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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?

#621

Post by TeMPOraL »

duckmysick wrote: post #24
wbsun wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, let’s make a subscription based service to help people easily self-host…

Isn't that what Tailscale is?

Yes, though for private self-hosting it seems entirely free.

It's one of those subscription services I'm willing to pay for (I'm not right now, because I'm way under the threshold of even the cheapest paid option). It automates the boring parts of a process that I'd otherwise be able to do on my own, using the same open-source tools they're using (Wireguard). The value proposition is very clear here.

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

#622

Post by xg15 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #617
gnicholas wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had data locked up in some software I would rather have an ongoing relationship rather than just hope that they decide to make a new version when an OS update or other critical need arises.

"Data locked up in some software" in practice means strictly SaaS with cloud storage. 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…

> or through third-party converters.

Assuming those exist.

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

#623

Post by xg15 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #534
solardev wrote: post #47

I 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…

> Subscriptions allow companies to better develop organic roadmaps that's not tied to an upgrade cycle This point is at the center of the move to subscriptions, and I think we should be more explicit that we want companies to eventually _not_ significantly upgrade products and keep them alive with minimal changes for a long time, while we're still paying for subscriptions. It I think really important to lower the pre…

> This point is at the center of the move to subscriptions, and I think we should be more explicit that we want companies to eventually _not_ significantly upgrade products and keep them alive with minimal changes for a long time, while we're still paying for subscriptions.

How is that different from rent-seeking?

In particular, what does "keep the software alive" mean? I can understand that cloud services have a fixed cost of upkeep. I can understand that less so for software that runs on my own pc.

> The roadblock is of course customers wondering why they're still paying every month for a product that sees little change, and I don't have an answer to that, except the alternative had other issues as well.

That question is not that dumb. If you don't want any meaningful change to your software, why do you care that the company still exists? You might just as well have an old version that still works, whether or not the company is still maintaining it.

So yeah, in that situation, apart from the occasional security fix, I really wouldn't know what I'm paying for.

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

#624

Post by TeMPOraL »

sanjayio wrote: post #93
quaintdev wrote: post #6

And this is exactly the reason I self host[0]. I am pretty sure it's not just me. I have seen r/selfhosted[1] skyrocket in it popularity over past year or two. The number of applications that you can self host are increasing daily. The only problem at the moment with self hosting seems to be the maintenance and setup but that also will be solved once many people start doing it. History repeats itself. Self hosting to…

You self-host things that are easily self-hostable. You wouldn’t self-host something like emails or error reporting.

> You self-host things that are easily self-hostable.

Exactly, which is why you can self-host e-mail, as there are turnkey packages available for that. Self-hosting e-mail does generate some extra workload, but that's atypical, and has to do with a) somewhat arcane tech that's underpinning e-mail, and b) whether it works or not with a wider ecosystem depends a lot on where you're self-hosting it. That b) in particular is not something you encounter elsewhere.

As for error reporting... I'm gonna risk asking: what's the challenge making it hard to self-host?

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

#627

Post by phendrenad2 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #571
phendrenad2 wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And no non-subscription software company has ever gone out of business, and deleted all download links when it did so, preventing you (as soon as you lose the installer) from ever installing it again?

There are websites out there backing up every version of every software you can think of. In CD/DVD days, you'd obviously have your installation media, which the vendor couldn't retroactively take away from you. Or its backup. Later, I always kept the copy of the original installer .msi/.iso (mostly to save on download time - companies retiring products or going out of business so fast as SaaS ones do wasn't on my ra…

Oh no! Don't trust those websites. This is how people get viruses.

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

#628

Post by phendrenad2 »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #610
phendrenad2 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hasn't been my experience. Windows 11 has more features any any version before it, and same goes for Office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi... Support for Android apps sounds nice, but you can't even reposition the taskbar anymore.

I'll gladly sacrifice the second list for the first list.

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

#629

Post by ratorx »

ryandrake wrote: post #595
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’ve never understood this desire to keep having sortware get updated over and over. Ideally, I want to buy a working version of a software once and never update it again. I want that software to work the same way as it did when I bought it, forever. I don’t want to worry about waking up one day and finding that, because the company’s chief designer needed to do something to justify his salary, the whole UI of my sof…

Having the ability to do seamless frequent updates means that bad software can cause excess churn. They are not intrinsically linked.

The problem with not having solid infrastructure for updates is security issues. Of course, there is a class of software where this is not a problem, but determining whether software falls into that category is pretty difficult given the structure of modern OS and the propensity for things like static linking. You have 3 choices: * leave software vulnerable. * track security vulnerabilities is all your software and its dependencies and manually update. * Bite the bullet and have robust auto-update infrastructure.

I’d argue the bigger problem is that implementing robust, dependable and user configurable auto updates with easy rollbacks etc. is a complex problem, so every piece of software ends up implementing its own shitty variant that sacrifices user control and doesn’t distinguish between necessity and churn.

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

#630

Post by rogual »

Yep. I refuse to use any of it. I want software to be like a screwdriver. You buy it, you put it in the drawer, it's there when you need it.

SaaS software is like a screwdriver where you pick it up and it goes, "Bing! Sign in to your screwdriver!" and you've forgotten your password so you have to reset it, then when you use the thing there's an "upgrade" button right on the handle that you've got to be careful not to press, and every couple of months the whole thing just randomly changes shape, maybe the grip disappears because a "sleek" look is trendy now, and so on.

If physical tools worked like that, it'd make everyone miserable. But when it's software, people just take it.

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