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Just Pay the Subscription

uncommonapps.nyc

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Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#51

Post by Lucent »

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…

For some reason the floor price is $5 a month when given the complexity of the app and the benefit to my life, the price should be between a few cents and a dollar at the high end.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#52

Post by dabluck »

everdrive wrote: post #41

No, no, never. Subscriptions never benefit the consumer. They all work exactly the same way: - Get the user hooked into their ecosystem - Slowly make the service worse / more expensive / different over time - The user is paying for a subscription which feels like an investment, so they put up with more crap than they would otherwise. Trust me. If you have a subscription for something, and you like it, it will change…

If you don't like or want any mobile apps whatsoever, I completely agree you should not pay for them.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#53

Post by neilalexander »

mpyne wrote: post #28
neilalexander wrote: post #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 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…

I don't expect that my current version of the software will be updated forever or remain indefinitely secure though. I expect that I'll get some small updates or security patches for a certain amount of time only and I'm OK with that. If something comes along that I can't live without, or the platform breaks things sufficiently, then I pay for the upgrade at that time.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#54

Post by ur_tech_friend »

everdrive wrote: post #41

No, no, never. Subscriptions never benefit the consumer. They all work exactly the same way: - Get the user hooked into their ecosystem - Slowly make the service worse / more expensive / different over time - The user is paying for a subscription which feels like an investment, so they put up with more crap than they would otherwise. Trust me. If you have a subscription for something, and you like it, it will change…

This feels backwards—if the service gets worse, simply cancel your subscription.

If it were a one-time purchase, wouldn't that encourage the service provider to make it worse over time because they've already taken your money?

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#55

Post by Brendinooo »

cogman10 wrote: post #31
ok123456 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (mostl…

> It doesn't need any sort of backend

It's far down the list as to why I decided to subscribe, but I do like the idea that if I lose my phone, my data won't be lost forever.

>This is exactly the sort of app that should have a single $10 purchase.

If you cloned the app and offered it as a one-time $10 charge, I'd be interested in that for sure!

> So why is there a subscription?

Recently they pushed out some updates that made the Watch experience a lot better. If you were the developer, would you have delivered that to $10 one-time purchasers for free, or would you have charged for a major version bump that had the feature?

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#56

Post by fusslo »

ur_tech_friend wrote: post #54
everdrive wrote: post #41

No, no, never. Subscriptions never benefit the consumer. They all work exactly the same way: - Get the user hooked into their ecosystem - Slowly make the service worse / more expensive / different over time - The user is paying for a subscription which feels like an investment, so they put up with more crap than they would otherwise. Trust me. If you have a subscription for something, and you like it, it will change…

This feels backwards—if the service gets worse, simply cancel your subscription. If it were a one-time purchase, wouldn't that encourage the service provider to make it worse over time because they've already taken your money?

I agree with you in theory

> If it were a one-time purchase, wouldn't that encourage the service provider to make it worse over time because they've already taken your money?

Couldn't it encourage the provider to make it better because their revenue comes from new customers?

> if the service gets worse, simply cancel your subscription.

There's plenty of examples of subscriptions that are nearly impossible to cancel, or have a giant fee for cancelling early. Adobe, Comcast, siriusxm spring to mind. Anecdotally, streaming services are partly funded by people who subscribe for a particular film/tv show and just never cancel.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#57

Post by etrautmann »

everdrive wrote: post #41

No, no, never. Subscriptions never benefit the consumer. They all work exactly the same way: - Get the user hooked into their ecosystem - Slowly make the service worse / more expensive / different over time - The user is paying for a subscription which feels like an investment, so they put up with more crap than they would otherwise. Trust me. If you have a subscription for something, and you like it, it will change…

I’m with you. I generally refuse. There are way too many things that I’d like to use extremely intermittently that beg for recurring revenue. I just opt out for the most part, aside from a tiny subset of indispensable apps.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#58

Post by plagiarist »

dabluck wrote: post #3
vlian2088 wrote: post #2

AI is going to make you unemployed and that's a good thing.

Hmm interesting, wonder how Anthropic and OpenAI make money. Subscriptions perhaps?

It's glib, but allegedly they are losing money on those. Certainly compared to what they'd be getting with their usage-based pricing.

Unless you mean people are forgetting to use the maximum amount every month, or forgetting to cancel?

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#59

Post by erelong »

Interesting article, I guess it may come off as a reflection of being of a different mindset than an older style of open source software and culture?

I thought the idea was, software is created with an open source and open license to it - so people know what the software is, and are able to make copies of it freely, and so that becomes hard to monetize.

If you are trying to sell software and make it proprietary with closed source, it's not software you can trust (could contain literally any insecure code) so you avoid it and it would lack people using it (not saying this happens in practice, but I thought was the open source argument).

Hence you're saying, just create / pay for insecure proprietary closed source software that can't be shared and isn't intended to be shared.

The subscription model lends itself towards abuses: namely, you can use something temporarily, then lose access. The open source vision was about creating software that can be freely re-used indefinitely without a required subscription and shared without as much of restrictions.

So I think basically people object to this increased limitation of "indefinite reuses" which you can get with open source software that you "own", and maybe the proprietary closed source tendencies of these locked down subscriptions.

Now granted, some of the newer "spaces" we operate in may look a little differently, with lots of things needing or desiring constant updates and we recognize we only have so much time so a question comes up if we even want or need "indefinite reuse" or to even have open source software or to understand how the software works.

But, there might not even be disagreement here... if you just "donate" to an open source nonprofit project, that could still be framed as a "subscription". I think it's maybe not conventionally how we're referring to subscriptions, but I think I could see your case for reframing the subscription towards being something "good" or "ok".

There are open source monetization strategies, but if code tends towards being less able to be monetized, how can software projects be funded? I think in this "post-intellectual property" open source scenario I'm suggesting at, the funding might shift in other directions (maybe like from selling hardware or tangible physical goods).

But anyway, I guess we would just probably distinguish between "unwanted" and "desired" subscription practices: limited locked down subs versus unlimited maybe subscription-less or limited open source subs.

At least these were some thoughts this essay was generating in me.

Re: Just Pay the Subscription

#60

Post by dabluck »

RugnirViking wrote: post #50
dabluck wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

no, they really don't. if the sun tracking app didn't exist, I or some other enterprising fellow could make it, and release it for free. It's at best a series of calculations, or just taking data directly from some api. Just because a business model can be made around something, does not mean a business model needs to exist to sustain that thing

That's totally fine, if you want to work on the sun tracking app in your free time and release it, I encourage it. But there's a lot of weird obsessive niches and I don't think you're going to make all of them, so the people who want weird things to exist should probably fund their obsessive niches. Of course, if you aren't interested in that niche, you shouldn't feel any obligation to use it or pay for it.
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