About a year and a half ago, I bought Airmail to replace Apple’s standard Mail app as my primary OS X email client. Not only was it miles above what Apple could offer, it was a bargain at $1.99. It was a no-brainer; I would gladly have paid more, considering its great feature set.

Lately, though, the Airmail updates have done little to fix the bugs I’ve encountered, from unread post counts not matching the actual numbers and poor threading of mailing list posts to annoyingly slow performance with large inboxes, etc. These annoyances haven’t been enough for me to bother looking up another email client just yet, but that’s mostly because I’m lazy and keep hoping that an update will eventually fix the problems.

So imagine how pleased I was earlier today, when I noticed that a version 2.0 of Airmail is available from the App Store. Finally!

Except then I spotted the price tag. The upgrade costs $19.99, and yes, that applies for customers both new and old. Although, for a limited time, you can get it at a special introductory price of $9.99.

WTF?

I feel cheated. It’s not the money – a year and a half ago, I would have considered $19.99 to be more than reasonable – it’s that they want to make me pay twice to get what essentially is an upgrade, the first more major upgrade since I bought version 1.0. See, they’ve reworked the app “from the ground up” and there’s now a “faster engine”, that is, they’ve finally addressed the performance issues and maybe more, but apparently they think they didn’t charge their customers enough the first time around.

And what happens the next time they plan a bigger upgrade? What happens when they move to version 3.0? Do they expect me to pay for the damned thing again, a third time?

So, sorry but no; not only will I not be buying the 2.0, I will also uninstall the 1.0 and replace it with an email client developed by someone who isn’t planning to rip me off.