Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 710 posts

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

#551

Post by pigsty »

solardev wrote: post #126
thot_experiment wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the heck subscription models are you using? In my experience the software gets broken over time and you can't do anything about it, including RUN THE OLD VERSION WHICH WORKED. There's no longer as much incentive for companies to improve because they'll get paid anyway instead of payment being contingent on actually delivering something useful. Yes subscription models are good for developers, no this doesn't make…

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.

Office is so bad that it’s unbearable. Photoshop became subscription-only and now I’m stuck with spyware that auto-launches and runs in the background in over 2 dozen separate processes and more bugs and glitches than I ever had on paid versions before.

Meanwhile, Sublime Text and Procreate hold up and I’m not paying monthly.

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

#552

Post by agret »

lozenge wrote: post #247
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.

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.

I use Spotify in my car over Bluetooth and for the past couple months it has this super annoying bug where you get in, start it playing and it finishes off what song you were listening to but then doesn't continue playing the playlist, it just goes silent and when you open the main app screen there is no playlist in sight. Have to manually re-open a playlist and pick a track to keep it going.

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

#553

Post by tored »

jasonlotito wrote: post #460
tored wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify, IntelliJ (Phpstorm), Postman is definitely getting worse.

IntelliJ you buy and you keep what you buy. That's it. You can pay each year to buy the "latest" version, with a price decrease every year until the 3rd year. You can use the version you buy forever.

IntelliJ is still getting worse regardless of their subscription plan (and it is getting more expensive).

I think it took the wrong turn around a year ago at the same they changed the splash screen (that is why I remember it), after that the updates have been worse.

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

#554

Post by agret »

chillfox wrote: post #443
moonchrome wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switch to 1password or something else ? That's the nice part about subscription - when it's about to expire it's easy to switch. Just make absolutely sure you remove payment info from that scammer site - they charged me for a year after I canceled and supposedly "refunded me" when I went to support forums- but never actually saw money refund. Couldn't be bothered to go further but just the fact that they will charge…

How do you figure moving hundreds of passwords + shared passwords (requires other people to also move) from one solution to another is easy.

Shared passwords is a hard one, they've got you by the gonads there. I moved to Bitwarden and all I did was export my password database as a csv then import it into Bitwarden and it all came across with no issues.

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

#555

Post by pigsty »

SteveNuts wrote: post #245
krater23 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello from the past. I'm typing this on a Windows 7, without the most of the updates. Most works fine, just can't install the newest Office or Games. But who wants that? p.s.: Nope, no viruses or things like that. Windows 7 is so old that it's not supported by botnets anymore.

This is like bragging about not wearing a seatbelt because "I haven't flown through the windshield yet"

Or it’s like driving a reliable Toyota with a proven safety record vs not wanting to pay for some new vehicle with a seatbelt subscription and updates that brick your car randomly or blare ads at max volume while driving down the interstate.

I’ve lost more work to forced updates resetting my computer randomly and making operation less stable than I ever have to malware (the latter being never in my adult life).

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

#556

Post by skelpmargyar »

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…

Well, it makes them no more money from me. My maximum value has been extracted. Whether that's a solid business plan or not is not my argument. I'm saying that if I paid for something I don't expect any changes at all. If good changes happen, great. If bad changes happen, I should be able to decide if I can retain the product that I paid for. Whether the changes are free or not is not important because changing anything at all would be make the thing a new unique product. I just want the choice to keep it the same, something subscriptions don't offer. Because, well, that's what a subscription service means. But if I bought a newspaper subscription, I wouldn't expect them to fix a typo after they already delivered a newspaper. Typos happen, bugs happen, I don't buy a product expecting perfection. I expect to get to use the product I paid for, for the time agreed upon.

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

#557

Post by badpun »

What REALLY sucks is subscribtions getting into physical products now. For example, (at least in my country) - you can't buy a BMW with Apple CarPlay - you can only rent it for $x per year... I like BMW's cars and I wanted to buy one when I'm old and have much more money than I need, but I also hate to be milked like this. So I guess, I'll have to look for a new retirement toy.

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

#558

Post by robin_reala »

vonseel wrote: post #480
thecoppinger wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claiming 1Password has declined is unfair at best. They release a steady stream of updates, and when I discovered a UX issue earlier this year their team were on it like a rash.

Yea I don't understand all the recent hate over their new version. I installed the new version on my devices, and while the keyboard shortcuts seemed to change, once I looked them up it worked better than before. I just use the cmd+ shift+space shortcut for everything now.

The weirdest thing is that they don’t have a Mac App Store version from v8. Most they’ve done is put up this page: https://1password.com/mac-app-store-subscribe/

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

#559

Post by panda888888 »

I'm in the extreme minority here, but I recently ditched ALL of my personal subscriptions and life has been perfectly fine without them.

Spotify: I listen to the ads

Netflix: I switched to Kanopy, which is free from my local library

Cable TV/other streaming: Never had these in the first place

Lastpass: I'm using the desktop version only

Amazon Prime: Ditched it on purpose because I was spending too much money on needless crap

iCloud/Google storage: Purged my old docs and now I don't need it

Peloton: Was using it during the early part of the pandemic, but the instructors were way too annoying, so I sold my bike

It takes a little discipline but I'm not paying for any subscriptions at all anymore, at least not for personal use.

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

#560

Post by skelpmargyar »

ghaff wrote: post #156
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.

The problem is that OS upgrades are frequently needed for security and bug fixes and those upgrades are often required by other applications--but a new OS version may break your older application. I suppose you can play around with VMs to keep an old OS and application together--that was one of the original virtualization use cases--but that gets awkward after a while.

That's like the car you bought in 2022 to run on the fuel used in the year 2500. Whether it's annoying or not, that it does or doesn't run on new technology, doesn't matter. You paid for a product, not upgrades (unless you did pay for upgrades, of course). You shouldn't expect free upgrades because they certainly were not free to create.
Post reply on HN