Indie apps need ongoing revenue to stay afloat. People are tired of subscriptions. These statements are conflicting, but they are both undeniably true, which is a problem if you want apps built by small teams to survive.
Discover Setapp: your gateway to over 240 Mac and iOS apps
Setapp points to one possible path forward: an indie app bundle for Macs. The service, offered by a company based in Kiev, Ukraine, offers access to more than 240 Mac apps for $9.99 per month. (You can save 10% by paying annually, and there's even an education discount.)
The list of apps on offer, which you can view online, includes many well-regarded indie apps that have previously topped the Mac App Store charts. If you buy a lot of Mac apps, and especially if you subscribe to a lot of Mac apps, this is a package worth checking out. There's even a seven-day trial if you want to try it out.
The app works much like an app store, except one where you’ve already paid for everything it has to offer: you can explore and install as many of the included apps as you like. There are a few apps that I use every day, several of which I’ve written up for Lifehacker . There’s Session, a combination Pomodoro timer and distraction blocker that I turn to when I’m having trouble focusing. There’s Eter, my favorite radio app, and MarsEdit, the best blogging app for Mac. I also use WifiExplorer whenever I need to diagnose a wireless network problem, and I generally appreciate having access to apps like Permute (a media converter), Numi (a nicer calculator app), BetterZip (an archiving tool), and GetBackupPro (a Mac backup app, of course).
