Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

I think we have to look at why everything became a subscription based model before we even talk about how the model is being abused now. When I was a kid, everyone was a pirate. Napster and Limewire were king because. Buying movies and music was absurdly expensive and extremely inconvenient. Amazon didn't exist and if your local record store didn't have something good luck. If you were in a smaller town, good luck getting a movie if Wallmart or your local mom and pop didn't have it (if you even had a Wallmart). But then Hollywood Video and Blockbuster ended up eating into the video pirating because let's be real, we only are going to watch that movie once and then it sits in storage. Now you have racks and cabinets full of tapes and disks. (My brother even had his car window smashed in where someone stole his entire CD collection) It was bulky and inconvenient, so renting made things easier. Music was the same way. But services like Napster weren't just free, they were FAR more convenient. That's why Spotify has taken over and to this day won. Convenience. I think Benn Jordan (The Flashbulb) did a good video talking about the music side of this argument (including software), so I'll let his video say more[0].

There's a second problem that has led to our hardware crisis. Where hardware is cheaper than ever but if you don't attach a subscription model some manufacturer in China will sell the same thing 10x cheaper than you. See Boston Dynamic's robotic dogs. Reverse engineering hardware is pretty easy, see K-13 missile[1].

The problem today, is that now EVERYTHING has become a subscription based model and we're basically back to where we were before (notice the resurgence in piracy lately?). So I think the problem is that we learned a lesson but we didn't learn THE lesson, of what people are actually after. I don't think our modern video streaming services are much different than buying cable in the past.

So I think the trillion dollar question is: what is the new model that learns THE lesson? But that has a lot of sub-questions, including what it is actually that people want. Surely convenience and accessibility is one, but that's clearly not all. Though the solution to this may be impossible, because no one wants to centralize everything into a single player (and I'm not convinced that's a great idea either, despite the success of services like Pirate Bay, Napster, and PopcornTime).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7EHRpnJICQ

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-13_(missile)

Own-it-for-life means "I expect free updates for the next 20 years" which as we've seen with the mIRC author isn't the best business model. Turns the software developer into indentured servitude to all the people who bought it in the past.

The JetBrains model where you own it up need to rent it to get upgrades seems to work reasonably well, but given how languages like C# and Rust are moving forwards all the time you want get those upgrades. Since I want to see the developers doing that work for me, it seems rational that I should be paying them.

Similarly I'm tired of baking porcals to be even worse coupled with mobile second factory auth instead of a classic physical OFFLINE time-based tocken, who do not allow OFX or similar feeds, some even do not offer decent exporting options and of course NO ONE IS THE SAME being different banks even if MY damn USAGE is the same.

And so on. Long story short: I accept to pay someone else works, because we use money as a tool to interact in society to get what we all want in more or less fair compensations BUT I do not accept and very tired of crappy IT choices not to ask for money but to trap users, munge more then formally paid money and offer far less with a coat of colorful nice crappy UI.

One thing I'd like to pay for but won't because of rent-seeking subscription is Roland's VST audio plugins. I'd happily pay hundreds of dollars for them if I could BUY them, but that's not an option. Instead, I'm holding on to my Roland XV5080 hardware synthesizer module, instead of replacing it with the software alternative, which I'd very much want.