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Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
411–420 of 710 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#412I actually prefer the subscription model for my software, if the monthly price is reasonable. It gives me faith that they can actually sustain their business and pay their employees to maintain and improve the service over time. I hate the other model, where with Windows and Office you end up getting useless forced upgrades and terrible makeovers because they need that upgrade revenue every few years. Or the ad drive…
It can go both ways. Upgrades: Plus: Must be compelling so they must come up with new features Minus: Sometimes those new features are bad. Subscriptions: Plus: Keep it working on new OS versions Minus: No compelling reason to add anything.
>Plus: Keep it working on new OS versions //
People are running pre-subscription Adobe products, for example, ... what specific software is suddenly breaking with OS changes?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#413Not really, because I saw too many software companies go out of business because not enough people wound up upgrading to the next major version -- the ownership model of software can be awfully feast-or-famine for developers' income, it's a very tough/risky business model. Generally speaking, I'm happy to pay a subscription because this way I get a steady stream of all the updates, and it's much more likely the compa…
My two cents is that this is why big tech outcompetes small tech. At a small tech you need great people to build the core product.. then there might be a period where the business rightfully just wants to get paid. Going from layoff to layoff sucks for the engineers. At a big tech you can just transfer to the newest thing.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the OP, but I have to disagree too. Creative Cloud, IntelliJ, Figma, Google Workspace, Postman, Spotify, Vercel, Adguard, Google storage space, Alltrails, 1password.. They're all subscriptions and getting better all the time. Meanwhile it's the old purchased software like Windows and Office that get worse with every version.
You've mixed subscription based services (Google storage space) and content (Spotify) with subscription based software. For services, it might make sense. Even so, what exactly is "getting better all the time" about Spotify the software? It's been the same for like 5 years now. As for the rest: 1Password declined (turned to Electron shit), Creative Cloud keeps adding bloat while not adressing decades standing issues,…
Claiming 1Password has declined is unfair at best. They release a steady stream of updates, and when I discovered a UX issue earlier this year their team were on it like a rash.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#415It’s kinda make sense on a deep philosophical level - we all are just subscribers for our own life, never the owners.
This means we never own anything but temporarily, i.e. subscription is more fundamental pattern of object/subject relationships.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#416A note taking app or password manager in the modern sense is not a product, it's a service. Your content is stored and this costs money. Not only is it a recurring cost, it's also a growing cost as content keeps getting added and rarely removed. It's not illogical that a recurring fee is asked. It's very much possible that a large company subsidizes these costs or runs ads, thereby making it "free". But the costs are…
> A note taking app or password manager in the modern sense is not a product, it's a service. Which is a very serious problem. Apps like that shouldn't be services. The only reason to make them that way is so the companies can continue to soak you over time. Break out the services separately. If the user wants cloud storage, sell that service as an option. But if the user doesn't, they shouldn't have to pay for it. >…
Note-taking apps are really simple, and I can't wrap my head around why I have to ever "subscribe" to use them. I would actually self-host the hell out of a ton of beautiful open-source ones on the cloud instance I own. It may be a thing to pay monthly in the enterprise world, but no way I am paying every month for simple note-taking apps. The growth of data stored is negligible - remember it's mostly text.
Password manager is a good example, but I would love to have something as affordable as Bitwarden. One good example of a bad password manager that went in the wrong direction if you ask me is 1Password. Their licensing was such a mess and as someone who bought into their "permanent license" a long time ago I've been screwed real hard because they wouldn't let me use it on Linux at all. The prices became "subscription based" and then steadily went up ever since then.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#417I deeply want to understand and solve this problem. I’m an indie dev that created a desktop app (electron) to design and print labels. I sell a one-time license for $147 but also a subscription for $14.99/month. About 20% of my revenue is MRR. It’s up to the user, and they seem to love it when they have this choice.
Is it sustainable for me? I think so. I license per computer. My largest customers have 20+ computers (grocers and franchises). My competition is 2-3x my price, and require yearly support contracts.
I purposefully do NOT enable auto updates because when label printing works you don’t want it breaking because I failed to catch a regression. Users can downgrade and their subscription still works.
My subscription server/license system is custom built on jwt, so I effectively embed license information inside the signed token and the app verifies authenticity using a public key. Thank you, node and react.
So why buys the subscription? Mainly four types of users:
1) seasonal, such as farms who only label a few months a year
2) users who can afford $15 now but not $147
3) users who can put a $15 monthly charge on the cc without filling out an expense form
4) suspicious users, who then fall in love, cancel and convert to a one time license
Yet, I don’t offer anything from the cloud. Yet …
I’m about ready to deploy a “cloud rendering” service that lets users upload a saved design file, and then you can call an API with variables that get rendered into the label result (barcodes, hide/show logic, color). But here’s the kicker, the result can be a bitmap image, or it can be the base64 data to send to the printer to achieve the exact label you need to print. With this solution you could effectively offload all design of labels from within your app, but still interface with the messy world of label printers.
For this last bit subscriptions make sense. I’m offering a monthly service that costs me money.
More info at https://label.live/
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the OP, but I have to disagree too. Creative Cloud, IntelliJ, Figma, Google Workspace, Postman, Spotify, Vercel, Adguard, Google storage space, Alltrails, 1password.. They're all subscriptions and getting better all the time. Meanwhile it's the old purchased software like Windows and Office that get worse with every version.
You've mixed subscription based services (Google storage space) and content (Spotify) with subscription based software. For services, it might make sense. Even so, what exactly is "getting better all the time" about Spotify the software? It's been the same for like 5 years now. As for the rest: 1Password declined (turned to Electron shit), Creative Cloud keeps adding bloat while not adressing decades standing issues,…
IntelliJ has arguably one of the best subscription models for tools. It works offline and they have fallback licenses so if they doubled the price and I cancel I’m still legally entitled to a recent version that I’ll probably be happy enough with until I find the motivation to replace it with something else.
If Adobe worked like that I’d be like 75% pissed off at their products and pricing.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#419when Google killed Reader it (should have) taught us that the interests of software developers and users are misaligned
everything that's happened since just further reinforces that lesson
but it wasn't always that way
when software was a product, that you sold, your relationship to the user/buyer was different
if you put out an upgrade it had to be worth the money and the faff of installing it
subscriptions (and free-with-ads) and auto-updates destroy that, devs no longer have to add value to keep getting paid.
We mostly don't see this in games, which continue to be sold on the old model.
I argue that "ad-supported" and "subscription", as software business models, eventually but inevitably turn developer and user into enemies.
So if you want to avoid becoming your users' enemy, you should actually SELL software to them, rather than leasing or giving it away + selling ads.
-- (transcription of a recent twitter thread)
To that I'll add: if you doubt that subscription/ad-supported software companies are your enemy, just think about
- Salesforce
- Facebook
- Slack's constant futzing with the UI that always makes things worse
- Chrome constantly threatening to lock out ad blockers
- Docker Desktop forcing you to upgrade to a newer version *that is broken*
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#420As a software developer, I experienced the need for subscription revenue first hand. Regular users want support for their software and there's only so much you can do for a fixed one-time payment. As an example, Windows might update on their computer without their knowledge but that Windows update breaks something so the user is like "I didn't change anything but your app stopped working" and in that situation you're…
You fix it for future users, current users get the benefit as well.