Perhaps my favorite phase of any project is when I get to call it done. Multi has come a long way since its initial announcement. It was neat to have built a tool that (1) had become part of my daily workflow and (2) had so many interesting opportunities for extension. Neither of those points are true for me today, so I decided to make Multi free for new users.
Multi earned around $1500. In total, that’s a pretty impressive number to me: coming out to ~$100/month. The catch is that only 1/3 of those earnings came from sales. The rest came from an API extension I made to support another developer’s use case–contract work, essentially. I don’t have issues with contract work generally, but I don’t have capacity for any right now. Deducting that one-off, Multi maybe sells one or two licenses in a normal month, and that’s not enough to offset the support effort. I always suspected Multi would sell a bit more if I put in any amount of effort towards marketing, but I never gathered the enthusiasm for that. Marketing is the opposite of hacking.
For the most part, I’ve been able to resolve user issues as they come up. There are a couple bugs though that I can’t figure out. I’ve spent several hours looking into these issues, and ultimately those sessions leave me intimately aware of my unfamiliarity with macOS development. Reflecting on those experiences, I realized that I need at least one of the following conditions in order to stay motivated:
The previous section explains how Multi doesn’t fall under motivation #1. Since I no longer use Multi myself and am not aiming for proficiency in AppKit, Multi work has never fit into #2 and has gradually slipped out of #3. Thinking through that list helped me realize that I’m ready to move on to other projects.
Edit: Migrating Multi to SwiftUI helped the project better align with motivations #2 and #3; hence Multi 3.0.
Multi 2.1.4 is the first version that removes the license key checks. I will continue supporting Multi 2.1.3 installations until their license keys expire. I also plan to clean up the GitHub issues to make the project more amenable to outside contributions. If Multi stirs any of your core motivations, I hope you stop by!