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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

#171

Post by sunir »

Bishonen88 wrote: post #7
Shank wrote: post #5

First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free. Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $3…

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…

Or drop the price to $20 a year instead of $20 a month and and focus on small software updated infrequently. Software as a service has a dirty secret that it was more service than software. The companies became larded with payroll and most never had great gross margins.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#172

Post by cosmic_cheese »

zahlman wrote: post #167
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux desktops (not the kernel) are actually among the worst when it comes to platform churn. It's one of the reasons why Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, etc require relatively complex machinery and runtimes and whatnot to function. The churn is just masked by package managers.

It's come across to me so far that this just results from application developers targeting a specific DE and not really thinking about compatibility, or even really whether they need specific functionality provided a specific way. Would be nice to see the XDG stuff like portals etc. better respected, though, yeah.

DE stuff is part of the picture, but there’s churn outside of those too. glibc, which is used in practically everything, is the classic example but across the whole of the Linux desktop sphere, it’s unusual for libraries to maintain compatibility.

The only reason why Linux desktops work at all is thanks to package managers and their maintainers doing the heavy lifting of keeping applications and the libraries they use in lockstep. If it weren’t for that random programs would be breaking every other update.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#173

Post by fragmede »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #149
zahlman wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions. ... Even for desktop Linux users? I can't say I've felt it. I switched almost 4 years ago and it just keeps feeling better and better (in a "Luigi wins by doing nothing" kind of way).

Linux desktops (not the kernel) are actually among the worst when it comes to platform churn. It's one of the reasons why Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, etc require relatively complex machinery and runtimes and whatnot to function. The churn is just masked by package managers.

if snaps were masked by apt, there wouldn't be such an objection to them.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#174

Post by dolebirchwood »

AstroBen wrote: post #115

Whats the future of being able to make money selling software with these changes?

Target undeserved businesses with niche problems that have traditionally been ignored by tech companies because those markets have always been considered "too small" to be worthwhile.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#175

Post by fragmede »

throwup238 wrote: post #150
carlosjobim wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do. Of course it isn't. Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. They can be anything from good value, to average value to low value. And products / services are of course not comparable just because they are subscription based, or used on a digital device. Gas has a fantastic value, one…

> Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. Sorry, but no. If they're worse value than my email and password providers which my digital life revolves around and who only charge me $5/mo each, then yes those products are a bad value. I pay $3,000/yr for Altium, $200/mo for Claude Max, $60+/mo for ad-free streaming, and begrudgingly $50/mo for Adobe so I'm not agains…

> If they're worse value than my... password providers... who only charge me $5/mo

In that case, people who run Bitwarden for free are screwed. In fact, looking at how much I use the web browser Chrome, and how much I get out of that, and the fact that I pay $0 to Google to use it (inb4 I'm the product because I'm not paying for it), paying money for anything digital is terrible value!

What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends.

Life is not an optimization problem. You can optimize for value, but then you'll find yourself in Walmart at 1am realizing that the 3-pack is cheaper per-roll than the 30-pack that night for some reason, and getting angry over that.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#176

Post by mannyv »

jakub_g wrote: post #105

The people who pay for the apps vs people vibecode them are largely a different demographic. Linux is free, but most people don't mind to pay the Windows / macOS tax.

Linux is free, but you pay for it with your time.

And calling Windows and MacOS a tax is a complete misunderstanding of what a tax actually is.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#177

Post by spike021 »

Shank wrote: post #5

First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free. Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $3…

I probably didn't market it enough but I specifically made an iOS game last year to be premium, $2.99, as a one time purchase to try and get around the obsession with subscription and freemium/ad-supported models but pretty much didn't get any more than a handful of sales.

At least for games I think it's much too late for the one time purchase model unless you're part of a pro studio making relatively big games.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#178

Post by cvhc »

seemaze wrote: post #106

Lower the barrier to MVP while raising the bar on the level of quality that warrants MRR. Rising tides and all.. I can hire a contractor to build a carport, or whack one together with some supplies from the Big Box store. More roofs being built with more price points to serve the market.

I agree with your point on surviving the market, but I also suspect vibe coding give rise to lemon [1] projects that only intend to get quick money and don't care about recurring revenue.

My wife was preparing for a specific exam and found an AI-powered mock exam app. The trial version was polished, but after she paid for full access she realized most contents are of low quality and some basic functionalities are broken. I imagine with LLM one might easily create such lemon products in infinite niche markets even without much domain knowledge, scam out some money from new users, and care not about survival.

[1] As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_(automobile)

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#180

Post by dmitrygr »

idopmstuff wrote: post #147

I own a number of brands that sell on Amazon, and I've always used an app called HighFive that automatically sends the email you've almost certainly seen that asks you to rate something you bought (without it you have to click a button on each order to send it). It's always been free, but because of a change to the way Amazon charges third party app devs, they were going to start charging next month. Since the whole…

> automatically sends the email you've almost certainly seen that asks you to rate something you

Just FYI, most of us maintain blacklists of sellers who do that and would never give business to one again, even if it requires paying more. If I bought something from you, that is not permission to email me anything other than a tracking number. Ever. If i like it -- i'll review it mysef. If i dislike it -- i'll email you. Note the direction of comms here.

Making you click a button per-order was perhaps Amazon's way to add friction to this -- to avoid poor users being spammed with endless review requests. I am sad that someone automated the friction away. I hope that one day amazon starts charging sellers a nontrivial fee per such email sent.

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