Ending My Indie Life

Frame Grabber has been acquired.

This has been a wild ride! After 5 years on the App Store, I felt it was time. I’ve built and run this venture from start to finish. It started as a solo product to solve a problem I had and grew from there. Back then, I had an idea but no clear roadmap for making an app. So I sat down and got to work.

Being an indie developer ends on a high note for me. The app has tens of thousands of daily downloads, tens of thousands of daily active users, and a 4.8 star rating world-wide. It’s a good app, it solves a real problem, and it does it really well. It couldn’t be a better time to move on.

How it Happened

The opportunity presented itself. I received an email from somebody interested in acquiring the app. We arrived at an agreement and I said yes. I didn’t make the decision lightly. The final offer was significant and, well, simply too hard to pass up.

I’ve never sold an app. With Frame Grabber, I wanted to build and run an app from start to finish and here I am: at the finish line. So I got to figure out that part as well, just one part of the journey. I sat down and read up on everything I needed to know. There’s contracts, taxes, weird laws, and more paperwork to consider. Especially when selling internationally. It was genuinely fun learning about those things.

Why

Time: I haven’t had much time to improve the app recently. Pretty simple. Time is limited besides full-time work and life outside of work. As the user base grew, feature requests kept accumulating. Putting something out there and having people depend on it, is a responsibility. Users count on me as the developer and I started to feel guilty by not honoring that to the extent it deserves.

Looking Ahead: 5 years is a long time. I have felt ready to move on for some time. My journey does not end here, there are new and bigger challenges waiting for me. I want to make a new app again, start from scratch! I think about that a lot. Finding a new home for Frame Grabber would give me the necessary focus to follow through with a new app.

What About Users

What would the acquisition mean for existing users? This was the biggest question for me and the one that made me hesitate the most.

Frame Grabber is a very accessible app, in every meaning of that word. It is free of charge (it finances itself through donations). It is privacy-friendly. It is open-source. And it is super easy to use. This, in part, is why users love it so much. “Trust” is a word that comes up a lot when people send in their feedback.

I definitely did not want to betray that trust.

At the same time, the app would change, that is a given. First, I guessed Frame Grabber would stop being free and switch to a subscription-model to recover the acquisition investment and increase profits. Second, I knew there is a good chance that the app and its features would significantly change.

The first point is fine I figured: Users constantly urge me to charge for the app outside of donations. Going subscription would not be a problem.

I was ambivalent about the second point: As I said, users depend on the app. For their hobbies and even professionally. The app is so well-received because I’ve spent countless hours iterating on the main use case. I had taken great care to design the UX. Going in a completely new direction here could mean disappointing users.

I did sit down with the future owner to discuss the future of the app. I had a great feeling this was the right direction. But in the end it didn’t matter. It simply clicked for me: I did not want and could not make any restrictions in any way. Why should I? The app is now theirs to do as they please. I mean, that’s the point of buying something, right?

I had to let go. And I did.