🌟 **工业软件与独立软件的对比：** 文章将大型科技公司生产的“工业软件”比作超市里充斥廉价原料的工业果酱，它们虽然便宜且普及，却常包含隐私侵犯的追踪器和专有格式。而独立软件则被比作农贸市场的手工有机果酱，代表着一种更注重品质、用户体验和隐私的制作理念。

💰 **大公司与独立开发者的经济劣势：** 大型科技公司拥有巨大的规模经济优势，能够通过广告、设备销售或企业合同等盈利模式补贴其软件成本，并利用庞大的用户基础进行市场推广。独立开发者则缺乏这种规模效应，面临着要么降低质量以求价格竞争，要么收费合理却可能因此失去大量用户，且还需承担应用商店高达20-30%的抽成。

🔒 **“免费”软件背后的代价：** 文章指出，大型科技公司提供看似免费的软件，实际上是通过其他方式盈利，例如谷歌通过广告和隐私追踪，苹果通过锁定自家设备生态，微软通过企业合同和生态锁定。这种“免费”策略制造了软件应廉价或免费的普遍认知，使用户忽视了高品质软件所能带来的真正价值。

🤝 **独立软件的独特优势：** 独立软件制作者通常更愿意与用户沟通，能够倾听用户建议和反馈，就像与制作手工果酱的农夫成为朋友一样。他们致力于开发不损害用户隐私、不限制用户选择的工具，提供了一种更值得信赖和个性化的软件体验。

💡 **支持独立软件的意义：** 作者呼吁消费者认识到，为高品质的独立软件付费，是将金钱投入到能真正提供杠杆效应的工具上。支持独立软件不仅是为了获得更好的产品，更是为了促进一个拥有更多软件创作者、更加多元化和以用户为中心的软件生态系统的发展。

Quality software from independent makers is like quality food from the farmer’s market. A jar of handmade organic jam is not the same as mass-produced corn syrup-laden jam from the supermarket.

Industrial fruit jam is filled with cheap ingredients and shelf stabilizers. Industrial software is filled with privacy-invasive trackers and proprietary formats.

Google, Apple, and Microsoft make industrial software. Like industrial jam, industrial software has its benefits — it’s cheap, fairly reliable, widely available, and often gets the job done.

Big tech companies earn hundreds of billions of dollars and employ hundreds of thousands of people. When they make a new app, they can market it to their billions of customers easily. They have unbeatable leverage over the cost of developing and maintaining their apps.

Independent software makers are small teams that don’t have those economies of scale. They can try to compete on price by compromising their craft, or they can charge a fair price knowing this will drive a large number of people to choose big tech instead. Either way, big tech wins because they take a 20–30% cut of the app store money earned by most independent makers. A cost that the big tech companies do not incur.

Big tech companies have the ability to make their software cheap by subsidizing costs in a variety of ways:

Google sells highly profitable advertising and makes its apps free, but you are subjected to ads and privacy-invasive tracking. Apple sells highly profitable devices and makes its apps free, but locks you into a proprietary ecosystem. Microsoft sells highly profitable enterprise contracts using a bundling strategy, and makes its apps cheap, also locking you into a proprietary ecosystem.

Some tech companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital investors, and use this money to subsidize pricing — until the money runs out, and the quality soon declines.

I’m not saying these companies are evil. But their subsidies create the illusion that all software should be cheap or free.

Industrial software has become so incredibly cheap that most of us have lost the sense for how much value a quality piece of software can provide. We have become numb to the taste of good software and hypnotized by the idea of “free”.

I’m not sure why, but we seem more willing to spend money on good fruit jam than on good software. I notice that I spend less on personal software than I do on groceries and many basic things. Yet software is one of the few things I pay for that truly gives me leverage. Consider its cost per use.

Independent makers of quality software go out of their way to make apps that are better for you. They take a principled approach to making tools that don’t compromise your privacy, and don’t lock you in.

Independent software makers are people you can talk to. Like quality jam from the farmer’s market, you might become friends with the person who made it — they’ll listen to your suggestions and your complaints.

If you want to live in a world with more than a handful of software makers, then spend a bit more on quality independent software. It deserves your hard-earned cash.