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Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

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

#171

Post by philipwhiuk »

matwood wrote: post #163
ChildOfChaos wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar - it's pretty standardised actually.

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

#172

Post by LVB »

yourMadness wrote: post #88
gordaco wrote: post #67

I'm a very, very firm believer on not paying for "subscription" to software. New content, I can understand (I spend about 40€ monthly on several Patreons, mostly comic artists; and I have a couple news subscriptions as well), although I still hate music/tv subscriptions and I don't want Netflix, Spotify or whatever. But for software, no matter how useful it is , I just refuse to choose between an unbounded price and…

Would you use a service that converts subscriptions into one time purchases at 20x the yearly subscription cost?

Jetbrains’ perpetual licenses are similar to this. https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

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

#173

Post by projektfu »

nathan_compton wrote: post #141
Brian_K_White wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I sold furniture, the designs and manufacturing processes and materials usage all undergo continuous iteration, yet when I sell you your chair, you don't have to keep paying me forever to keep using it. Yes, you also don't get updates to it. That is actually perfectly fine for countless bits of software. I have 30 year old software, and it still does it's original job just fine, if I happen to be ok with all it's…

No one is going to use an unpatched bug in your chair to rob your house.

No, but if my dehumidifier model causes fires it will be recalled and I'll get my money back to buy a new one.

Although, I think some companies use recalls in a dark pattern, specifically baby product companies.

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

#174

Post by hoherd »

yourMadness wrote: post #88
gordaco wrote: post #67

I'm a very, very firm believer on not paying for "subscription" to software. New content, I can understand (I spend about 40€ monthly on several Patreons, mostly comic artists; and I have a couple news subscriptions as well), although I still hate music/tv subscriptions and I don't want Netflix, Spotify or whatever. But for software, no matter how useful it is , I just refuse to choose between an unbounded price and…

Would you use a service that converts subscriptions into one time purchases at 20x the yearly subscription cost?

20x? No. But I paid way more than the annual subscription cost ($40/yr) for a perpetual license of plex pass ($120 for life), so in general, yes.

This was also the case for everybody who had bought a perpetual license for Adobe products and then did not subscribe to them when they switched to a subscription model.

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

#175

Post by matwood »

yourMadness wrote: post #88
gordaco wrote: post #67

I'm a very, very firm believer on not paying for "subscription" to software. New content, I can understand (I spend about 40€ monthly on several Patreons, mostly comic artists; and I have a couple news subscriptions as well), although I still hate music/tv subscriptions and I don't want Netflix, Spotify or whatever. But for software, no matter how useful it is , I just refuse to choose between an unbounded price and…

Would you use a service that converts subscriptions into one time purchases at 20x the yearly subscription cost?

I think a more reasonable multiple would be 5x. The problem you'll run into is that people who complain want the cheap subscription price and perpetual access.

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

#176

Post by viraptor »

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…

> It is unrealistic to expect to be able to pay once and use an app "forever".

That's the other extreme though.

There's a middle ground that http://reaper.fm/ uses. You buy the current x and x+1 versions. Then you pay for the license again for x+2, x+3 if you want to. The price is very reasonable and there's no subscription as such. If you're happy with the old major version, you can use it as long as it continues to work.

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

#177

Post by xtracto »

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…

>. Ads = Mostly works but the model is flawed and skewed

I would argue that it has been proved that this model doesn't work, because it unalgins incentivess between the developer and the user: the developer will look tho maximize revenue, catering to better paying ads and more clicks/interaction with them, while the User will try to get more usage from the main app.

I want applications that give me an EXE that I can use forever , even if the company disappears. And then the option to pay yearly or monthly for updates to said Exe (even as replacement EXEs) that give me more functionality, bugfuxes and secfixes .

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

#179

Post by torginus »

xg15 wrote: post #10
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.

> But our businesses are viable as subscription services, and not as one-off or ad-hoc puchase models. Doesn't explain businesses that had been per-purchase for a long time and are now still switching to subscriptions though. (E.g. photoshop, jetbrains...)

These kinds of software used to be always kind of subscription based - as new language features came out, new IDE features got added, the platform got updated to support new OSes, you would find that Company X would release IDE 2.0

Even if for some reason you didn't need all of this, IDE 1.0 would eventually stop getting updated and the bugs would stop getting fixed, so you would naturally need to update.

Considering people naturally want the latest and greatest, and devs hate maintaining legacy stuff, a subscription makes sense in this case.

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

#180

Post by spaceman_2020 »

Part of the problem is that most of these startups simply have too much overhead to offer their product for free or cheap.

Like I never understood why most of these basic tools morph into 100+ people companies. A tool like Evernote can be built and maintained by under 20 people. Even at inflated salaries, your yearly burn would be under $10M.

This is part of a broader trend of startup overhiring. Like Better.com had 10k employees at one point. What are those people even doing at a “startup”?

This late in the startup cycle, you really need to ask why a 10k person company hasn’t IPOed and why is it still calling itself a “startup”

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