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

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

#231

Post by NegativeLatency »

PaulHoule wrote: post #7

I dunno. I felt like it was a mistake to get a Plex Pass that I paid for once because Plex had my money and didn't have to listen to me with product direction and Plex got worse and worse at serving media from my local server while it became increasingly focused on showing me ads for off-brand streaming services. I think the subscription model actually works for Adobe in that the upfront price of creative cloud was a…

The plex support forums are pretty disappointing, the top issues go pretty much unaddressed, and past technical choices are really holding back the quality of the experience for me with regard to 4k content.

Jellyfin is coming closer in terms of functionality, but the client apps are missing tablestakes features still, and it's a bit of a pain to have to setup https and dynamic dns and such if I want to access jellyfin outside of my house.

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

#232

Post by feanaro »

sanjayio wrote: post #93
quaintdev wrote: post #6

And this is exactly the reason I self host[0]. I am pretty sure it's not just me. I have seen r/selfhosted[1] skyrocket in it popularity over past year or two. The number of applications that you can self host are increasing daily. The only problem at the moment with self hosting seems to be the maintenance and setup but that also will be solved once many people start doing it. History repeats itself. Self hosting to…

You self-host things that are easily self-hostable. You wouldn’t self-host something like emails or error reporting.

I self-host my email, thankyouverymuch.

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

#233

Post by themacguffinman »

TingPing wrote: post #194
jonwest wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel as though Windows as a SaaS would be better? At least as a consumer I have a choice to say “I’d rather not upgrade to Windows 11 and get the worse experience” and not just login and see that those changes that I wouldn’t have upgraded for have just been pushed down as it happens with a SaaS. Windows, as an example, is an interesting one in that you’re paying once for a license and it’s good more or less i…

You don't have a choice not to upgrade Windows, not practically, it will go out of support and you can't do anything about it other than hope Windows Next will be more to your liking.

It may not be advisable, but tell that to the XP-for-life or 7-for-life people. It won't actually stop working, it just means you're much more vulnerable to malware.

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

#234

Post by itake »

f1refly wrote: post #128
itake wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why a password manager should be a SaaS While I fully agree with you, how do you sync passwords across my 3 laptops and 3 phones without a SaaS offering? While I don't use this feature, but it is common for ppl to share an account. How can I securely share credentials with family members?

> how do you sync passwords across my 3 laptops and 3 phones without a SaaS offering? Syncthing. Set up once, runs reliably forever. > How can I securely share credentials with family members? I don't do this either (and don't know anyone who does) but I imagine it'd be easy to just create a different shared database for the family for that? With password store, it's also possible to set multiple different gpg keys f…

Syncthing doesn't work for iOS https://forum.syncthing.net/t/syncthing-for-ios/16045

> it's also possible to set multiple different gpg keys for a specific directory. I don't think the last option is doable for most people though.

this seems really complex...

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

#235

Post by lapcat »

duckmysick wrote: post #210
lapcat wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this principle, every physical product in the world would be "a Ponzi scheme".

I thought about it and a lot of physical products we use everyday are either perishables themselves or require perishables for a regular maintenance. Yes, we aren't forced to buy from the exact same brands like in a subscription model. Practically, we end up buying the same products in a predictable schedule, to keep the wheel spinning.

A lot? Furniture? Clothing? Cars? Electronics? Appliances? Physical books? [takes off glasses to think] Glasses?

Physical products wear out eventually, but they can last for many years. They're not necessarily perishable.

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

#236

Post by PicassoCTs »

The actual horror is the DRM and the forced updates that come along with it. Nothing is stable anymore, all things are fragile, forcing you to develop against a rolling release by default and good luck expecting something working. The only provider of stable releases for some software by now are pirates. So you buy the license, to be safe legally, and then you use warez, cause the DRM is shit by default, trying you to buy more licenses, and they know they can wiggle out of all responsibility, even the ones stated in the license agreement if they can get you to switch to pirated software.

Open source, looks prettier every day.

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

#237

Post by ahepp »

PetahNZ wrote: post #125
bombolo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use debian and i get a steady stream of updates! And I also don't get microsoft bugging me every day to install windows 11.

I am on Ubuntu and it constantly bugs me to upgrade: > New release '20.04.5 LTS' available. > Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.

Despite being pretty similar under the hood, Ubuntu and Debian seem very different in their approach to this kind of thing.

The Debian package manager telemetry is opt in, for example. Whereas iirc Ubuntu used to bundle an Amazon store in their default release? And who could forget that guy who got a cold call "hey, we saw you spun up a Ubuntu VM in Azure. Want to buy support?"

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

#238

Post by jimkleiber »

openlowcode wrote: post #162

One big negative aspect is that everything tends to cost around $10/month, from a verified Twitter account to an app to teach English to my children. Now, it may be small change for single people with Silicon Valley salaries, but I have a family to feed on my French experienced engineer salary, and I basically have around $150-$200/month left for entertainment for the whole family. I cannot buy 10 internet services,…

Hmm, I'm debating a lot of this now for my work. What if they said $10/month or $50/year? Or would you prefer a software you could buy for $50 until it falls apart? (I built an app and didn't update it as Android and iOS changed and it doesn't work anymore)

Edit: ok not falls apart but maybe doesn't stay updated and becomes obsolete, or has bugs that don't get fixed, etc.

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

#240

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

itake wrote: post #230
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't. Sharing a Netflix account with your family is easy. Send it in the whatsapp group if you need to change the password or something -- how often are you going to do that in your life? Not enough to justify handing over all of your password to a 3rd party and paying them money for it. Anything more important than a Netflix account you don't share at all. If they need access, just call them.

> how often are you going to do that in your life? Small startups use password sharing tools to share passwords with new employees (think db passwords or other saas accounts). This happens at least a once per month in a 10 person organization.

That's the intended use case IMO and it absolutely makes sense. I used to share passwords in Slack before and that made me uneasy, the company investing in a password sharing SaaS absolutely made sense. However, I do not manage 100+ people at home and thus have no need of one.
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