Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021) • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by Bancakes » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 12:43 PM UTC

dt3ft wrote: post #423

Software is expensive to make. It can take years to build and if the price tag resembled true cost of software, very few would be ready to pay the full price. Subscription makes software available to the masses.

Then most people wouldn't be purchasing name-brand AAA software and would likely settle for FOSS or indie apps. Even better, you wouldn't be expected to be using said commercial solutions.

Subscriptions incentivize selling programs that are in a perpetual unfinished state. We lost the opportunity to call a project "feature-complete". LZMA2, H264, and RSA/AES were developed years ago, yet 7zip, netflix, and ssh still need regular updates for some nonsensical reason.

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

#432

Post by wink » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 12:47 PM UTC

njsubedi wrote: post #261

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.

If you're a small game studio I guess you're very much included in the professional artist category. Hell, back when we were slicing up templates to use in table-based layout I used photoshop every day and even being a 100% web developer I would put myself in that category.. not artist, but professional user ;)

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

#433

Post by marssaxman » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 1:50 PM UTC

senttoschool wrote: post #427

dt3ft wrote: post #423

Software is expensive to make. It can take years to build and if the price tag resembled true cost of software, very few would be ready to pay the full price. Subscription makes software available to the masses.

This. Maybe people forgot about the days of having to buy software one-time for $59.99 and then have to buy a new version if you want the latest. Today, you can probably get that same service for $10/month and you're continuously getting updates. 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 us…

> Today, you can probably get that same service for $10/month and you're continuously getting updates.

I remember when you could buy software, learn it, and use it effectively, without having constant habit-breaking changes stuffed down your throat. I remember when you owned your data and didn't have to rent it from a service provider. I remember what it was like to trust my machine, because everything was happening locally and software wasn't phoning home.

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

#434

Post by feanaro » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 10:31 AM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #332

feanaro wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens is that you'll have to use less stuff and learn to be content with it. What this means for the endless, exponential "consumer" ideology is that it isn't sustainable in the long run. This should be blindingly obvious but for some reason many people weren't or aren't seeing it.

There is a difference though between "making the most of what you have" and "navigating a growing amount of deliberate, arbitrary restrictions". Only because you can't afford a subscription won't mean that people will stop trying to upsell. Instead you'll be constantly confronted with all the things you're supposedly missing out on, will be stuck with purposely annoying workflows and generally will feel like constant…

Maybe in the short term, but I'm talking about a somewhat longer time frame where the entire world will realize exponential growth is no more. Eventually there will be no more upselling because there will be no one left to buy it.

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

#435

Post by nunez » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 2:15 AM UTC

> They don’t want to see another monthly number chipping away at their bank balances month after month, year after year.

They don't?

My uneducated take?

- People won't buy anything full boat that they can buy monthly - People prefer monthly payments - People don't actually track their monthly payments, because generally people are bad at money stuff

It's not an accident that BNPL companies like Affirm and apparently Apple now are mooning right now

Personally? I really like software subscriptions. They are zero commitment, auto-updating, and usually a good value relative to the price. When I'm done with them, I stop paying. Easy.

Amazon Subscribe and Save is a perfect example. The items I get that I'd usually skip on getting until I absolutely had to (because work and life get in the way) come in bulk every three to six months when I need them. That's incredibly valuable for me.

Most of y'all who are for paying full boat are speaking from a privileged position where full boat isn't much. For a lot of people, Office 365 with Word, Excel and PowerPoint for $6.99/mo is a much more achieveable than the $99 for a single version with feature-toggled restrictions (and better than dealing with cracks).

Then again, I think that ownership in general is overrated, so I realize that I'm a contrarian on this

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

#436

Post by nunez » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 2:26 AM UTC

Brian_K_White wrote: post #110

danielvaughn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

And the margins for those furniture businesses are super duper tiny, whereas software margins are super duper not. Ironically, this is why they hawk monthly plans like the world is ending.

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

#437

Post by nunez » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 2:49 AM UTC

civilized wrote: post #291

One reason to hate on subscriptions: I can't tell what the hell is charging me and why from my credit card and bank records. What is AVUT**aidurhbwkansj and why did it charge me $19.99? Sometimes I have to guess based on the transaction amount. Do these businesses want me to find out who's charging me by doing a chargeback and seeing who gets mad? Can there be some better standards for how transactions are documented…

privacy.com perfectly solves this

They abide by KYC so not good for true privacy, but they are very very good at containerizing your recurring expenses

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

#438

Post by signaru » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:24 AM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #381

signaru wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another idea: pausable subscription (like cancelling then re-subscribing, but without the hassle or stigma). I think I've seen a music plugin do this before. It's the idea of losing money to "idle time" that makes me allergic to subscriptions. You'd have to be a business that constantly uses the product for that to make sense. The opposite effect is you are pressured to keep using the product and I feel my friends ar…

Pausable subscriptions sounds hard to market. If netflix said that you need to pay $0.10 / hr people would be less comfortable with spending time on the platform. Every time they watch something they need to make a mental decision of if this episode is going to be worth paying $0.10 or if I should just browse TikTok for free.

It need not be per hour. You're right in pointing out the challenges of making it per hour. But that also should best be considered a metered model instead. And that could easily be annoying considering its too close to a show/movie run length.

I was thinking monthly as that is the usual billing interval. Minimum 1 month subscriptions, then pause the next month if you want to be busy for example. Maybe even weekly or 24 hours would do.