Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

Each version of Windows was designed to ideally trigger a purchase of new hardware as a concession to the hardware partners, while each purchase of more powerful hardware was designed to be prohibitively difficult for users to operate using previous Windows versions, triggering a new OS purchase.

Non-Microsoft software suffers more from this disadvantage, compared to the benefit of having some of the Microsoft non-OS software function fairly well across a few OS versions.

I understand how embarassing it would be for users in general to have become aware of how much higher performance they could have gotten from using a previous version of Windows on the next generation of hardware, so this was always made unnecessarily difficult if not impossible.

Also how much hardware could have been saved from scrap heaps if maximum utilization of hardware was given top priority?

When the main reason for growth in manufacturing was consumers purchasing their first computer, this is not as much of a problem.

Once computers are ubiquitous, each new purchase triggers a corresponding waste declaration event.

Accelerating growth pressure under these conditions, while failing to even provide archives for "outdated" code needed to operate remaining vintage hardware, amounts to an overall anti-reuse/anti-recycling strategy.

This year Ahrefs, a popular marketing tool that indexes the web, changed their pricing model to impose a strict 3,000 token limit on report generation. That limit used to be 1,500 and reset on a weekly basis. This is for the $200/month plan.

Now if you “accidentally” use all 3,000 reports you are essentially locked out of the platform, like I was.

What that means is that you can no longer use the export feature, which left me with a million+ unused rows.

I had been their customer before, and I was told they did send out an email about the new changes (just not to people who weren’t active subscribers), and their official blog post was very sparse on appropriate wording that the report limit was changed so drastically.

Was it my fault in the end? In more than one way, yes. But does that make me hate this approach less? Not in the slightest.

Subscriptions make more sense for both users and businesses. It's not like you can fire the entire product team once you finish shipping a version of the product. And for users, the upfront cost is less and you're getting updates more frequently. You can also cancel if the service isn't what you expected. The power swings in the favor of the user more.

At the end of the day, it's all about life-time value anyways. Selling two copies of your software for $120 total is the same revenue as selling $10 subscriptions for 12 months.

And that's only because of current regulations and anti-competition laws. Turns out "free market" is only "free" when the giants are asked to behave and punished for bad behaviours.