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

It was very very popular. I think all the flak it receives now is because of its pervasive usage in the past. We all overreacted and over corrected. It is definitely a very legible font with a lot of accessibility and warmth.

> Subscriptions allow companies to better develop organic roadmaps that's not tied to an upgrade cycle

This point is at the center of the move to subscriptions, and I think we should be more explicit that we want companies to eventually _not_ significantly upgrade products and keep them alive with minimal changes for a long time, while we're still paying for subscriptions.

It I think really important to lower the pressure on companies to have a constant flow of updates every month just to justify to users the money they're paying for. That would bring the old "one big revision every year" cycle to a more severe "meaningless small updates every months".

The roadblock is of course customers wondering why they're still paying every month for a product that sees little change, and I don't have an answer to that, except the alternative had other issues as well.

How much maintenance does the monthly service cost to update? To be clear, this is your service and you get to charge whatever you want, but the difference, in my mind, is that it's one thing to pay to keep the (cloud) servers running. It's the actual dev work (like maybe writing new code to support a new label printer or to handle a newly found messy-ness) behind it that makes SaaS an okay tradeoff.

Paying someone a monthly fee to arbitrage running software that doesn't change, on VMs in the cloud, is honestly where the industry seems to be, but I don't have to be a fan of it. I'd rather have static software I can install on my own hardware, kthx. (But also, I'm not the target market for your label software.)

I feel like this comment was written by the head of monetization from Mythic Quest. It's clearly very biased against the consumer.

> a yearly subscription is cheaper than buying outright

That depends on how often you buy. If you bought every update for full price, maybe you're right. If not, the consumer has much more freedom to decide on their course of action, consider alternatives or just save money while sticking to the old version. Consumers are completely deprived of choice with the subscription model.

> in some cases I no longer need the software, or now prefer to switch to a competitor

Have you met Adobe? Those guys are great. They let you pre purchase an entire year of their subscription with no other options. Oh and you can't cancel in the middle, or rather you can, but don't expect a refund. It's so great they have this business model that allows them to rake in money while basically handcuffing their customers to their plans! The shareholders are ecstatic.

> the idea of "owning" software feels positively archaic to me, as strange as "owning" a music album.

This is starting to feel like a generational gap. I don't know how old you are, but perhaps being accustomed to subscriptions from a young age will make you more tolerant towards this business model. I think that anyone who owned their own music, and software, having total liberty and no dependencies on when you and how you can access your stuff, will find letting go of this liberty a difficult prospect.

I agree with you. I simply have no words for how much this pisses me off.

I'm seriously considering importing my next car from Russia or India or some country where consumers aren't as easy to abuse and defraud as they are in the west. But getting it certified for the road might be difficult, and I'd basically be on my own regarding maintenance. I live in rural Germany with close to zero repair shops close by that are capable of servicing non-German cars. (Okay, maybe there's a Ford dealership here somewhere, but that's just about it).

Wasn't "consumer protection" something that governments were supposed to be doing? Where are they right now, as they're watching this shitshow?

The way it worked in the software industry was that the move from purchase-prices to subscription prices was a huge structural change that made it difficult for consumers to compare prices and lead to a drastic price increase.

Consider Toggl track, a time-tracking software that I like to use and that, at $9/month without any predatory subscription tactics, I consider very reasonably-priced. ...but at the same time, I can still recall a day when you'd pick up small software utilities like that from a Radio Shack. They came on floppy discs (later CDs) in cardboard boxes that would cost you maybe $20-$30. This was to own the software and you could use it for the rest of the hardware's lifetime if you didn't do any OS upgrades. (often they would even survive an OS upgrade or change of hardware). That was so much better value for money.