What's in a name? This app is 'cha-ching' for the developers, more than anything else. It was in beta for several months, with a very limited set of features, for a reduced price. I bought a license, as did many others, trusting that the 1.0 release would bring the missing (indispensable) features and get rid of some annoying bugs and oversights.

The launch of 1.0 was hyped in a way seen rarely before. A special web page was put up, where big new features were to be announced, one a day, during the four day countdown to the 1.0 release. This is when registered users started worrying, because the web page looked very slick, just like the app itself, but the features being announced were not at all impressive. And did not address the needs expressed by users on the Cha-Ching forum in preceding months.

So users started to voice their worries on the forum. Then the developers decided that the forum would be closed down upon release of the 1.0 version. And they announced that the 'free updates for life' promise they made earlier was no longer valid. Early adopters would now have to pay for 2.x and other future versions. Many users did not particularly like this change of heart, or the attitude displayed by developers in response to user complaints.

Meanwhile, every day new 'underwhelming' features for the imminent 1.0 release were announced, and the final announcement was a joke (Cha-Ching was going to actually make users rich, it claimed). But one of the developers said that the real new features were kept under wraps for the big day. So we all waited. And the 'big day' came, and it turned out 1.0 did have no surprises at all. Nothing new, nothing that wasn't already announced, and the features that were announced were... just lame. Nothing special.

So what do we have?

- A much hyped 1.0 release with zero new features of any importance
- Developers who break promises of free upgrades for life for early adopters
- Developers who lie about great new features in 1.0
- An unfinished app, with lots of bling-bling, but far from useful
- Glaring bugs and oversights not fixed even though users pointed them out patiently for months

There's a word for this kind of thing: it's a rip-off. The developers should be ashamed of themselves, and quickly provide those who paid for a license with a decent app, or give them their money back.