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Just Pay the Subscription
21–30 of 121 posts
Re: Just Pay the Subscription
#22I agree 100%. The key thing is that the monthly subscription should be cheap. That way it really does work for everyone - the user does not end up paying very much over a lifetime and they are getting value for it. And I think in most cases the subscriptions are cheap enough because those that aren't get no business. Of course there are rip-offs out there, and there's nothing wrong with them existing, but just don't…
this. I would happily pay subscriptions if they reflected an app's value to my daily life. The unfortunate truth many many app developers would immediately find out is that their sun tracking app or sprit level app or game I play on the train twice a year or whatever is worth approximately 10 cents a month if they're lucky.
It's far too common for me to download something ive never used before and for it to ask me to cough up 10 dollars a month. Thats what I pay for netflix or youtube or whatever, things I use for hours each week!
I suppose theyre trying to target some mythical user that checks the sun position every morning and evening obsessively or some nonsense, as though their strategy should be to capture the entirety of the value a top 1% poweruser gets from their software. No! it's expected that a top 1% poweruser will get a lot of value, if you design your monetization for them, they'll be humming and hawing and comparison shopping, and nobody else will ever even entertain the idea of paying. And then you'll get half of 1% of your addressable market.
But of course, the entire reason it really exists is to profit off people who forget about the subscription. This is clear to see when looking into the financials of it, or the number of people paying for things they havent used in a year. This also affects incentives!
Finally, the neccasary structure around the apps means for the most part, if a company goes bankrupt, decides its not worth mantaining, or plain gets bored, you lose access to the thing.
Re: Just Pay the Subscription
#23One great genre of HN comment is where people insist subscriptions are the only way a software business can work, as if commercial software sprung into existence fully formed in 2012.
A growing problem is that there are whole generations of younger people who have no lived experience with or imagination about certain benefits we used to have, so the world you're describing is all they effectively know. It's so easy to fall for the midwit take that the past could not have actually been better in some ways, that it's only nostalgia when people claim it was.
Re: Just Pay the Subscription
#24"Ownership" is something only the HN set cares about. The reason your average person hates app subscriptions the author relegated to a footnote: they mostly exist to trick you into paying for the app more than once. Folks pay for all sorts of subscriptions, nobody cares about ownership, but when my mom finds out she's been paying $0.99/mo for a "countdown timer" app she used a few times over a year ago she swears off…
I think broadly your comment is true, and it would be better for the good actors if the bad actors didn't exist. Apple and Google do make it pretty easy to cancel though vs the wild west of the web
Re: Just Pay the Subscription
#25> Upgrade pricing also doesn’t solve this. [...] versioned upgrades incentivize developers to chase shiny features that people might pay for rather than improving their app and building for the long haul. It makes the product worse.
In my mind this is missing the point. I am very pro-upgrade pricing because upgrade pricing actually forces the developer to think about what their users actually will pay for, or what improvements will make my workflow better, instead of just adding whatever fancy side-quest thing that you've decided I need today.
If users are asking for shiny new features and are willing to pay for them then fine. If we want refinements and are willing to pay for them then fine. If you want to optionally provide backend storage or backups or whatever then fine.
However, if my continued use of a specific version of your software has no continued cost to you, then be absolutely assured that I do not feel a moral obligation to keep on paying for it endlessly, nor should you assume that I do.
Re: Just Pay the Subscription
#26> I like subscriptions because, in the worst kind of corporate management speak, subscriptions align our interests. You pay for the app for the duration that you see fit. We see the same pattern over and over again: (1) subscription service starts and operates at a loss, (2) people recognise this and sign-up, (3) the service gradually enshittifies to the point where there is no real value propisition, (4) company ban…
I think you're overgeneralizing. I subscribe to a couple of apps (OnX, Strong) and some news sites (Tangle, local sports site); as far as I know none of them started on 1, and 3 hasn't happened yet for any of them. They all provide services that I think are valuable, at a fair price - a price that, as far as I can recall, hasn't changed for any of them in the 4-6 years I've been a subscriber.
Strong appears to be a fitness tracker. It's in competition with a spreadsheet.
OnX appears to be heatmaps as a service for outdoor recreation. They have to cover their opex costs.
These are not the subscriptions people have in mind when they say they hate the subscription model. People dislike obvious rent-seeking behavior; they really dislike it when there is no technical reason something can't be sold to them in a one-time transaction; and they hate it when a product that was offered as a permanent one-time purchase is then only available as a subscription service.
Re: Just Pay the Subscription
#27Right, the issue is that we are owning our stuff less and less. You used to be able to even buy a copy of an OS on a CD. Thus, I don't think a subscription justifies the cost of maintenance, and a lot of app models don't do subscriptions for app updates. Of course, if there is a cloud component, that's a different story because there are recurring costs to hosting a server. Or maybe a user uses the service enough to…
I addressed this in the post. I don't quite understand what people mean when they say they want to own their software. I mean okay you can put the CD on the shelf. Now what? I understand why they don't like paying money. But ownership just doesn't make a lot of sense when talking about a mobile app.
If you shut down, I want to still be able to run the software.
OK, if you're running something with a cloud component, I might not get all the functionality. But if you decide that you don't want be in the app business any more, I still want to use what I paid for.
Re: Just Pay the Subscription
#28> Upgrade pricing also doesn’t solve this. [...] versioned upgrades incentivize developers to chase shiny features that people might pay for rather than improving their app and building for the long haul. It makes the product worse. In my mind this is missing the point. I am very pro-upgrade pricing because upgrade pricing actually forces the developer to think about what their users actually will pay for, or what im…
> However, if my continued use of a specific version of your software has no continued cost to you
That's just it, it does carry a cost, at the least for security updates and allowing the application to continue to be installed on later OSe or key libraries.
That's why even open-source libraries that in actively being used will get forked if unmaintained too long, because there's always something to do to keep bitrot at bay.
Re: Just Pay the Subscription
#29[deleted]
Re: Just Pay the Subscription
#30> Upgrade pricing also doesn’t solve this. [...] versioned upgrades incentivize developers to chase shiny features that people might pay for rather than improving their app and building for the long haul. It makes the product worse. In my mind this is missing the point. I am very pro-upgrade pricing because upgrade pricing actually forces the developer to think about what their users actually will pay for, or what im…
Can you list any examples of companies that have done this well? The products I have used that tried this either stopped trying it (Ulysses articulated it really well) or devolved into shinier objects. In practice I think it's pretty tough to pull off.