A world where people pay for software • Hacker News Board

Re: A world where people pay for software

#251

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 5:07 PM UTC

Mc91 wrote: post #146

7e wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. Software has low marginal cost, but that has high fixed costs that need a monetizable market to sustain. Good software takes effort and great people. Those are expensive. If you can't monetize you can't put people on your software and it will suck (like most OSS software, for example). Physical manufacturing is hard, but at least it brings in dollars. OSS, privacy and wankers reverse engineering your soft…

> If you can't monetize you can't put people on your software and it will suck (like most OSS software, for example). I have worked on FLOSS software and I have worked on non-FLOSS software and I don't see most FLOSS software sucking in a way that non-FLOSS does not. FLOSS has some advantages - as there is no compelling need to release new features which can drive up revenue and profit (or at least OKRs) for the next…

One of the reasons why I strongly prefer FLOSS over commercial software is that FLOSS tends to be of better quality.

Whether or not I pay money for it doesn't enter into my calculation much at all.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#252

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 5:08 PM UTC

shon wrote: post #170

gizmo wrote: post #21

Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then some. Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality control and returns. It still blow…

Software margins are good, especially compared to physical things. However, the marginal cost is far from zero. It scales with # and variety of users. Today, all software comes with complex dependencies. Take for example any mobile app. Apps require constant upgrades to keep up with the hardware and software changes on the platforms. You can’t just build an iPhone app and leave it alone to be enjoyed by people. I’ve…

> Software doesn’t just work anymore. The platform that executes it is constantly changing.

It depends on the software. But where this is true, it's not because of some innate nature of software, it's because of business decisions software companies have made.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#253

Post by swagasaurus-rex » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 5:12 PM UTC

chadash wrote: post #28

The link doesn’t talk about the SAAS model, which is probably the most profitable (and ubiquitous) one these days. I know people like to rail against it, but I actually like the SAAS model. It keeps incentives aligned. It used to be that I might shell out $200 for a piece of productivity software. Now, I might pay $10 a month instead. The thing is that under the old model, a company was incentivized by make a sale bu…

I think subscriptions would be more popular if you could manage subscriptions on the bank's end.

How is it a company can give me recurring charges and I have no ability to turn them on or off?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#254

Post by sophacles » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

philistine wrote: post #225

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's really nothing wrong with new features as long as you understand that there's a certain subset of users who don't want things to change. Maybe it's because people are already trained on the current version, or they don't want to have to upgrade machines just to run the new feature set, or any of a thousand reasons you may not have thought of. And then there are the "upgrades" that try to force you to pay more…

The subset of people who don't want things to change are running which OS exactly? User interface is just like any other artistic field: it has fashion trends. Look at something that's been around forever and is still developed: BBEdit. Yeah sure the app has not changed a *ton*, but its changed more than you think. Many fads in OS X design (like drawers) had to be implemented and later removed. Any successful piece o…

>The subset of people who don't want things to change are running which OS exactly?

All of them? Hell I hate it when things change in a way that forces me to give them attention now rather than when I have time. Nothing worse than doing an update and having to rework my flow, scripts, and code just to be productive again. Let me choose when I update my tools, don't force it on me just because your UI team found an even more complicated and torturous way to make simple things ugly and hard - I have my own work to do.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#255

Post by robalni » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

rzwitserloot wrote: post #119

This product names crucial issues with how software development is currently monetized, and then offers an alternative that... solves absolutely none of these problems. Optional extras like 'downloads or other resources' are presumably digital and therefore do not solve the problem - folks can still pirate it. If that's not the point, then it is a donation, in the simplified parlance of the first paragraph of 1sub.de…

> offers an alternative that... solves absolutely none of these problems.

Here is how 1sub solves or remedies the problems with the mentioned methods:

- Pay to download or for other services: With 1sub it will be more worth it because you don't just get access to that software or that service, you get access to the software and services of all developers who participate in this system.

- Accepting donations: While 1sub keeps some of the voluntary aspect of donations, you also get something for your money.

> folks can still pirate it

Yes, the point of this is not to make it impossible to do anything without a subscription. It just makes the difference in convenience between subscribing and not subscribing bigger since there are more things that you get or don't get depending on whether you subscribe.

