Write libraries instead of services, where possible

It doesn't even take oodles of money from a SaaS platform to motivate turning a library into a service.

Even in in-house development, developers are often motivated to build services and have internal customers take dependencies on them so that they can expand influence and demonstrate ownership in a way that gets noticed by senior leadership and put them in line for promo. It also opens up the possibility for stakeholders to build their own little fiefdoms with access controls, intake processes, and a justifiable source of funding.

Can't do that with a library.

> with each subscription comes a business relationship you have to manage, which is annoying and prone to being forgotten

Though, this is one advantage of centralized services like Paypal and the iOS ecosystem.

At any time, I can see the iOS apps that are auto-billing me and I can rescind the contract from that UI. I don't need to call anyone or hope their Cancel actually does anything. I don't need to watch my statement like a hawk just to make sure they actually stopped billing me or that the 7-day trial that I canceled actually canceled.

Anyone can complain about yet another subscription. But tools that help us stay on top of our subscriptions are essential for subscriptions that aren't a bad deal. The banking/financial industry stopped evolving long ago and should have built ubiquitous tools for this.

Finally, the complaints about subscription services in this thread aren't very compelling. Nobody wants to buy a subscription yet the app transaction they want on their terms (e.g. buy once, never expire) presumably doesn't exist. It's a pebble's throw from just complaining that you'd prefer if everything was free so that you could keep your hard earned money.

Aside, iOS doesn't go far enough. Just so I don't seem like I'm too kind to Apple and subscription services here, they still have a long way to go. If they cared more about consumer protection, they would enact these changes:

1) iOS notification every time we get auto-billed. Every time we get charged, we should get reminded to consider if we actually want the subscription and that people aren't just getting taken advantage of by forgetting. iOS does nicely show you your auto-renewing subscriptions, but my parents don't know how to access it.

2) nuke the ability for weekly charges. A monthly billing cycle should be the minimum because that's what people are used to. It's kinda disgusting that an app can charge $7/wk when 99.9% of auto-renew cycles are monthly, and the user has to happen to notice the "wk" when they agree to it. And if weekly billing is allowed, then the iOS pricing page should standardize it showing you how much that costs per month to make it clear that it's not $7/mo.

3) An app shouldn't be able to default to the yearly billing cycle, it should default to monthly and the user can choose a yearly cycle if they want to, ugh. So many apps will default to the yearly cycle (so, 12*fee upfront) and even require you to pick that one if you want the 7-day free trial. It's hard to see how Apple could design the system to allow this behavior without knowing it's going to make people commit to a billing cycle they don't actually want.

4) You shouldn't be able to display a full-screen interstitial that makes it seem like you have to subscribe to use the app. I was just looking for a good daily workout iPhone app this week and every app had a full-screen splash page where you had to notice the tiny "X" to skip.

That said, still better than the US system where giving someone your debit card number in 2021 lets them pull money from your account for years just because you bought a $3 hotdog from them once.

5.15, not 5.7, but everything else you say is true

> Pay-once has the huge advantage that the barrier to entry is much lower. I'm pretty sure that it's much easier to sell a 50€ app than a 10€ subscription.

I think you've got it backwards. I can't think of many examples that suggest that this is true.

The iOS app store is a very hard place to sell an expensive $50 app, yet it's a very easy place to sell 7-day trials that turn into $10/month subscriptions. Immediate cash outlays are always harder to sell than pay-over-time deals for various reasons.

One reason being the customer's attempt to avoid the feeling of overspend: that you can always stop subscribing when you're done rather than getting "stuck" with the product, even if the one-time cost is a better deal. Another reason just being that you're asking for less money upfront which is always easier.

In my own experience, people will even stick with a pricier monthly billing option over the yearly billing option just to avoid the larger hit, even when they've been a customer for five years and know they'll still be subscribing a year from now.

I certainly appreciate how us HNers might prefer a one-time cost over a subscription, but I wouldn't try to generalize that to customer behavior.

Yeah, my first thought was "If this is called Phoenix and it's Cloud-related, I'm gonna have to swim through a lot of FFVII results before I find it".