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Subscription Hell

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Re: Subscription Hell

#131

Post by ctulek »

StudyAnimal wrote: post #60
d2p wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my issue with most subscriptions too. The price has to be set based on the average use, which makes it really expensive for the infrequent user (and ultimately this means less conversions, yet nobody seems to care about this?!). I've had the same gripe with games for years. I stopped paying for Xbox live and World of Warcraft because they're the same - if I only played for a few hours in a month, I've paid ov…

Obviously (in these cases) there are market segments that favor all you can eat subscriptions and those that favor à la carte. It makes sense that for most things the heavy users get the sub and the light users get to pay for what they use. However I thought of a counter example. Spotify. I would normally be a light user of music. I had some CDs in the 90s but lost interest in the whole thing by the time I graduated…

Subscriptions usually work better when the variety of content/product offered is big. Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, NY Times; these companies offer a lot of content from a lot of producers. In contrast, most media subscriptions offer you a few articles per week that is worth of reading. The rest is usually written by people who are not necessarily more knowledgeable about the topic than their readers but only have the skill/patience of writing an article about them.

Re: Subscription Hell

#132

Post by Sylos »

lajhsdfkl wrote: post #75
rahoulb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if the service is only marginally profitable without acting unethically it should shut down.

Showing ads is unethical now? >Maybe if the service is only marginally profitable without acting unethically it should shut down. Also I love this neo puritan thinking. I'm sure all the users of these services agree with your ideology and you forcing it down their throats is for their own good correct?

No, tracking is unethical, which most ads rely on.

And yes, it is for their own good to not have thousands of databases with their data littered across the internet.

I know, this is not a very American way of thinking, but no one can be an expert at everything. Most people are not experts at computers and even less can grasp the outreach and effects of their data being everywhere.

These people need help just as much as the average guy needs assistance with doctors. If they knew enough to tell when a doctor is bullshitting them, they could probably become a doctor, too.

Re: Subscription Hell

#133

Post by wutbrodo »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

I 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…

There has been a LOT of effort put behind micro transactions for publishing, from companies that have all the resources and incentive in the world, like Google. The market simply doesn't want it. The average consumer isn't remotely rational enough to amortize a subscription cost and compare it to a unit cost. The way they process the incentives of a subscription is more like: "once you've reached the threshold where you consider the subscription worth it, completely forget about the fact that you're paying it for the purposes of assessing costs". Micro-transactions, even for tiny unit prices, feel like a cost upon every use.

You or I may prefer the microtransaction model to free with ads or subscription-based, but I suspect there's a lot about the market that we'd prefer was different, and that's because we're not typical of the market.

Re: Subscription Hell

#134

Post by AJ007 »

microtonal wrote: post #67
baxtr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. A subscription to Office 365 comes down to 99 Euros per years. Of course you’d pay maybe 150 every three years or so for a new version back in the days, but still that’s double. Also, I wonder whether this will lead to a slower development of the software. Before you’d have to create a leap forward to impress people to buy the new version, if the old version was still good enough.

It is also surprising how much other subscriptions cost compared with Office 365. Office 365 contains the most complete office suite in existence, probably larger than many operating systems. It also includes 1TB of OneDrive, and free monthly Skype minutes. And the 99 Euros that you quote are for five persons. Most subscription software is a terrible deal in comparison. I have tried to avoid subscription software as…

There was some low hanging fruit for companies to create subscription plans who shouldn’t have been adding them. The more subscriptions your target customer has, the harder it is to convert them on the new one. For the business side the ceiling is a lot higher, but for consumers there is a very low limit.

Each market is different, but when I look at an area like Photoshop or Illustrator, the competition keeps getting better. In some areas they aren’t even competing.

The workflow of a game artist will have them going through a bunch of different products to get to an end result. A lot of those steps can have alternatives. If a vendor has some proprietary format that doesn’t work with anything else they never even get a user base.

If a subscription is funding continuous development, and th company is doing a good job, and I use the software daily it doesn’t bother me. If I use it twice a year, I’m going to be looking hard at alternatives.

Re: Subscription Hell

#135

Post by open-source-ux »

3pt14159 wrote: post #91
always_good wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

> The middle ground doesn't work

The "middle ground" has been the most common model for desktop app pricing for decades. You buy version X of a product. When the next major version is released you pay an upgrade price.

In fact, the "middle ground" has been the norm for the majority of software apps over the history of desktop computing. It's the SaaS subscription model for cloud-hosted software that is the new deviation. But that cloud-based subscription model is now leaking into desktop apps (like the Adobe suite).

Re: Subscription Hell

#136

Post by d2p »

scarface74 wrote: post #47
d2p wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because a large percentage won't pay doesn't mean that putting the price high will maximise income. It's possible that at $10/month they'd get 5x the signups. That said, increasing prices is hard; reducing is easy. If you're trying to figure out sweet spot for max revenue is it probably makes sense to start high and slowly reduce it until you find it. If you're on a rolling monthly payment and decrease everyones…

The biggest hurdle is not price elasticity between getting someone to pay $10 versus $35, it's getting people to pay anything instead of something. Look at the App Store as an example and how hard it is to get people to pay $1. Besides the people who are willing to pay are by definition people who are willing to spend money - the same demographic that advertisers covet the most. Meaning they can't target their best c…

> The biggest hurdle is not price elasticity between getting someone to pay $10 versus $35, it's getting people to pay anything instead of something.

I'm not doubting that's tough; but it's significantly easier to get someone to pay $1/month than $35/month. People aren't completely stupid; they won't just blindly pay any amount just because they'd decided they'd pay something.

Like I said though; if I was making this decision, I'd start high.

Re: Subscription Hell

#137

Post by paulcole »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

I 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…

Here’s the problem with paying per article read: The vast majority of people likely don’t want to read articles so much as they want to say, “I subscribe to The NY Times.”

Netflix released data showing that people added documentaries and art house movies to their queues but never watched them. Instead they watched the same action movies and comedies over and over.

It’s the same reason as why gyms charge per month not per visit. What people say they do and what they actually do is barely connected at all.

Re: Subscription Hell

#138

Post by superbaconman »

JauntTrooper wrote: post #119
ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

I 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 u…

That's not a great example. You can buy your own plastic bags for 1 cent a piece on amazon.

Re: Subscription Hell

#139

Post by mbesto »

> One way we could fix that situation would be to allow subscriptions to combine together more cheaply.

“There are two ways to make money in business: You can unbundle, or you can bundle.” — Jim Barksdale.

Re: Subscription Hell

#140

Post by d2p »

lajhsdfkl wrote: post #48
d2p wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because a large percentage won't pay doesn't mean that putting the price high will maximise income. It's possible that at $10/month they'd get 5x the signups. That said, increasing prices is hard; reducing is easy. If you're trying to figure out sweet spot for max revenue is it probably makes sense to start high and slowly reduce it until you find it. If you're on a rolling monthly payment and decrease everyones…

> It's possible that at $10/month they'd get 5x the signups. I highly doubt it. Also, while it is possible that the people at bloomberg are so incompetent that they did not consider how to maximize their profits, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they did.

> I highly doubt it.

I never said it was likely, just possible. And I wouldn't question the incompetence of anyone these days; big companies make questionable decisions all the time ;-)

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