Used to be the best

I’ll keep this relatively short and to the point—LogTen Pro was a great piece of software when it was initially released many years ago, but the updates have consisted of minor incremental improvements and prettification...at a very high price point. Still, it has historically been worth the upgrade, as often the updates were coupled with small but indispensible feature improvements, like initial iCloud sync.

However, with LogTen Pro X, that all changed. Using the shift in storage between the old iCloud Sync and the new iCloud Drive as a springboard, Coradine moved to an outlandishly expensive subscription-based pricing model, refusing to update the old version of LogTen to support the new iCloud Drive. If you wanted to upgrade to Yosemite, you were forced to either agree to subscription pricing or simply not use iCloud sync.

The simple fact is that there haven’t been any updates between the last version and this one that were worth of paying a nominal fee for, much less $50/year. A subscription model for utility software with no service backend makes no sense whatsoever—there is no ongoing cost to Coradine for use of their software. The argument that you’re paying for future updates is an absurity in any rational economy, and it’s not how software works.

Coradine has clouded the waters by initially referring to the Mac version as ‘free’, then saying $99 ‘for life’, and insisting that they’re only charging for the app version… which they’ve reduced the cost of to a ‘mere’ $50/year after the users revolted.

The simple fact is that now that users are locked in to LogTen, many with many thousands of hours logged, Coradine appears to be banking on the fact that they’ll be reluctant to switch away from even a punitive pricing model.

Now for the ugly part—There are long standing bugs and instabilities that have been reported and yet gone unaddressed for several major versions. There have been few useful features added in recent memory, outside of some updates to address rule changes and some glitzy stuff. Attempting to set LogTen up on a new machine today, I’ve run across numerous glitches that have required restarting the program, changing preferences and then changing them back, and so on. Currently, the entire app hangs when I try to go into the ‘types’ section to get my total time for an airplane type.

$50 per year? I’d be unhappy if I’d paid $50 “for life” and these issues had gone unaddressed for this long.

Coradine needs to fix their pricing and their product. If they want more money from existing users, they need to give those users some reason to upgrade rather than a requirement to continue to pay for the same software.

My previous review came with a five star rating, but I’m sorry to say that I must rate this version at one star.

Snowfoxiness about LogTen Pilot Log