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Just Pay the Subscription

uncommonapps.nyc

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Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#31

Post by cogman10 »

ok123456 wrote: post #26
Brendinooo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Strong is exactly the type of subscription that I hate. This is the sort of app that can be "complete". It doesn't need any sort of backend and doesn't have any sort of real operating expenses. So why is there a subscription? This is exactly the sort of app that should have a single $10 purchase.

About the only argument for it having a subscription of any sort is the devs have to cover the BS from apple/google (mostly google) who don't believe in backwards compatibility.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#32

Post by mpyne »

thatxliner wrote: post #6

Right, 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 still have my CD for Office 97 and (somewhere) SuSE Linux 7.2, but I can't honestly say I can continue to use those.

The way to get around that is either continually releasing feature upgrades with one-time payments, or paying for access to the software only while you need that access.

Both models have strengths, one is not inherently evil and the other inherently good.

It's easy to say app updates should be bundled into the one-time cost but even that needs to have a time bound on it. When software lasted 3 years that potentially made sense, but now the release velocity is so much higher that there would be an explosion in complexity to try to keep up with all "one-time" releases going back for years.

Even completely Free software packages struggle with the balance with how far back to claim prior releases are under maintenance (e.g. LTS is popular, but so are 'rolling releases'). That's because of the underlying economic complexity with the costs to maintain what has gone before vs. the cost to develop what will come next.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#33

Post by BeetleB »

> Maybe for budgeting purposes you don’t want to lock in future obligations. And I guess I can understand that, but I can’t help feeling like you have in mind that this one-time purchase is going to be $5 total. And I’m here to tell you that’s not happening. For anything that takes effort it’s going to be more like $200.

Except he's forgetting that before subscriptions, most consumer SW cost $10-50 with a certain timeframe for support. Not every app is Photoshop, you know.

And stuff like music players? Free!

I think the real problem is the ecosystem keeps changing. The need to ensure there is an update after upgrading Android broke the app.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#34

Post by hellisothers »

ventana wrote: post #15

Speaking about paying for apps in general, I'm all for it. The moment a new app shows an ad, if this app seems useful to me, I'll go make a purchase if it's a single "remove ads" IAP with a reasonable price, where "reasonable" is a price that is less or equal to a price of a cup of flat white where I live. But I really don't see a reason to pay for a subscription for the app I probably don't use that often. If it's i…

You can cancel immediately and still get that initial trial/month! I always do this, especially for apps i aspirationally purchase a subscription for a year for (fitness/language apps).

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#35

Post by bee_rider »

Interesting take. In my gut I hate subscriptions mostly because keeping track of them is annoying. But I’m semi-convinced. I mean, aligning the interests of the developer and the users is a nice benefit.

Something Apple could do is allow iOS to handle some of this stuff automatically. Establish a sort of “small app subscription” account. Keep track of which apps had been opened every month, only pay the subscriptions for the ones I’ve opened, and allow me to set monthly limits. It could also offer feedback to the app developers, “X% of your users didn’t use the app this month,” etc.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#36

Post by dabluck »

RugnirViking wrote: post #22
ChessGenome wrote: post #18

I 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…

The cheaper it is then the more people you need to sustain it. If there are only a small number of obsessives who want the sun tracking app, and the sun tracking app is really great and serving their needs, it should probably be more expensive not less. If the sun tracking obsessives want it to exist, they have to pay for it, because nobody else cares.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#37

Post by lghh »

edent wrote: post #27
dabluck wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tbh for most things you could probably run a personal version of the webserver component yourself.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#38

Post by dabluck »

bee_rider wrote: post #35

Interesting take. In my gut I hate subscriptions mostly because keeping track of them is annoying. But I’m semi-convinced. I mean, aligning the interests of the developer and the users is a nice benefit. Something Apple could do is allow iOS to handle some of this stuff automatically. Establish a sort of “small app subscription” account. Keep track of which apps had been opened every month, only pay the subscriptions…

Thanks for reading. Totally agree Apple can do more a lot here and it's disappointing they haven't tried.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#39

Post by FatherOfCurses »

Every other business has figured out a way to operate on a single transaction model where I give them money and they give me a product and that is the end of our relationship until I need something else that they make. Somehow we have managed to operate in this manner for hundreds of years. Why is software development any different?

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#40

Post by BeetleB »

acheron wrote: post #11

One 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.

> One great genre of HN comment is where people insist subscriptions are the only way a software business can work,

It's the primary way most SW can work. Pre-subscription, you needed to make SW that was so much in demand that it could survive piracy. Once the worry about piracy went away, a lot more SW became commercially viable.

Even Sid Meier said in his memoir that while he hates subscription, the one time they released something on a subscription based the profits were significantly more than selling his games (but he went back to one time pricing on principle).

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