Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

Unfortunately, something as basic as lyrics is rife with legal challenges, and you can't just slap it onto an app.

However, I find subscriptions super annoying for things that already exist in its entirety and doesn't cost the service provider anything to give more of.

Something I find unacceptable is the subscription situation coming up in the car industry:

Some examples include:

* BMW heated seat subscription [1]. The entire hardware for the heated seats is already in the car!

* Mercedes horsepower subscription [2]. Again, the entire capability is in the car. It's not like Mercedes sends the souls of horses OTA into your car after you subscribe.

Other manufacturers are also guilty here.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...

[2] https://www.kbb.com/car-news/mercedes-launches-rent-a-horsep...

1. want to pay to keep companies in business

2. unless one can offer me a reasonably priced "all you want from almost everywhere" like Spotify or Apple Music (and even they are just barely good enough for the price), I want to pay by tokens instead of by month.

Exceptions exist: service contracts is a place where I can accept to pay happily monthly for a number of incidents even if 90-something of them aren't used.

I also understand very well that storage has a price even if I forget it.

That said, for us who (tjknk we) remember Microsoft Office from before it became a SaaS I think it went something like this:

You buy Microsoft office x at a crazy price.

Shortly after someone else gets Microsoft Office version y and you start getting documents you can't open.

At some point you give up trying to tell people to use the old format and you pay 25-75% of the original crazy price to upgrade.

And so it goes on.

Jetbrains is one of a few companies that has made a reasonable deal for users in this regard: you get to keep forever the last version you have paid 12 months for. Could probably be improved to 6 months, but compared to everyone else I can think of it is a different league.

I am pissed to be asked to pay a subscription for something that is one and done. Apps you install on your phone and are purely local for example. The most egregious example is the shift of the car industry to that model.

I am fine when it requires them to operate a service, though I prefer self hosting because I don't trust companies with my data.

On the Mac at least, some of the alternatives to Adobe are better for the vast majority of users and aren't on a subscription model.

For example, Affinity has a universal license for $99 where you own Publisher, Designer and Photo for macOS, Windows and iPadOS. This is like being able to buy Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign from Adobe without a subscription [1]:

    Experience the full power of Version 2 of Affinity apps with the
    Universal License. For just one discounted payment, you can get the
    ENTIRE Affinity suite (including Publisher for iPad!) on all your
    devices, across macOS, Windows and iPadOS.
    

Acorn [2] is a great image editor for macOS that takes much better advantage of the Mac platform than anything Adobe has recently put out. Unlike Adobe, this indie developer doesn't have to make a UI/UX experience that both works on macOS and Windows. It can do much of what other image editors can do, in addition to being programable with AppleScript or JavaScript. The UI is much easier to use than most other mid to high level image editors.

I've been a customer for years because the support is great and the upgrades have always been reasonably priced. A license for Acorn is $40.

OmniGroup provides the best of both worlds with all of its macOS, iOS and iPadOS software: you can purchase a license, pay a monthly subscription or add a web subscription [3].

[1]: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

[2]: https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

[3]: https://support.omnigroup.com/buying-mac-apps/