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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?

#281

Post by Oxidation »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #250

The garage door opener feature is behind a subscription for Chamberlain on Tesla. Lol. A monthly fee to be able to open a garage door. Nah thanks I'll clip the opener to the sun visor. I hope they throw enough money away on this to learn a lesson and give up forever. https://support.chamberlaingroup.com/s/article/myQ-Tesla-Fre...

Cars in general are going to become huge subscription platforms pretty soon. And you just know that your 10 year old car features will cost as much to rent access to as the ones on a new car.

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

#282

Post by Spooky23 »

jonwest wrote: post #147
solardev wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but I have to disagree too. Creative Cloud, IntelliJ, Figma, Google Workspace, Postman, Spotify, Vercel, Adguard, Google storage space, Alltrails, 1password.. They're all subscriptions and getting better all the time. Meanwhile it's the old purchased software like Windows and Office that get worse with every version.

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…

In enterprise, Windows and Office are subscriptions in most cases. I wouldn’t say they have gotten better.

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

#283

Post by falcolas »

mnming wrote: post #277

Not really, like others said, in many cases subscription is well justified.It normally brings consistent updates, data hosting and backup on top of typical purchase. In addition, for me most importantly, it forces a continuous relationship between business entities that brings trust and continuity.

> relationship between business entities that brings trust and continuity

No, it absolutely does not imply trust OR continuity. When the business folds, the customer is always the one - and in a way the only one - who loses.

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

#284

Post by keithnz »

Yes and no... for software I use all the time I don't mind. But there's some stuff that are occasional use type things, and I'd just like to pay a single one off cost that makes sense to me. But usually, it is some low ball subscription like $6 a month. It's like I wish for something like "Softify" where you pay a subscription to a service that has a ton of utility like software and based on usage it distributes to the creators (doesn't have to be as predatory as spotify)

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

#285

Post by FpUser »

solardev wrote: post #185
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's a very modern take on a recent problem. I used VLC, Firefox (Phoenix), LibreOffice (OOo), MSOffice, paint, photofiltre, and notepad++ when I was a teen. They still work today. The trending app ecosystem, the social network du jour and the JS framework fever seem to have given the impression to the new generation that there is not other way to do this.

It's not necessarily a generational thing. I grew up on DOS before Windows was common, remember v1 of OpenOffice and Phoenix and the birth of CSS and JS, and have been making webpages since before the div tag was invented. I bought and used many tools like Notepad++ and Ultraedit and Sublime, and used the heck out of Paint Shop Pro and some GIMP and the rest. But many of those tools are quite a bit less powerful than…

>"Take IntelliJ for example. There was a big uproar when they moved to a subscription model"

They did not move. They still offer perpetual license. Otherwise I would not be using their products.

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

#287

Post by bytehowl »

jimkleiber wrote: post #243
bytehowl wrote: post #145

Ignoring all the issues around ownership, corporations being untrustworthy, etc., I think one of the biggest problems is that subscription costs aren't flexible enough and require too much micromanagement. You use a program 24/7 for a month straight? That'll be $10. You need to use a program just for a single 5-minute task in a whole month? That'll be $10. You literally don't touch a program for a month? That'll be $…

I've been exploring a pay what you want model for a subscription. Would you prefer something like this? Or more about just putting in more options for selecting based on one's usage? something else?

TBH, as I'm on the pay2own team, I haven't given it that much thought. However, I think some sort of pay-as-you-go model would be the most fair. For every minute the software is active in (user interaction or processing some task), the user would get charged X. I think determining the correct X might be quite difficult, but I guess that's why marketing departments exist.

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

#288

Post by _delirium »

Gigachad wrote: post #262
amarant wrote: post #259

I don't think subscriptions per se is that much of a problem, but for certain products I feel like there needs to be some kind of regulation mandating companies to enable some kind of self-hosted solution on the event they take their cloud down for whatever reason (including bankruptcy). If the product requires online servers, and the company is not willing/able to keep those servers online, anyone who has paid for t…

This isn't true for most things you "subscribe" to. If the gym closes down, they aren't required to provide a new location near you. If your office building gets demolished, there is no recourse. You just have to deal with it and sort out your own alternative.

If it's purely a subscription service then that's fine. What bugs me is selling a software or hardware product for an up-front purchase price, but then disabling it by discontinuing a cloud service that it depends on. In those cases I think customers should have some kind of recourse, either as a refund or by allowing them to "unbrick" the device themselves with something self-hosted. For example, if Philips decides to shut down the Hue servers, I think they should be required to make enough technical information available so people who bought Hue products can keep using them.

An example of a company voluntarily taking the refund option is Google Stadia. They're shutting down the online service, which will effectively brick all the hardware, and also render purchased software unusable. But they're fully refunding everyone's purchases. It's not clear they legally have to though; perhaps they could've just screwed over everyone who bought the products. I assume there would've been lawsuits to try to sort that out.

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

#290

Post by franga2000 »

Gigachad wrote: post #262
amarant wrote: post #259

I don't think subscriptions per se is that much of a problem, but for certain products I feel like there needs to be some kind of regulation mandating companies to enable some kind of self-hosted solution on the event they take their cloud down for whatever reason (including bankruptcy). If the product requires online servers, and the company is not willing/able to keep those servers online, anyone who has paid for t…

This isn't true for most things you "subscribe" to. If the gym closes down, they aren't required to provide a new location near you. If your office building gets demolished, there is no recourse. You just have to deal with it and sort out your own alternative.

Just because there are other situations that suck, doesn't mean this one has to. Allowing users to use software if a company goes bankrupt or kills a product costs next to nothing.

A big difference is also that many other subscriptions are much more fungible - I can easily go to another gym or rent a similar office in a nearby building, but I can't go play Sadia-exclusive games on another cloud gaming provider or move my Adobe Lightroom catalogue to some other software.

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