> this effort sounds like some naive newbie took 5 seconds to think about

Interestingly I have thought about this for many years and no idea I have had before or any solution I have seen has felt as good as this one because they always fail in that the user doesn't have enough reason to pay. The main objective of this solution is to give the user more reason to pay.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#256

Post by supportengineer » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #21

Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then some. Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality control and returns. It still blow…

In software you can make an excellent product and still fail, sadly.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#257

Post by swiftcoder » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #125

vishnugupta wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, this is what all the business books, MBAs have been saying since 60s. However, since then we have come to learn a lot about software. The most important of which is that software, just like physical products, needs maintenance. The world is constantly changing and evolving, and software has to keep up otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years. At the very least it must be patched up with ne…

> At the very least it must be patched up with newly discovered security threats. I'd say at the very most it needs security updates. Too much software changes just to change. UI redesigns for the sake of redesign, cramming features that nobody wants so a product owner can get promoted, adding telemetry and analytics to chase metrics that no user cares about, adding annoying notifications and popups to juice "engagem…

The OS under your software is not static. MacOS programs from 10 years ago rarely execute successfully. Windows programs from 20 years ago might. Linux programs from 5 years ago mostly don't unless you have access to source code (and a certain willingness to patch it yourself).

Re: A world where people pay for software

#258

Post by brickers » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

hbn wrote: post #196

steveBK123 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SaaS from established firms seems to be more durable & maintained. The problem is all the flash in the pan ZIRP VC funded never-profit SaaS startups out there. Hopefully these get shaken out over the next couple years finally. For example, I've used Adobe products for a very long time, and they get a lot of flack. I was an extensive user of Photoshop (PS) and Lightroom (LR) for a long time. However, the old model was…

> I'm also intrigued by how many very wealthy people are unwilling to pay $10/mo to stream music/video and/or share passwords, when I recall paying $20/CD at the record store in 1998 dollars. Because everything is a recurring automatic charge to my credit card, and one more thing to try and keep track of and continually reevaluate if it's still valuable enough to me to continue paying for it. When you bought a CD you…

I personally find the subscription model in some ways better in terms of cognitive load - choosing between concrete things can be paralysing enough that the two most likely outcomes are failing to make a choice or choosing something and regretting it. The sense of now owning something that I spent hard earned cash on can feel a burden if money gets tight.

Subscriptions, on the other hand, match how consuming media feels to me - I spent time doing something I liked and the cost enabled that.

Looking on it from a pure economics point of view, clearly it makes more sense to buy a CD and have access to it forever from that spend. But psychologically it feels very different

Re: A world where people pay for software

#259

Post by ndriscoll » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

gnulinux wrote: post #197

gizmo wrote: post #21

Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then some. Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality control and returns. It still blow…

It's almost like we live in different world, I could not disagree more. * Software is extremely expensive. Software engineers are expensive, and for a good software project you need a tech lead, a manager and probably a few developers. These are all people you need to pay tons of money for. * Software is constantly changing, something that worked 2 years ago can be broken beyond repair today. You need a team that can…

> Unlike what outsider think, software -- even "boring" CRUD/web software -- is still very much a research project. If you ask a civil engineer how to build a bridge, they'll tell you about all the techniques that were developed over the many many decades. What a developer focuses on while writing code is mostly ideas developed in the last few years.

Most (all?) of the ideas I see are at least 20 years old, if not 40-50. Something like Spring wouldn't be my ideal choice, but it can certainly get the job done for most people, and it's 20 years old. MVC dates back to the 70s. Postgresql is 27 years old and is a fantastic choice. SQL and RDBMSs date back to the 70s. The term CRUD itself dates back to the 80s. Server rendered pages are still easy to do, perform way better than most React-based abominations, and are as old as the web. If anything, software is plagued by these "research projects" that are mostly just to scratch smart people's itches.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#260

Post by swiftcoder » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #244

scarface_74 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another benefit of software that doesn't change every week is you can charge one time for it rather than these awful subscription pricing that most software are switching to. How do you pay developers to continuously fix bugs, provide security updates and update their software when the underlying hardware and operating system changes?

> How do you pay developers to continuously fix bugs, provide security updates and update their software when the underlying hardware and operating system changes? Have we really strayed so far that everyone's forgotten how this is done? Security fixes and serious bug fixes should always be free (At least going back N-1. You price that work into the sale price to begin with), and you get ongoing revenue by selling ne…

> and you get ongoing revenue by selling new versions

This works exactly up until the moment that your software is good enough that most of your userbase stops paying to upgrade. Then you are dead in the water, and the software becomes abandonned by design.