I think it comes down to how often you use this thing. I don't want to pay subscription for Photoshop because I open a photo editor a few times a month. So I bought Affinity. But I'm happy to pay for my email client, note-taking app and the calendar, because I'm using them all the time.
Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
501–510 of 710 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#502I actually prefer the subscription model for my software, if the monthly price is reasonable. It gives me faith that they can actually sustain their business and pay their employees to maintain and improve the service over time. I hate the other model, where with Windows and Office you end up getting useless forced upgrades and terrible makeovers because they need that upgrade revenue every few years. Or the ad drive…
Office upgrades were never forced. I pay for an Office365 subscription so I can have it on Mac, but on my Windows PC I use Office 2010, which I paid for when it was current. It is lightning fast compared to the current release of Office, and has all the features I could ever want. The company I worked for '05-'12 used Office 2003 that whole time. It was fine!
There was a moment when they adopted a new format in DOCX thought.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could consider https://kagi.com/ for a subscription-based, ad-free search. I've been using it for a few months and haven't had a case where the Google results were superior.
I tried Kagi for a couple of weeks and the results were painfully inferior to Google's. I was really hoping they'd be good.
Funny, I've had the exact opposite experience, in most cases.
It definitely depends on the query, but Kagi seems to do better at common (for me) queries. In particular, it tends to recommend authoritative sources instead of clickbait/SEO sources (e.g. official documentation instead of w3schools).
Google does better at some queries, particularly those that require a bit of parsing of the query text, understanding when two words represent one concept, etc. But you can usually tell when Kagi is doing poorly at those and fall back to Google by adding !g on the end of your query.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#504Earlier 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.
I haven't seen any improvement in Spotify in years. Still can't organise songs in any meaningful way, can't rate songs, playlists suck, shuffle is broken, and they keep pushing podcast content when I never listen to podcasts. 1Password also used to sync to Dropbox for free and even had an HTML version that could serve from Dropbox.
All I want from Spotify is for it to be performant. I hate that it's such a slow and bloated app.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#505Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#506One thing I'm excited for in the digital markets app is app stores that allow a "paid upgrade" model. This is pretty much untenable with the current incumbents.
I'm working on a consumer productivity app and really want to provide it as a paid upgrade model, because I'm philosophically opposed to SaaS for everything as well. But, when I go cross-platform, I won't be able to offer the paid upgrade model on either iOS or Android.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#507I can't believe no one has posted the infamous quote yet: "You will own nothing, and be happy." The WEF posted that article on their site in 2016, deleted it sometime later after it got a LOT of understandably negative attention, and tried to call it a conspiracy theory, but it's clear what's going on. (You can still look in the web archive for the article). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25068820
Saved you a click: https://web.archive.org/web/20200420054424/https://www.wefor...
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#508Not 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…
"You'll Own Nothing and You'll Be Happy"
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's so much worse when a subscription business fails. You can lose access to your data with very little notice to migrate. At least standalone software keeps working for a while after the company maintaining it is gone.
That's a cloud vs desktop distinction, not a subscription vs buy once. If Adobe went out of business, you wouldn't lose any local stuff.
"Well, is officially illegal has an Adobe products if you live in Venezuela" (Okt 2019) [1]
From [2] (due to sanctions from the US to Venezuela)
[1] https://twitter.com/AenderLara/status/1181291242531020800/ph...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20904030/adobe-venezuela-...
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#510I think software companies should offer both. A subscription gets you access to any version of the software as long as you keep paying. Or you can purchase a particular version.
Unfortunately though, this is very hard to achieve with Web based products, since then they would need to retain copies and host copies of every version. This to me just highlights how Web based software makes ownership harder, and is why I will always preference software I can download and backup and store how I please, etc.