Lunar 4 (first paid version)

A lot of challenges had to be surpassed before I got to this version.

There was no good solution for M1 Macs so I had to settle for two workarounds that kind of worked and I wasn't sure users would be happy with them.

The codebase wasn't prepared to support more than one way to control a monitor so a big refactor was expecting me.

The payment SDK I used didn't have a way to provide a license valid forever and also only allow updates for one year, so I had to create a custom licensing server.

The external light sensor needed a firmware written in a way that could work with a lot of sensor modules so that users could DIY it where I couldn't ship it.

I had to find beta testers, work around macOS bugs, secure code containing Pro features (as the app is still open source, mostly).

And users still kept coming with feature requests and minor annoyances that they wanted fixed.

It was a long and hard journey, but on May 31st, Lunar 4 was finally released on Product Hunt, with support for M1: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/lunar-4-2

I gave free licenses to all the users that donated even a single dollar and it was great getting all those thank you emails!

But some users were still upset that Lunar now had paid features, and voiced that with an attitude that made me question if I did the right thing.