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Your app subscription is now my weekend project

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Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#111

Post by billforsternz »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #100
Bishonen88 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most apps rationale for subscriptions is "Ongoing development" without an option like jetbrains etc. to fall back to a perpetual license. In practice, regardless of whether an app needs ongoing development or not, this is the best way to try to guarantee continuous income and make a living off of a project I guess. Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating…

One-time purchase software would become dramatically more sustainable if platform churn could be ground to a halt. Most types of software achieved peak usability and functionality somewhere between 5 and 25 years ago and there wouldn't be much reason for anybody to upgrade if their one-time purchases continued to work in perpetuity. A substantial number even prefer e.g. Word 2000 or Photoshop CS1 over their modern in…

Maybe we should just freeze development in lots of designated areas and declare victory (I know this isn't a practical suggestion, but still...).

Eg in desktop OS's. Apple for example makes everyone miserable by re-breaking macOS every year. To what point?

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#112

Post by nasreddin »

3rodents wrote: post #44

Software is a manifestation of someone’s knowledge of and experience in and ideas about how a thing should work. We learn from the software we use, we benefit from everyone else’s ideas, we benefit from the hundreds and thousands of hours other people put into understanding a problem to design a solution. My workflow is better because of the incremental improvements made by developer after developer year after year.…

"Transportation, like software, is accumulated knowledge. The horse embodied centuries of breeding, training, and hard-won understanding about terrain, endurance, and failure. People learned from the horses they rode. Travel improved through incremental refinement, generation after generation. The automobile didn’t appear in a vacuum.

Building all your transportation yourself—whether by breeding horses or assembling a Model T—cuts you off from that accumulated experience. You lose the benefits of thousands of hours spent by others thinking carefully about the same problems.

I have no objection to Model Ts for personal use, but I wouldn’t be one-tenth the traveler I am without constant exposure to well-bred horses.

Some worry cars make horses obsolete—who needs breeders if anyone can buy an engine? I’m more optimistic. As cars proliferate, people will value good horses more. A Model T gets you the first 90%; it’s the last 90%—judgment, robustness, and adaptability—that differentiates."

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#116

Post by TheGRS »

kylecazar wrote: post #2

Yeah. Part of why this is possible is simply that there are tons of subscription apps out there that were never really justified in requiring a recurring payment and are actually fairly trivial. It used to be that you offer subscriptions only if there are ongoing costs, and a one-time payment if not (utilities, local, etc). SaaS kinda ruined that. I'd welcome a boom in DIY vibe-coded utilities for personal use.

Was reminiscing about the early iOS App Store days when many apps were free and often hobby projects. Some hooked up google ads to make a nice easy profit if they stumbled on a particularly good early app idea. I don't really find apps like that anymore, or at least they don't really get shared the same way. Maybe this is a return to that in a sense.

I also don't think any particular idea is off limits for making a profit, if you do something and you do it well, you can charge a fee. But if the free hobby version is better then you best find a way to justify the price.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#117

Post by SLWW »

I read the same tired opposing arguments all the time; I thought of it the moment I read the title. "My time isn't free, so I'll pay the tax" is true, however most of these individuals spend hours a day watching the news or doing anything else but being productive or spending time with family/friends.

If you aren't working 24/7 while handling a family and telling yourself your time is worth more than a small fee, you are just being lazy. I'm the same way, I am incredibly lazy and will constantly tell myself that my time is worth more. This is usually until I realize I'm spending way to much of my "money" to "save time". HourlyWage(time) = money, if I'm saving time by spending money I'm losing time. This is a basic concept and I defy anyone to show me otherwise.

We live in a time where instant gratification is the main driver behind most decisions, devaluing our currency each and every fee we succumb to... as money is time, and if time is being "saved" by spending time (in the form of money) we are now applying a future debt to the work we are doing today. You might work 40 hours one week, where at least 4 hours of that week goes to paying your streaming bill, another 8 for Internet and Phone, as well as another 2 for the coffee you didn't make that week, another hour for your notetaking app on your phone, 30 minutes for your subscription to watch funny youtuber release content early, another 2 hours for you glut of productivity apps, etc. These things all work to keep you a wage-slave till the day you eventually croak with a menial 401k.

It's embarrassing we reduce ourselves to this.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#119

Post by paulryanrogers »

billforsternz wrote: post #111
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One-time purchase software would become dramatically more sustainable if platform churn could be ground to a halt. Most types of software achieved peak usability and functionality somewhere between 5 and 25 years ago and there wouldn't be much reason for anybody to upgrade if their one-time purchases continued to work in perpetuity. A substantial number even prefer e.g. Word 2000 or Photoshop CS1 over their modern in…

Maybe we should just freeze development in lots of designated areas and declare victory (I know this isn't a practical suggestion, but still...). Eg in desktop OS's. Apple for example makes everyone miserable by re-breaking macOS every year. To what point?

Apple certainly churns APIs quite often. And now my Tahoe install has broken window management, one of the most core features of a modern OS
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