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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?

#461

Post by exodust »

solardev wrote: post #385
Diapason wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify? What the heck is it doing in this list. When you pay Spotify - you are paying - supposedly for a large part - for Artists's right, not for a Software service.

Spotify is way better than similar offerings though, like Amazon or YouTube or Apple and such. Part of that is because their app makes social playlists easy. Everything from Christmas music to board game nights has a good community driven playlist.

But we can't even "bookmark" or save a position in a playlist. No way to place a pin in a playlist, go listen to something else, then come back to that playlist position. Major let down of Spotify playlists.

Also the mandatory syncing across devices is annoying. I sometimes listen on my PC, and don't want my phone to lose it's place where I paused it previously.

Also finding playlists by "humans" not algorithms seems deliberately blurred. Spotify wants to push certain content, so they've designed their service to make it unclear or unintuitive if you want to find playlists curated by people only.

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

#462

Post by jasonlotito »

lapcat wrote: post #182
skelpmargyar wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion you shouldn't expect future updates of any kind from software that you own. I wouldn't expect them to keep updating it because it obviously makes them no money. I would expect them to release a new product to keep making money.

> I wouldn't expect them to keep updating it because it obviously makes them no money. What do you mean by this exactly? There are always new customers to sell to, so of course you can make money by updating your product. Will the buyer continue to receive free software updates forever? No, probably not. Eventually they may have to pay an upgrade fee. But the great part about upgrade fees compared to subscription is…

This is why I think JetBrains nailed the pricing with IntelliJ. You own what you buy, and can use it forever. You pay for upgrades. That's it.

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

#463

Post by chillfox »

phrom wrote: post #362
vinyl7 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't give them any ideas. Could you imagine having to have separate subscriptions for O'Reilly, Shuster, and Penguin, etc.

They already got the idea. Look up the "O'Reilly Learning Platform"

Used to be some of my favorite tech books, but these days it's so damn hard to figure out what books they still print if any, so I have mostly moved over to No Starch Press as my default goto for tech books.

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

#464

Post by carom »

Everything should be pay-as-you-go. We need infrastructure for low fee microtranscactions. Subscriptions exist because of the minimums on card payments. You can't charge a cent to read an article because the banks will be taking 20c + 2%.

Micropayments are my dream. I'm extremely negative on cryptocurrency but the lightning network is the closest technology I have seen to achieving it. It is just a nightmare to use. I looked into going through banks and it was just a nightmare to set up something that had the hint of being a money service business. I will feel like the future has arrived when I can pay 5 cents for a news article or pay per second on a YouTube video.

Micropayments would also unseat advertising (and tracking!) as the defacto payment mechanism on the web.

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

#465

Post by exodust »

Rejected subscription years ago, avoid as much as possible.

The idea that a product is not "complete", so we must pay for "future updates" is twisted logic.

The model should be "we are proud of our product as it stands today, and here is the price". The promotion and sale of future updates beyond a certain point should be separate.

Maintenance plans for example. You buy "version 5.2" today, and get free point release updates until version 6 or maybe even 7. But your version keeps working even after version 8 is released. If you want 8, you get a big discount and can jump back in at any time because you're a valued customer who not only paid, but is using the software and most likely talking about it online or producing work with it.

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

#466

Post by FpUser »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #422
FpUser wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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.

I don't where/when/how this myth started. If anyone from JetBrains is reading this, please asking you sales/PR/marketing team to make it crystal clear on your website so that we can kill off this silly myth that hurts your excellent brand.

>"...sales/PR/marketing team to make it crystal clear on your website"

They have, just not what you think unless your post is an attempt at humor:

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

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

#467

Post by chillfox »

dmitrygr wrote: post #170
crazygringo wrote: post #40

Not really, because I saw too many software companies go out of business because not enough people wound up upgrading to the next major version -- the ownership model of software can be awfully feast-or-famine for developers' income, it's a very tough/risky business model. Generally speaking, I'm happy to pay a subscription because this way I get a steady stream of all the updates, and it's much more likely the compa…

> I'm happy to pay a subscription because this way I get a steady stream of all the updates Who needs that? I use office 97 with Microsoft’s office converters package for modern formats. Super fast and does all I need I use photoshop cs2. Local. Fast. Offline Software can easily reach “good enough”. What is it with people today that makes them think that no updates or no recent changes is bad? I WANT my tools to be s…

Anxiety about security would be my guess.

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

#468

Post by habosa »

carom wrote: post #464

Everything should be pay-as-you-go. We need infrastructure for low fee microtranscactions. Subscriptions exist because of the minimums on card payments. You can't charge a cent to read an article because the banks will be taking 20c + 2%. Micropayments are my dream. I'm extremely negative on cryptocurrency but the lightning network is the closest technology I have seen to achieving it. It is just a nightmare to use.…

Other countries, like France, have credit card fees https://www.valuepenguin.com/interchange-fees-na-vs-eu

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

#469

Post by vladvasiliu »

least wrote: post #407
class4behavior wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were no lyrics all this time? Either it's really hard to get people to pay attention to alternatives like Deezer and Tidal or there is little demand for lyrics.

Spotify's killer feature at this point is probably that they have an ad-supported tier while none of the other services (that I'm aware of) do... unless you count youtube? I think lyrics was a bit of legal hurdle so Spotify had to get rid of it. I imagine they brought it back recently as they worked out a legal way to provide them again.

To me, Spotify's killer feature is Spotify connect and official Linux support.

I keep looking at Deezer for its cheap hi-def support (the premium plan now has FLAC, for the same price as Spotify). But integrations with non-officially sanctioned devices seem janky, at best.

Maybe things have improved, but at one point I had a Yamaha receiver, officially supported, which basically replicated the Deezer interface inside the receiver's app. I couldn't control it from my computer. IIRC Tidal was the same. With Spotify, this just works. Bonus points for supporting the use case of "having friends over who can play their music on my stereo".

I also use multiple "devices" to play music: phone, personal laptop, work laptop, personal desktops, media PC. I don't know how Deezer's "three registered device limit" is implemented, but I'd hate to have to log in again every time I change the computer.

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

#470

Post by HKH2 »

pwg wrote: post #451

> Want a password manager? It's a SaaS now. No, not all of them. Here is a password manager that runs locally, no SaaS: https://www.pwsafe.org/index.shtml -- plus here is a long list of compatible alternate versions that also are not Saas: https://www.pwsafe.org/relatedprojects.shtml > Note taking app? SaaS. Hmm, purists would say Emacs and Org-Mode here, but there's also a whole host of open source text editors that…

Krita is an excellent open source image editor too.
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