I just looked up the cloud prices. There's no way I'll be upgrading anytime soon. I can't justify spending $28 for beersmith2, paying about $2-3 a month for cloud then paying $4 for the app for my android. I highly doubt it will make my beer any better and I've never been in a situation where I absolutely needed a recipe I made last month.
Agreed... and if you do find yourself in that situation, it's much easier to put your Beersmith directory into your free Dropbox folder, then open it with the free BrewAide app.
Honestly, I'd have no problem with the $4 app if it could just read the recipe folders from Dropbox like BrewAide does.
There is a 'full mobile app' coming out later, which might have more functionality. Also, you can save your 10 free cloud recipes directly on your phone. Then you can delete them from the cloud, upload 10 more, rinse and repeat.
Without being able to read all my recipe and inventory files from a service like Dropbox, a 'full mobile app' won't offer any of the extra functionality I'd be looking for (creating a shopping list when I'm standing in the homebrew shop would be awesome, for example). I am happy to just read all of my recipe file from Dropbox now with the "other free app" rather than paying for an app that makes me guess which 10 recipes I need to keep in the BeerSmith cloud.
I understand why he did it the way he did. It's another revenue stream for him when people want to store more than 10 recipes. I'm a software guy, so I get the business side of his decision. Software as a service is more lucrative than one-time software purchases, and the industry is heading that way whether I like it or not. Unfortunately, it's not the best solution for me as a consumer.
All that said, I love the full BeerSmith application. I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with the mobile app and the cloud in the future. At some point, it may make sense to me.