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

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

#581

Post by hermitcrab »

urthor wrote: post #326
hermitcrab wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offering free upgrades for life is almost always a terrible idea: https://successfulsoftware.net/2008/09/08/should-i-give-free... And offering upgrades for life and then trying to backtrack on it is even worse.

Strongly disagree with the linked article. Individual customers, and corporate customers, are wildly different. The "buy it for life" business model works very well if you're trying to launch a mass market product to individuals. In your first year of a product, those users who'll pay upfront 3 years of subscriptions for a "lifetime pass" are an awe-inspiringly useful customer segment to identify. They're your way to…

I was talking about never changing anyone for upgrades. Making a special deal for an early cohort is a little different. But what happens if you abandon the product before the 3 years. Do you stiff those users or give them their money back?

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

#582

Post by cnity »

vonseel wrote: post #480
thecoppinger wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea I don't understand all the recent hate over their new version. I installed the new version on my devices, and while the keyboard shortcuts seemed to change, once I looked them up it worked better than before. I just use the cmd+ shift+space shortcut for everything now.

I sort of like 1password, but I have to admit that on my personal macbook which is from mid 2015, if I am running anything moderately intensive (like a video game) then 1password drops about 20% of my keypresses when entering the master password if I enter it at my full typing speed. This is a huge pain because my password is long and I'm forced to type it slowly to avoid the drops.

Other text entry fields don't seem to suffer from this problem. AFAIK this wasn't a problem before the switch to Electron.

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

#583

Post by TeMPOraL »

lapcat wrote: post #55
solardev wrote: post #47

I 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 gives me faith that they can actually sustain their business and pay their employees to maintain and improve the service over time. > Owning software is worthless to me because their effective lifespans are so short anyway, usually just a couple years, before the ecosystem has moved on and left them behind anyway. I find it strange that these two sentences are in the same comment.

They've perhaps not realized that effective lifespan of software is so short because it's SaaS.

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

#584

Post by TeMPOraL »

bananasmarties wrote: post #173
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's a very modern take on a recent problem. I used VLC, Firefox (Phoenix), LibreOffice (OOo), MSOffice, paint, photofiltre, and notepad++ when I was a teen. They still work today. The trending app ecosystem, the social network du jour and the JS framework fever seem to have given the impression to the new generation that there is not other way to do this.

Many of those would be broken in various ways if they were not updated. For starters: VLC due to missing codecs, firefox not supporting newer standards. All the software you mentioned was most likely heavily updated since your teens.

VLC got popular because it was the first media player that would always play whatever you threw at it. But thinking back to those times, perhaps there was merit in those older players which stayed the same, but made you occasionally install a codec pack. It was a sensible separation between the "chrome" that was stable in time, and the decoders which were changing often to accommodate new and better formats.

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

#585

Post by nlnn »

Yes and no.

No because for things I care about a lot, and want to ensure long term support/service/updates (e.g. password manager, email host). Having a subscription model also means I generally know the cost of keeping up to date (no being surprised by a new $359 version to shell out for at some arbitrary point in time).

Yes for three main reasons.

First being that it feels like it doesn't scale with the amount of software that's trying to use that model. Sure I can easily afford a couple of $20/month subscriptions, but 20 of those? Not a chance.

Second is that its a bad fit for software that I value but only very occasionally use. In such cases it feels like I'm paying way above the odds for the amount of time I use the software.

Third is that I actually find it stressful to have to remember and manage subscriptions for everything. I have to spend time figuring out whether it's still worth paying, check to see if rates have changed, worry about getting locked into another year's worth of contract, etc. With a one-off app purchase it's done and takes zero mental bandwidth in future.

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

#586

Post by hbossy »

solardev wrote: post #126
thot_experiment wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the heck subscription models are you using? In my experience the software gets broken over time and you can't do anything about it, including RUN THE OLD VERSION WHICH WORKED. There's no longer as much incentive for companies to improve because they'll get paid anyway instead of payment being contingent on actually delivering something useful. Yes subscription models are good for developers, no this doesn't make…

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.

Spotify did get worse. It used to have build-in Genius lyrics / trivia display for currently playing song. This feature and recommendation system actually convicted me to pay for it over using youtube as main music player. It is no longer available.

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

#587

Post by TeMPOraL »

ymolodtsov wrote: post #502
slotrans wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office upgrades were never forced. I pay for an Office365 subscription so I can have it on Mac, but on my Windows PC I use Office 2010, which I paid for when it was current. It is lightning fast compared to the current release of Office, and has all the features I could ever want. The company I worked for '05-'12 used Office 2003 that whole time. It was fine!

There was a moment when they adopted a new format in DOCX thought.

For authoring you can probably side-step that with a converter, unless you're one of those phantom people who use any but the most basic Word features.

(I don't know who those phantom people are. I'd love to meet them and learn from them. Everyone I know cares so little about the quality of the document itself they hardly use anything beyond immediate-mode font and paragraph styling...)

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

#588

Post by [deleted] »

WhiteBlueSkies wrote: post #577
openlowcode wrote: post #162

One big negative aspect is that everything tends to cost around $10/month, from a verified Twitter account to an app to teach English to my children. Now, it may be small change for single people with Silicon Valley salaries, but I have a family to feed on my French experienced engineer salary, and I basically have around $150-$200/month left for entertainment for the whole family. I cannot buy 10 internet services,…

Maybe your employer is lowballing you. 200 disposable income as senior dev is too low.

[deleted]

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

#589

Post by benhurmarcel »

WhiteBlueSkies wrote: post #577
openlowcode wrote: post #162

One big negative aspect is that everything tends to cost around $10/month, from a verified Twitter account to an app to teach English to my children. Now, it may be small change for single people with Silicon Valley salaries, but I have a family to feed on my French experienced engineer salary, and I basically have around $150-$200/month left for entertainment for the whole family. I cannot buy 10 internet services,…

Maybe your employer is lowballing you. 200 disposable income as senior dev is too low.

He's in France. Tech salaries aren't nearly as high as the US there.

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

#590

Post by TeMPOraL »

solardev wrote: post #139
gernb wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've never really seen a subscription program stagnate in practice. In fact I find that subscriptions allow companies to detach revenue from feature planning and deliver useful features rather than shiny new UIs.

You and I must be using completely disjoint set of subscription software, because I can't think of any that ended up delivering useful features and improvements, instead of cutting out and dumbing down the functionality, while endlessly messing with the UI.

That's a big reason people want sta ility of "buy once": to protect the tool they use now from becoming worse over time.

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