221–230 of 299 posts
$30/month? Are you high?
I'd probably pull the trigger on this for $3-$5/mo.
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>but there’s no guarantee that the payoff will be worth the cost in the long run as the company increases its prices. You can cancel a subscription
Right, but what if your subscription tool that you want to cancel is pipelined into your workflow in such a way that you’re paying a technical or operational cost to cancel beyond just severing the account itself, i.e. vendor lock-in? This is why it’s often better as a solo dev to not rely on these tools in case you have to jettison them and break your workflow.
Uh... then keep it, because that means it's providing value to you.
Came here to see comments about pricing. I think inline with others.Expected a nominal 1 time fee. Probably up to $60. $30/mo is more than Photoshop.
A comment to address the pricing that everyone is complaining about: A web designer/developer in a decent, profitable company is probably getting paid $100k at least. Assuming 250 working days a year with 8 hours a day of paid time, that's roughly $0.8/minute. If this tool saves that person 90 seconds a day finding and tweaking things in a design then it's saving more than $30/month worth of their time. It's quite ch…
As pointed out elsewhere, it's saving the business more than $30/m, not the developer.
The developer doesn't get to pocket the savings. Their reward for "saving" 4 hours a week is an extra 4 hours of work per week.
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Exactly! And I do, in fact, I will pay much more than that for a one-time software payment, and I have. However: > If you have to make your tool a one-time cost, you might come to realize it's not really worth the amount of money you could've made by selling it for $5/mo, and that's a great illustration of just one reason why developers don't like subscriptions. At $900 , it's not so easy of a sell. edit: Especially…
I’d love to see software escrow for companies like this - something as simple as “if we stop making the software or go bankrupt or otherwise make it unable to be used, we have the source code and friends escrowed with a company that will then release it under the AGPL.”
It's just not that simple in practice. Then again, that's not unique to software: imagine being a car company and looking for suppliers. You're not gonna rely on some new unknown company for components that you need in your long-term planning. But if you do, you pay them so that they can survive.
My main gripe with subs is that there's no central place to manage them and it's easy to forget how many you have. That is the one thing that Apple did well in the App Store.
- tackling of inconsistent browser behaviour and bugs on top of cross-browser compatibility
- RWD
- pixel perfect implementation of designs
- extending or replacing native input elements
And very little of it has to do with color gradient selectors or pixel to em conversion.
The most common question I'm always asking myself is: Why is this like this? For many properties the browser can tell you which CSS selector "won" a property such as "font-family".
But for something like a width, the actual formula being applied is often hard to puzzle out. The browser will tell you its result but now how it arrived at that result.
For example, the element with id "pagespace" on this page. It has width that works out to some px depending on your screen width. But why that width specifically? I can personally figure it out by going up the DOM tree to see that each element is the full width of its parent (and that's how display: table-row, table-row-group and table all work) until we get to the "hnmain" element which is 85% width (of its parent). And then its parent is the body which has 8px margin all around. So the formula is something like: (screen-width - 8px * 2) * 0.85. But that took me how long to figure out manually?
Show your work!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d love to see software escrow for companies like this - something as simple as “if we stop making the software or go bankrupt or otherwise make it unable to be used, we have the source code and friends escrowed with a company that will then release it under the AGPL.”
Unlikely that this will happen. Companies rarely go bankrupt, they often just float along. Even if it did release the source code, will you really go and make it compile? There's also a lot of credentials involved; for example for getting an app on the App Store, you not only need the source code but all the developer certificates. Releasing them would violate Apple's App Store T&C. It's just not that simple in pract…
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I don't disagree with what you saying, but ... People seem to forget what the cost of a perpetual license use to be. Licenses would easily equate to 3-years (36-months) or more , of what a monthly subscription would cost. Case in point: $439, you can buy a perpetual license of Microsoft Office $7/mo, you can get the same functionality + hosting + storage as a monthly subscription It'd take over 5-years to breakeven.…
There has to be a reason all these companies love SaaS vs yearly upgrades and I think it’s because “subscriptions” get forgotten or ignored or “it’s not worth worrying about”.
If I buy a month, and never renew, it means I'm done using it or I didn't find it valuable. Don't send me emails reminding me, don't notify me. I'll find out when I open the thing up again and see my sub is gone. If I want it back, I'll buy another month.
The value in a sub for the end user is that I don't have to sign my soul away for a program I'll use once or twice a year. But the common pattern tries to hide that away and fool me out of money. Frankly, it's offensive and gross, hence, fuck subscriptions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't disagree with what you saying, but ... People seem to forget what the cost of a perpetual license use to be. Licenses would easily equate to 3-years (36-months) or more , of what a monthly subscription would cost. Case in point: $439, you can buy a perpetual license of Microsoft Office $7/mo, you can get the same functionality + hosting + storage as a monthly subscription It'd take over 5-years to breakeven.…
There has to be a reason all these companies love SaaS vs yearly upgrades and I think it’s because “subscriptions” get forgotten or ignored or “it’s not worth worrying about”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most tools like this are priced with the understanding that they'll be billed to the employer in the end, not paid out of pocket by the developer. They probably need to add org licenses soon in order to better accommodate that.
Yeah, but a lot of employers would still bristle at $180 a year (if you pay in advance) for a souped up version of dev tools. Not to mention that most places that would have a budget for something like this would need to do a security audit of anything like this. If you’re a consultant or have a lot of client projects, you can absolutely bill the client for this sort of thing. But that’s not the situation for everyon…
Were way more efficient than any other place I've worked, all because we're empowered to buy little $10/month plugins that save boatloads of time.