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

> By this point, the idea of "owning" software feels positively archaic to me, as strange as "owning" a music album.

You would have to be very young to not have owned (physical) music albums - and I'm a pretty young person myself.

I really hope this isn't a bot/paid PR thing, because boy would someone have wasted their money.

If you have a subscription model you don't have to prioritize marketing and sales as much and can grow at a more gentle pace and focus more on the quality of the product. I'd rather spend time and money on preventing churn by making the product better, instead of investing in shiny stuff and ads to keep the existing revenue stream at a constant level.

If you build the perfect product, and everybody buys the first version, then you'll have no revenue stream left after everybody who wanted to purchase it has purchased it.

And that's where the subscription model steps in.

It's also a way of slowing down innovation (and therefore risk) while remaining profitable. In a world where your revenue is based only on how many new copies of your product you sell, you are forced to innovate and keep selling, or your sales will drop and competition will eat your plate. If you already have a user base of subscribed users instead, it's much harder to attack your bottom line.

So yes, it's a great model from a business perspective, but it's an absolute nightmare from a user perspective.

I personally started paying between $300-400 a month just in subscriptions at its peak (about 3 years ago), and we're talking just of 8-9 services. I decided that it was not sustainable, and that I had to fight back.

Today I reward news outlets that let me pay for content "on the go" over those that put the "subscribe now" paywall in front of my eyes. I am very happy (and proud) to scrape and pirate those services without feeling an inch of guilt. If in order to read a single article I have to start a subscription that involves cumbersome interactions with your customer service just to terminate it, then you deserve piracy.

And, when it comes to other services, I started self-hosting everything. There's plenty of open-source alternatives to literally every paid service that you can run yourself. A Celeron minipc in my house with a few TB of storage connected cost me about $350. After 1-2 months running Nextcloud, Miniflux, Wallabag, Matrix, Ubooquity, wger, Bitwarden etc. on it, it already paid its own price back in terms of subscription savings.

If you have the data locally, you can always migrate it - whether manually, through the software that made it (e.g. if the app isn't supporting your new OS, then run it in a VM with an older OS to export to a more forward-compatible format), or through third-party converters. If enough people are in this position, someone will write a solution.

If your data resides in the cloud, however, it's up to the vendor whether or not you'll be able to access it or export it, and how much of it. If they're just sunsetting the product, you probably, maybe, will be able to get some data back (which is almost definitely in some unknown ad-hoc format, quite likely a database dump in form of JSON, so you'll need a converter anyway). If they terminate your account because of $random reason, you won't even have a chance.

Or, to borrow a cliché, "not your files, not your data".