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Subscription Hell

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Re: Subscription Hell

#241

Post by lozenge »

jjeaff wrote: post #115
hedora wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real innovation of the *aaS model is that you no longer need to compete with prior versions of your own software or hardware infrastructure. You can hike prices, cut engineering costs, cut some nines off your availability, defeature, or just plain embrace incompetence, and, in the short term, it will improve your balance sheet. Of course, in the long term, customers will revolt, and do so swiftly, and without mer…

I don't know. I think a lot of people have decided they like things like the Adobe products subscription. Instead of the several thousand dollars you would have had to pay for the various softwares in the lineup up front, you just pay $50 a month. Which is reasonable of you previously used more than just Photoshop and maybe upgraded every 3 to 4 years. If the end result is a similar cost, I would much rather keep my…

It works for Adobe, ReSharper or MSDN because people make their livelihoods off it. It makes less sense when it's a utility (window management) or tangential to your actual revenue stream (keeping notes).

Re: Subscription Hell

#242

Post by sincerely »

>Today’s consumers though have significantly higher standards than the original users of the web. Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format.

do they really want these immersive experiences? Do consumers even have a choice?

Re: Subscription Hell

#243

Post by 2color »

I feel like this might be a good thing. Money is a powerful mechanism of transferring the percieved value of goods. If anything, this might cause good quality content to live on. Of course, there's the transition period during which free content has the potential weeding out the "quality" content.

Re: Subscription Hell

#244

Post by sincerely »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #237
freehunter wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the other hand, there's a million different competing not-microsoft-word text editors for writers. Whereas there's no real alternatives to adobe or microsoft products if you need them for your career.

Re: Subscription Hell

#245

Post by jacques_chester »

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.

> Ive used blendle. I wish there was a browser extension that would detect paywalls and let me use blendle to see the article.

I designed such a system in 2012 and was granted a patent for it late last year. I asked a professional about what to do next and the advice was "wait until someone is infringing". Not hugely satisfactory.

I wanted to build the scheme described in the article. My goal was: fix the internet. The way it's paid for breaks it. Fix the money and the rest would follow.

Everyone who's thought about this problem for more than 10 minutes has hit on the same basic business model. I hit on it in 2008, I wasn't the first. Since then I've watched business after business fail in this area. The problem has never been the technology and I'm not sure if a successful shared scheme will ever emerge.

Re: Subscription Hell

#246

Post by rossdavidh »

sincerely wrote: post #242

>Today’s consumers though have significantly higher standards than the original users of the web. Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format. do they really want these immersive experiences? Do consumers even have a choice?

I strongly disagreed with the same paragraph. "Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format." No, they don't want that, especially not the video, and the rest is just a nice-to-have, not a want-to-have. You WANT consumers to want that, but they don't; it's being forced on them instead. Plain text with the occasional still graphic, on a plain white background, would be just fine.

Re: Subscription Hell

#247

Post by jacques_chester »

reitanqild wrote: post #220
wutbrodo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been a LOT of effort put behind micro transactions for publishing, from companies that have all the resources and incentive in the world, like Google. The market simply doesn't want it. The average consumer isn't remotely rational enough to amortize a subscription cost and compare it to a unit cost. The way they process the incentives of a subscription is more like: "once you've reached the threshold where…

> There has been a LOT of effort put behind micro transactions for publishing, from companies that have all the resources and incentive in the world, like Google. I feel I used to follow Google quite closely before and I cannot remember seing any hints of this. My feeling has rather been that any form for paying has been looked at as second class compared to ads at that company. Youtube Red still isn't available here…

They tried several variations for Google Contributor, each less appealing than the last.

More recently they introduced Subscribe With Google.

Re: Subscription Hell

#248

Post by coldtea »

siscia wrote: post #106
bastawhiz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between charging for updates and charging for continued use. What if Sublime Text started charging a monthly fee just to use it? There's no excuse. > But as far as most software pricing goes, if it's so bad, then people wouldn't pay. And yet people keep paying ransomware for access to their important files.

Sorry but nobody is forcing you to use sublime. If they started charging just for use they wouldn't need neither an excuse nor a justification. I really don't see your point. If you could explain further why you think sublime would need an excuse for charging a monthly fee I would really appreciate.

>If they started charging just for use they wouldn't need neither an excuse nor a justification.

Actually they'd need both.

And companies are not so dumb as not to understand this. Any company that started charging or went into a subscription model, offered both excuses and justifications for doing so.

You might be think "it's a free country, it's their product, and they can do anything with it".

Which is true in a trivial way (they're allowed by the law to do anything they like in that area), but it's also wrong.

Wrong in that in practice they're not really free: to survive they are bound to the market and their customers responses.

So they're free only as much as they're OK with pissing their user base and potentially losing sales (or have most of them go for some other product, and kill their own user base -- e.g. Quark xPress vs Adobe Indesign, and tons of other similar examples).

Re: Subscription Hell

#249

Post by petra »

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…

In general, software has zero marginal cost, so in theory, it's price should fall near zero due to competition. So why is the subscription market behave so different ?

And what can be done about that ?

Re: Subscription Hell

#250

Post by Shank »

djhworld wrote: post #44

The thing I don't understand about this article is the author makes out like he's been forced into this situation, the "hell" he talks about is entirely of his own making.

I mean, the fact that paywalls are being introduced in front of previously free content does make this something to be dragged into, not necessarily something that's been walked into. If your habits for 5 years involved following links to free content, and that content still exists but is now paid, you're now losing access to things you previously had -- which is tantamount to force.
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