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Subscription Hell

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Re: Subscription Hell

#231

Post by madeofpalk »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #169
techsupporter wrote: post #33

At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments ill…

There really isn't a better way to run a business (even if it's just a single app) than to get someone to pay you an amount on a fixed interval. It's predictable and generally weathers shocks pretty evenly. This is also why for most investors dividends are a big selling point - consistency. Even Apple somewhat relies on this, except it's been in 2 year intervals. It's the point of so called "planned obsolescence." So…

Seems weird to call Apple out for planned obsolescence considering their devices are generally supported by the manufacturer for considerably longer than the alternatives.

Re: Subscription Hell

#232

Post by lsc »

Paul-ish wrote: post #206
PrunJuice wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Blendle https://blendle.com/ They aren't Apple but they do the pay per article thing.

Ive used blendle. I wish there was a browser extension that would detect paywalls and let me use blendle to see the article. Right now I have to open a new tab and search the article on blendles website. That adds friction that causes me to use blendle less than I would.

It sounds like the sort of thing that would be amenable to a greasemonkey type script? hm. sounds like an interesting project.

Re: Subscription Hell

#233

Post by mmt »

Paul-ish wrote: post #206
PrunJuice wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Blendle https://blendle.com/ They aren't Apple but they do the pay per article thing.

Ive used blendle. I wish there was a browser extension that would detect paywalls and let me use blendle to see the article. Right now I have to open a new tab and search the article on blendles website. That adds friction that causes me to use blendle less than I would.

That and the "we're in beta" not just being able to sign up for it in a straightforward way makes it a non-starter for me (and I would expect for most consumers).

Re: Subscription Hell

#234

Post by glenneroo »

JauntTrooper wrote: post #119
ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want. The issue many people, myself included, have with subscriptions are that you pay $x / month whether or not you read that month's product. And whether or not you read every article or just one. So for me, as a consumer, my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity (pay but read zero articles). Now the pa…

I don't think that model will work, honestly. There's friction anytime you ask someone to spend anything, even if the price is de minimis. Look what happens whenever a city adopts a $0.05 plastic bag tax. When Washington DC did it, plastic bag use dropped by 50% - 70%. I'd see people that just spent $30 bucks at the store with their arms overflowing with stuff rather than pay that extra nickel. I'd expect prompting u…

Regarding bag tax, I have trouble believing this is more than your own anecdotal observations, do you have any sources to back up that claim? Most cities in Europe charge a lot more than 0.05 per bag (Austrian supermarkets generally charge between 0.25-1€) yet most people just bring their own. I buy the more expensive variant (cloth material) which survive about a year.

Re: Subscription Hell

#235

Post by nixpulvis »

sturgill wrote: post #190
nixpulvis wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the issues isn't directly about price (though it's often a part of it), but more about the idea of paying for something continuously versus once. Almost a form of out of sight out of mind.

For me, those two points are inseparable. But I’ve also spent the last several years of my career focusing on maximizing profits within consumer subscribeables... There are only so many ways to make money: ads, once off charges, term payments, and recurring charges. A consumer license to use vs physical ownership is incredibly interesting. Buying a Mario Brothers cartridge for the original Nintendo vs games delivered…

The best example I have right now is with music... I am ALWAYS going to want to be able to listen to my library, it's not really fair to assume I should have to pay monthly for it for the rest of my life, but for every day I don't buy the album and I listen to it on AM or Spotify, I'm in effect paying for a redundant service.

I get the difficulty finding ways to make money, but we are pigeonholing ourselves into a model that is against the best interest of the users.

Re: Subscription Hell

#236

Post by cookiecaper »

open-source-ux wrote: post #135
3pt14159 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The middle ground doesn't work. See MS Windows update hell. The way things should work is like this: Subscription for when you want to use the software and open format data files that you're always easily able to export and download. If a company goes out of business or does something stupid then another one will pop up to handle your needs. This aligns incentives correctly while still allows a healthy dose of compet…

> The middle ground doesn't work The "middle ground" has been the most common model for desktop app pricing for decades. You buy version X of a product. When the next major version is released you pay an upgrade price. In fact, the "middle ground" has been the norm for the majority of software apps over the history of desktop computing. It's the SaaS subscription model for cloud-hosted software that is the new deviat…

It was easier to price software like a physical good when the distribution method was identical to other physical goods. You'd go to the store and give them $50 to leave with a box that contained a disk. When you wanted vN+1, you'd repeat this process. It all made sense to the user. That model is collapsing as digital distribution takes over.

Also, Adobe's tools have always been among the most pirated software out there. People who needed to do occasional work wanted Photoshop but there was just no way they were going to drop $700 on it. Nowadays, Adobe just charges them an $11/mo fee. That makes it much easier and I know several instances where this newer model has resulted in real income for Adobe, from what would've otherwise been pirate installs.

People are much more willing to pay a small fee several times than a massive fee once. The subscription makes them feel like they have more control and they can cancel when they don't need the product anymore (not always true because some of Adobe's subscriptions have annual lock-ins). It reduces the friction from "figure out how to pay us more than your car payment" to "just send us the cost of a trip to Starbucks, it will only take a couple of minutes and you'll be merrily on your way".

