Not to be that “just add blockchain” guy, but this would be a great usecase for permissionless cryptocurrency micropayments, e.x. Lightning Network. Create an open protocol, build it into browsers, let content sites ask you to pay $0.01 (or whatever) to view an article. Maybe you could set your browser to automatically pay for the first N articles or M dollars per site per day. Or maybe a site could offer an unlimited subscription option through the same system.
Subscription Hell
111–120 of 610 posts
Re: Subscription Hell
#112You can't have it both ways. Either you pay for high quality content or you deal with intrusive ads.
Was Bloomberg making $35 from ads from my 3 visits to their site per month? If not why do they ask me now for $35?
Most likely you are not the target of this subscription. You will be just collateral damage.
Just like most people wouldn't pay 2000 a month for access to their terminal software.
Re: Subscription Hell
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me and three friends worked on a similar idea at the YC hackathon a couple weeks ago. You'd pay us $10/month and we'd buy a lot of subscriptions to different newspapers. You'd install our chrome extension and when you came across a paywall, we'd autofill credentials that are just valid for one day. We didn't win but it definitely piqued the interest of the crowd and the judges (Sam, Michael, and Adora). We're not pur…
What did you plan to do when the publishers terminated your accounts for sharing credentials?
Proxy and cache articles using a standard set of credentials from a set list of origin IPs, most likely. The traffic would appear as that of an average reader.
Re: Subscription Hell
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the website says: Your license comes with a year’s worth of updates. Once that year is up, you can keep using the last version of Sketch you downloaded, forever. That sounds ok to me.
What happens if there is a security hole in your version?
I don't know about any software that is supported indefinitely. One day you need to upgrade, it's fair enough.
Re: Subscription Hell
#115At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments ill…
The real innovation of the *aaS model is that you no longer need to compete with prior versions of your own software or hardware infrastructure. You can hike prices, cut engineering costs, cut some nines off your availability, defeature, or just plain embrace incompetence, and, in the short term, it will improve your balance sheet. Of course, in the long term, customers will revolt, and do so swiftly, and without mer…
I don't know. I think a lot of people have decided they like things like the Adobe products subscription.
Instead of the several thousand dollars you would have had to pay for the various softwares in the lineup up front, you just pay $50 a month. Which is reasonable of you previously used more than just Photoshop and maybe upgraded every 3 to 4 years.
If the end result is a similar cost, I would much rather keep my capital in the business and make a monthly payment.
Re: Subscription Hell
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
One-time payments for software amount to a pyramid scheme where you benefit from the money of future users. That's not without its downsides either, where your userbase grows indefinitely yet doesn't pay for its own support-email rent. There's obviously a middle ground, like being able to at least use the version you paid for indefinitely but having to pay a smaller price to upgrade. But which direction a pricing str…
The middle ground doesn't work. See MS Windows update hell. The way things should work is like this: Subscription for when you want to use the software and open format data files that you're always easily able to export and download. If a company goes out of business or does something stupid then another one will pop up to handle your needs. This aligns incentives correctly while still allows a healthy dose of compet…
Actually, it works in software that many of us use every day. Once again, there's more nuance to making an argument than being able to point out a single absolute example. Why is this such popular rhetoric on HN? Especially in such a varied imprecise world of pricing structures?
I use various bits of successful software like Transmit and Alfred that let you update until the next major version in which you must pay again.
Re: Subscription Hell
#117At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments ill…
One-time payments for software amount to a pyramid scheme where you benefit from the money of future users. That's not without its downsides either, where your userbase grows indefinitely yet doesn't pay for its own support-email rent. There's obviously a middle ground, like being able to at least use the version you paid for indefinitely but having to pay a smaller price to upgrade. But which direction a pricing str…
Which is why most companies do a mixed model. Pay an amount for a version, get one year of updates (or that specific version + it's updates), then pay to upgrade (and/or reup your year of support).
Re: Subscription Hell
#118I like software subscriptions. It’s a way to ensure that the software developer is going to have a predictable revenue stream to continue to improve features and fix bugs in the software. That is valuable to me as a user.
Re: Subscription Hell
#119I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want. The issue many people, myself included, have with subscriptions are that you pay $x / month whether or not you read that month's product. And whether or not you read every article or just one. So for me, as a consumer, my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity (pay but read zero articles). Now the pa…
I don't think that model will work, honestly. There's friction anytime you ask someone to spend anything, even if the price is de minimis.
Look what happens whenever a city adopts a $0.05 plastic bag tax. When Washington DC did it, plastic bag use dropped by 50% - 70%. I'd see people that just spent $30 bucks at the store with their arms overflowing with stuff rather than pay that extra nickel.
I'd expect prompting users to choose whether reading a story is worth $0.05 to them every time will cause them to read and engage significantly less.
Re: Subscription Hell
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
One-time payments for software amount to a pyramid scheme where you benefit from the money of future users. That's not without its downsides either, where your userbase grows indefinitely yet doesn't pay for its own support-email rent. There's obviously a middle ground, like being able to at least use the version you paid for indefinitely but having to pay a smaller price to upgrade. But which direction a pricing str…
This is possibly the worst use of the term "pyramid scheme" I have ever seen used in print, and that's really saying something with how often it's abused nowadays.
Yet you left your entire argument up to our imagination.
I explained why I find the description fitting. You could at least entertain us with why "future users pay for your upgrades" does not fit in the context of one-time-paid "perpetual license" software beyond disagreeing with the phrase I chose to name the predicament.