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Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

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

#261

Post by njsubedi »

BonoboIO wrote: post #256

I don't know anybody who pays for adobe products beside some professional photographers/artists. The support is nonexistent and their pricing is consumer unfriendly. You can only make yearly subscriptions and even the student prices are high. Acrobat for 180€ a year and it crashes one in 10 times when I convert some things and takes all the edits with it to the grave. Ridiculous.

We’re a small game studio and we pay for all adobe products ($84/mo/user). It’s an underestimation that people don’t pay for Adobe products. No other offerings match their products, and Acrobat is something that we rarely use. Other products work perfectly.

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

#262

Post by tomrod »

julianlam wrote: post #234
d13 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my unpatched chair breaks because of a manufacturing defect I’ll sue the company.

You would? That seems like an outsized reaction to a broken chair.

Small claims makes low dollar torts fairly straightforward.

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

#263

Post by ratww »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #180

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…

Sibling post is correct: I worked in a couple companies backed by Softbank and they specifically asked for engineering headcount increase.

Investors and CEOs think they need massive numbers because they misunderstand how dev headcount scales and how much overhead it generates. Hiring warehouse workers, moderators and content editors scale, so they extrapolate that to devs and expect the same results.

Also with lots of devs you need lots of designers, managers, product owners and other idea people, so there’s a lot of minor tasks being pushed trough, which would otherwise not be if it was a 20 dev product. Not to mention the extra need of support, QA and ops people, which in turn needs more coordination and management.

Going back to 10 or 20 devs is borderline impossible, even if you reduce the scope, since the infrastructure needed to support 100 or 1000 has too much of an overhead in itself. I would love to see someone try, though.

It is also cool to have 1000 devs in case of an acqui-hire. If your product sucks, you can still sell your team. Yay.

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

#264

Post by tomrod »

cpach wrote: post #74
codeptualize wrote: post #63

I don't mind subscriptions, I actually prefer them for many things. Especially for software I rely on I want the developers to consistently earn money so they keep motivated to work on it, do maintenance and fix bugs. I don't pay for software, I pay for the thing it allows me to do. Me paying a subscription fee creates an incentive and responsibility to keep things working. If there is a backend component to its even…

Indeed. Buying an application is not necessarily like buying a wrench or a shovel.

Used to be.

Look at drivers. Usually you update those yourself. Some managed services exist, but they break often, leaving the system in an unusable state.

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

#265

Post by chrisandchris »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #180

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…

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

I think that is not the issue. The issue is having a physical product that is tied to a subscription which could also be a one-time fee. Like a subscription for your dorbell - just why?

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

#266

Post by manigandham »

mschuster91 wrote: post #214
manigandham wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation is the worst solution to any of this. Let the free market figure it out and you'll find enough competition if there really is enough demand.

The "free market" will always, always end up with large fish eating up the small fish and extracting rents once the competition is eliminated and the startup costs too high for startups to enter the market.

The number of successful new companies contradicts that statement.

Regulation, on the other hand, does tend to lead to rent seeking behavior as incumbents use those laws to their advantage and forcibly block new companies.

It’s much easier to overcome high costs than bad laws.

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

#267

Post by vladvasiliu »

BonoboIO wrote: post #256

I don't know anybody who pays for adobe products beside some professional photographers/artists. The support is nonexistent and their pricing is consumer unfriendly. You can only make yearly subscriptions and even the student prices are high. Acrobat for 180€ a year and it crashes one in 10 times when I convert some things and takes all the edits with it to the grave. Ridiculous.

I do, and I'm not a professional photographer/artist by any measure.

I pay for the "photography bundle", which is Lightroom + Photoshop + some cloud storage (which I don't use). Before the subscription-based model, these two would cost some 8-900 euros.

At 12 € a month and 800 € for the bundle, that's 66 months to break even, or 5.5 years.

Sure, you could use the same version for 20 years if you wanted. It probably works on Windows, but probably not on the mac, what with the CPU architectures changing. And there have been improvements that I, as an amateur photographer, am happy to have. For example the new automatic selection that landed a year or two ago in Photoshop. Could the same be achieved by a skilled professional with the path tool? Probably, and maybe even better. But I'm not that professional, and I don't want to sink hours and hours into this.

To me that's actually a pretty good deal.

Now, you could argue that the product isn't worth it because X is better. But that's a totally different argument.

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

#268

Post by cinntaile »

ekianjo wrote: post #216
alanfranz wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few follow that trend, though, and servers sometime get shut down after a while, exactly because they have a price. And expansions, dlcs, seasons, are a way to subsidize such online services. How many games that offer no additional packages keep their online offering working forever?

> How many games that offer no additional packages keep their online offering working forever? All the games that actually released binaries for hosting your own servers. That used to be the standard back in the day.

I don't think that's coming back, but it would be nice if they released the binaries once they stop providing servers for a game.

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

#269

Post by ratww »

danielvaughn wrote: post #79
codeptualize wrote: post #63

I don't mind subscriptions, I actually prefer them for many things. Especially for software I rely on I want the developers to consistently earn money so they keep motivated to work on it, do maintenance and fix bugs. I don't pay for software, I pay for the thing it allows me to do. Me paying a subscription fee creates an incentive and responsibility to keep things working. If there is a backend component to its even…

It blows my mind that there are people in this thread who think that a business should charge once for a product that requires iteration or continued backend support.

Not all products need iteration or a custom backend, and those two things are often undesirable features for a lot of users.

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

#270

Post by pixl97 »

badtension wrote: post #250
nbzso wrote: post #208

SaaS model is applicable in some use cases. The VC like it, because they can give the investors comfortable idea of progressive growth and quick ROI. But I am patiently waiting to see what will be the consumer reaction when everything becomes compartmentalized and monetized to hell. Like the great ideas of geniuses in BMW headquarters:) https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-is-charging-a-subscription... https://www.wired…

Making a subscription service out of physical products (that are there anyway) is really too crazy to wrap my head around. Why not make us pay monthly for everything? Trunk, headlights, the horn, blinkers, blinker fluid cap opener and so on. Oh wait, that's just car rental! Let's just abolish all private property and pay subscription for living, like a reverse UBI.

VC's: keep talking dirty like that and I'll give you another billion to implement this as a service.
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