This dramatically changes the incentives re: piracy. Instead of spending hours trying to find a cracked build from a site that won't pwn your PC so that you can save hundreds of dollars, you just pay a few bucks and speed through with a known-good version (plus a clean conscience).

It's almost a side benefit that subscriptions frequently represent additional lifetime value v. a "pay once" model.

Re: Subscription Hell

#237

Post by AceJohnny2 »

freehunter wrote: post #192
beberlei wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, that is economics 101. consumers price goods by value, not by costs. if your costs are higher than consumers are willing to pay, then you will at some point go bankrupt.

Exactly. No one cares what the product costs to make, they care what it costs from their own pocket. If the app isn't worth $40, then it doesn't have the features and/or the polish to have multiple full-time developers working on it. If the price people are willing to pay is lower than your cost of goods sold, lower your COGS or raise your value proposition. Those are the only options.

> If the app isn't worth $40

Ay, there's the rub. The problem is also related to price anchoring [1]: People [2] accepted the price of $70 for the perpetual value provided by the app (including cloud syncing), but balked at $40/year. The latter price makes the app more expensive over 2 years, and the developer promising updates doesn't have quite the impact to justify the change in the eyes of the angry customers.

If the app initially cost, say, $160, maybe the newer pricing would've been better accepted. I hear Adobe and Microsoft are doing quite well with the subscription models...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

[2] The people who bought it. This is important, because it ignores all the people who thought this wasn't good value. Maybe some of the initial non-purchasers became subscribers. Market analysis is hard.

Re: Subscription Hell

#238

Post by csydas »

siidooloo wrote: post #189
AJ007 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was some low hanging fruit for companies to create subscription plans who shouldn’t have been adding them. The more subscriptions your target customer has, the harder it is to convert them on the new one. For the business side the ceiling is a lot higher, but for consumers there is a very low limit. Each market is different, but when I look at an area like Photoshop or Illustrator, the competition keeps getting…

Its going to be a real problem for Adobe. Their biggest apps (PS/AI/IND) haven’t had real upgrade worthy updates in years. Competing apps like Affinity Photo are pretty much 1 to 1 replacements. Eventually some significant portion of Adobe’s core users are going to go elsewhere.

It's not even that - they basically are back to just the isolated professional market now as the majority of built-in apps do many of the enhancements that the cheaper subscription licensees would have sought out Adobe for. No one except aspiring professionals really needs the majority of Adobe projects to do competent looking amateur work anymore.

Subscriptions from Adobe were meant to soften the initial sale, but Adobe's own rigidity with the subscription schemes on release shot them in the foot, as organizations had to wait a long time for a model to come out that met the needs of small/medium businesses who previously could have made due with a few perpetual licenses. The storage was pretty sad even at the time of the switch, so that wasn't a compelling sales point either.

I think Adobe just didn't pull the numbers they were expecting when they switched, and now they're stuck with this model and infrastructure they don't know what to do with.

Re: Subscription Hell

#239

Post by jakobegger »

madeofpalk wrote: post #219
jakobegger wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But 50€ a month is way too much for casual users. I do some vector design work maybe once a month. I'd love to buy a license for Illustrator, if it cost whatever it used to cost before Creative Cloud. I would use it for a long time. But 50€ per month is too much. So I bought a license for Affinity Designer instead. It covers most of my needs, and it's no subscription. I also bought a license for Sketch, since the sub…

They never became more expensive. They were extremely expensive to begin with and now they’re a lot cheaper. Previously it was like 500€ or so? That's too much for the casual user as well. Here’s the reality. I used to pirate Adobe software because there was no way I was going to pay 1500k or whatever Photoshop was. Adobe got $0 from me. Now I subscribe to get access to Photoshop. Adobe now gets £100 from me a year.…

I just checked the illustrator website. One year costs 287,77€. So it's only cheaper if you updated at least every two years. But I use my software a lot longer than that.

Software used to be an investment. At university, our physics department had a lot of old computers standing around, whose only purpose was to run some specific legacy software that was no longer maintained, but still worked perfectly.

During my time there, I convinced the theoretical physics department to buy a few Illustrator licenses so we could make better diagrams. I think the academic license cost 300€ per seat. They probably never updated, but I'd assume they still have a PC somewhere with one of those licenses installed, and if someone has a PDF from Inkscape with an incorrect Color Profile, they could still use that machine to fix it.

I think you underestimate how many people use old software out there. Sure, we tech folks update every year, but people who work outside of the tech bubble don't always upgrade a system that's working perfectly fine.

Re: Subscription Hell

#240

Post by wpietri »

techsupporter wrote: post #33

At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments ill…

A model I really like is the one IntelliJ uses. They encourage you to buy a subscription. But when you buy a year at once, you get a "perpetual fallback license" such that you can always keep using the version that is current when you buy: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

That means I always will have access to my projects and to the level of functionality I start with. But I keep getting upgrades as long as I keep paying, and they get the steady revenue stream that means they don't have to play weird marketing games.

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