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Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

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

#401

Post by wizofaus »

eganist wrote: post #226
ekianjo wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pay for the thing it allows me to do Why can't software ever be "finished" or "sufficient" to meet your needs? I don't see the point of having software is updated day after day, month after month, if I am not interested in the new features they bring.

This used to be the case. Photoshop, for instance. I don't need it to have new features; there are certain things I need it to do for me, and that's it. I don't need constant new features. But I do expect security updates. Same model we have with cars (that BMW is trying hard to upend): it has the features I need, and if there's a systemic defect that poses a safety risk across those models sold, they're expected to…

Cars are nothing like software, they clearly deteriorate with time to the point parts eventually need replacing. You could argue there's a better case for a subscription model for buying cars than for software.

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

#402

Post by hammyhavoc »

Offer me self-hostable licenses. Simple as that. Offer everyone else the cloud with a subscription by default.

The per-seat subscription model for a lot of these services doesn't make any sense when you own the hardware already, or can roll it out in the cloud and only pay for what you use with elastic models.

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

#403

Post by nottorp »

Varqu wrote: post #218
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…

Speaking from a consumer perspective, there should be definitely 2 options: 1. You pay for a subscription $X per month and get the newest updates. 2. You pay $Y*X once, but then you are left with the version which you bought in the first place.

What you end up with though is a predatory sales team so that when the time comes to upgrade they want you to back pay the subscription :)

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

#404

Post by jwr »

nvr219 wrote: post #188
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 is unrealistic to expect to be able to pay once and use an app "forever". No it's not. This is very realistic: pay once for a license to use the software, and then you pay a maintenance fee every year to get the updates and new versions. You stop paying, you stop getting the updates, but whatever you have already still works. There's no shortage of examples but I'll give a shout-out to one of my favorite softwar…

You've pretty much described a subscription, with the difference that you expect that whatever you have already still works and that you completely ignore the problem of support.

We can pretend it will work for a while, but I do not think this is realistic.

Support is not something you can ignore: people will request support, post negative reviews and opinions, and you will need to deal with that.

My point is that we should all stop pretending and just accept that apps cannot be used without regular maintenance anymore.

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

#405

Post by jwr »

Ekaros wrote: post #162
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…

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?

Features have increased, at least for the kind of apps that I write. My software does things which are quite complex, and were definitely not present in this class of software several years ago. Better languages and libraries make this possible.

In general, I do think software should be cheaper than ever. The main reason it isn't is the crazy pace of changes in platforms. I maintain a web app, which helps me keep my sanity, but I'm not even considering writing mobile apps: there is no way for me to keep up with the pace of changes and updates that vendors make there. It's just way too expensive.

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

#406

Post by Kye »

init2null wrote: post #375
Kye wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "Microsoft operating systems have always strived to make that impossible." That's the one thing I've never seen someone accuse Microsoft of. They're famous for their obsession with backward compatibility. It sounds like you've had a different experience, and now I'm curious. Care to share?

Microsoft's backward compatibility was always impressive until Windows 10 (ignoring the death of 16-bit on 64-bit Windows). S Mode and the store are great examples of how Microsoft has lost interest in supporting third-party binaries. They want to own Android, not Windows. I've had software break in the forced feature upgrades of 10, and I had BSODs when printing on every machine I supported at work thanks to a secur…

It's possible they're breaking some stuff so other things work better. A lot of developers are still using the registry, for example. The choice is basically leave it wide open for developers to break or push them to AppData and friends. All the programs I use also use the current standard, and I don't have any issues.

This might actually explain why 10 and 11 have been the most flawless experience I've had with Windows while so many people have endless trouble. It might be similar to the transition to NT in XP: everything broke, but almost everything made after was more stable and secure.

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

#407

Post by shafyy »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #349
shafyy wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like I never understood why most of these basic tools morph into 100+ people companies. Simple answer: They've signed a deal with the devil (VC funding) and now need to grow to make a > 1 billion dollar exit.

Vercel is going down this path now.

Yeah I think Netlify and Shopify, too. A shame.

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

#408

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

I think the simple reason why we have so many subscription-only services is that few people would buy it at the LTVs that these companies hope to (and often do successfully) extract via the subscription.

And people who see through it hate it because they realize how ridiculous the actual price is.

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

#409

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

The point of a startup is to make lots of money, to provide a large return to early investors; they definitely don't want to offer their product for free, and only want to offer it cheap if that's all the market will bear and they can get enormous numbers of sales by doing that.

> Like I never understood why most of these basic tools morph into 100+ people companies.

The giant company was the goal all the time. The basic tool was just a starting point.

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

#410

Post by tomnipotent »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #283
tomnipotent wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except a "new version" is arbitrary, and the decision to do so was made for financial reasons and not technical. Every new version of Photoshop had some percentage of people complaining "why can't this update just be a patch?".

Yeah sure, although upgrading was optional. My point is the incentive is on the developer to make it worth while to pay for an upgrade, they can't just phone it in.

There's even more pressure on a subscription service to deliver value, since you can cancel and the business makes less than selling MSRP (and this usually means losing money on the customer after customer acquisition costs).

I can't think of a single subscription service I use that doesn't continue to deliver new updates and value on a regular basis, and other than Adobe's bullshit "annual masquerading as monthly" drama I haven't come across something I wished was still packaged.

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