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Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

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Re: Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

#161

Post by acjacobson »

ekianjo wrote: post #100
boffinism wrote: post #4

Dear customers: we know. But our businesses are viable as subscription services, and not as one-off or ad-hoc puchase models. We know because we tried them. So we're catering to the people who are OK with buying a subscription because there are enough of them. Sorry if that doesn't suit you.

Your businesses are only viable as subscription services because they suck. We had software industries long before everyone was starting to ask for a monthly subscription. You are just making the lazy decision to extract the most value from your existing customers with rent building instead of trying to expand to new markets and services.

I feel like this might be true, but if it is true wouldn't someone else take advantage of the fact? Competitors usually spring up when there is an advantage to be leveraged - and there usually is always an advantage when an incumbent is lazy or rent building.

Re: Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

#162

Post by Ekaros »

jwr wrote: post #122
boffinism wrote: post #4

Dear customers: we know. But our businesses are viable as subscription services, and not as one-off or ad-hoc puchase models. We know because we tried them. So we're catering to the people who are OK with buying a subscription because there are enough of them. Sorry if that doesn't suit you.

That sounds like a cynical take, but is actually close to the truth. The usual take is that businesses are "greedy" and subscription models are "lucrative". The word I'd rather use is "sustainable". Maintaining software (any software) is an ongoing process, not a one-time effort. It needs to be paid for on an ongoing basis. Even a tiny phone app needs regular maintenance work just to stay current with OS and tools de…

Shouldn't software be cheaper than ever? Features certainly haven't increased much. And we now have magnitudes more processing power, memory, bandwidth and storage space. And improved tooling should have made it much much more efficient process? So what has failed? The entire field? Do developers really deserve the expensive pay if their efficiency has not increased?

Re: Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

#163

Post by matwood »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #54
lawgimenez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I feel as a happy customer of Fantastical calendar. The hate is just unwarranted.

But why is a calendar app a subscription service? That is ridiculous.

I think people underestimate how much maintenance work there is today. iOS alone adds features yearly that everyone expects the existing apps to support on day 1. While macos has fewer changes, same issue there.

And calendars...smh. It would be great if MS and Google both followed some standard perfectly, but based on what I've seen from various calendar apps, they do not. Otherwise, the apps would not have such a hard time dealing with multiple calendars.

Re: Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

#164

Post by matwood »

xg15 wrote: post #26
mattjenner wrote: post #21

Dear innovative people: think of a better model. 1. Free = problematic with the lack of money 2. Freemium = looks good if the balance is right 3. Ads = Mostly works but the model is flawed and skewed 4. Subscription = Love/Hate currently trendy but too relied on 5. Pay-what-you-can = Fans provide the service for everyone 6. Premium only = Only what it's worth, when it's worth 7. Enterprise = S'ok because my company/o…

How about good old "pay for it once, then own it"?

This works as long as customers can't complain the app is broken when a new version of the OS comes out.

Re: Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

#165

Post by dtech »

schroeding wrote: post #150
jwr wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a cynical take, but is actually close to the truth. The usual take is that businesses are "greedy" and subscription models are "lucrative". The word I'd rather use is "sustainable". Maintaining software (any software) is an ongoing process, not a one-time effort. It needs to be paid for on an ongoing basis. Even a tiny phone app needs regular maintenance work just to stay current with OS and tools de…

It may be unrealistic for your business plan and your product (which is fine, no criticism here), but the existance of software that still uses the pay-once-use-forever model proves that it is possible for many apps without being unsustainable. E.g: Serif / Affinity, JetBrains (as you still get a perpetual fallback license to the last version you payed for, so it still can be viewed as a one-time-payment, IMO - just…

One thing is that this doesn't currently work in the mobile space, because somewhat regular (~biyearly) updates are necessary to simply keep stuff working on the newest OS and hardware, and the majority of new software targets mobile, often even exclusively.

Re: Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

#166

Post by jdbernard »

williamtrask wrote: post #111
pakitan wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also I fear this is really changing society. Many years ago, as you got older you got into a better place in life because you had saved up and bought all the stuff you need and slowly aqquired good equipment and everything you need. Your grandfather's wheelbarrow didn't need replacing every 2 years but he also didn't have Netflix. You can easily have your grandfather's lifestyle by buying a future-proof wheelbarrow…

Believe it or not the wheelbarrow was considered modern technology at one point. Software is fixed cost to create and near-free to distribute. Sure there are tiny cloud costs for running things and maybe you need a couple engineers to fix bugs, but the subscription pricing model doesn’t fit this.

Fixed cost to create, sure. Not fixed cost to keep up to date, running on the current version of OS, hardware. The basic design of a simple wheelbarrow has not needed to change since its invention. A wheelbarrow made 30 years ago will still work just fine. Almost no software written 30 years ago will still work on modern systems without someone doing additional work to support it. And for the few that do, no one wants to run the 1990s version. They want to run the 2020s version.

Re: Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

#168

Post by paskozdilar »

Subscription services, in my opinion, is the pinnacle of a disposable society. Everything is ephemereal, nothing lasts, and people are dependent on their corporate overlords to bring "updates", which are often nothing more than a stream of ugly hacks working around the rotten core.

Re: Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

#169

Post by matwood »

chunkyguy wrote: post #125
xg15 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about good old "pay for it once, then own it"?

And who pays for the maintenance and bug fixes? Softwares can't sell like hardwares. When you buy a toaster for example, after the warranty expires you pay for every time you take it out for repairing. With softwares customers expect a life time of warranty, bug fixes and improvements.

Not sure why you're downvoted, but this is exactly what we saw early on with the app store. People paid 99c for an app, and then expected it to work with every new version of the OS and incorporate new OS features forevermore.

The stores also lack (and still do) an easy way to sell new versions, so here we are. Subscriptions.

Re: Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

#170

Post by togs »

For software, the subscription model makes sense to me. It costs money to develop a working product, then it costs money to maintain it, and, in the case of cloud-hosted software, it costs money to serve it.

The subscription model benefits the consumer because it incentivizes use of the software. For example, suppose I want to learn web design. If I subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud, I am now committed to use it because if I do not I am wasting money.

The subscription model benefits the consumer by reducing the up-front cost to use software. For example, Adobe Photoshop used to cost hundreds of dollars before use, and now it costs $20 (per month).

I suggest that we, as consumers, may need to reconcile with the cost of labor.

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