331–340 of 390 posts
Somewhere along the line software went from being $99 for life to $9.99/month for life. The net result is massive inflation. I dusted off an old video game system recently and the game still played, through the end, for just the cost of electricity. I realize that maintenance is important and should be paid for, but let's be honest maintenance is a small sliver of your monthly subscription cost.
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Exactly. Most people are also not in the position to easily make $100/hr and be able to just burn money to "save time" with subscription apps. There's another competition, your average folks who end up using physical notebooks, stock Notes/Calendar/... apps and Google Sheets when they figure the subscription isn't worth it anymore / they can't keep up with all of them due to rising CoL.
One’s time is only worth money if they would otherwise be making money. If they would otherwise be playing video games or watching Netflix, then the app they spent an hour on cost them nothing in opportunity cost.
Three major iterations from now this whole conversation will be quaint and everyone will have always thought this.
What I don't get about this is that it looks like there are decent open-source alternatives to all of the services mentioned. The most egregious example is the markdown editor. There are lots of free, open-source markdown editors out there. Why would you vibe-code your own? Just because you can?
First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free. Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $3…
Previously, if you wanted to rig up a screen recording app in a few minutes you'd use Linux and specifically one of the minimal desktop environments like i3 or sway. Then you'd wire up a few command line utilities (slurp, wf-recorder, etc) and get the exact experience you want. These small unix tools allowed the greater ecosystem to just cobble together what they wanted without too much hassle. I've done exactly this!
This is the exact mindset that keeps people away. They'd prefer to NOT maintain their own video recording software THANK YOU VERY MUCH. So you get people who go to Mac OS because there's always a slick solution for a couple bucks and you never have to be TOO fiddly.
This doesn't destroy the market for people in the latter camp, but it DOES open up the market for people in the former.
I see basically no reason why Salesforce can't be taken down by a 2-3 person team right now. Shopify? Everything Intuit? Atlassian (Jira, Confluence)?
First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free. Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $3…
Most apps rationale for subscriptions is "Ongoing development" without an option like jetbrains etc. to fall back to a perpetual license. In practice, regardless of whether an app needs ongoing development or not, this is the best way to try to guarantee continuous income and make a living off of a project I guess. Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating…
How would the economics of this work universally? Jetbrains is a bit of an oddity in terms of SaaS. For the most part, it's desktop or on-premises software that was sold with a perpetual license. If you've bought a subscription and canceled, they've generated some revenue. Maintaining a subscription generates more revenue for them, but they can slow or stop development without stopping you from using the product.
SaaS is typically some server software hosted by someone else which most often doesn't have an on-premises version. They can stop making feature updates, but if they turn off the servers, the service ends. They still have costs even if you use the software less. You can argue about the profit margins, but that's not the point here. As most SaaS companies don't start with on-premises, they can't ever get their software working there for many reasons. There are a few like Atlassian and GitHub that do both, but if you look at the heritage, both are really on-premises first.
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Some of this "I can do it for free " stuff gives me the vibes of people who monitor gas prices every day. Only to drive 10 miles out of their way to save $0.30 a gallon filing their 15 gallon tank ($4.50 savings - $2.00 gas used - $X for time). They probably also buy an overpriced drink/snack for a net negative value proposition even if time is free. Some of these things are the feeling of "getting a deal" or "screwi…
I'm one of those guys you speak of, that would do that fully knowingly. The point is principle. If I feel I'm being exploited, then I will refuse to deal with something/somebody even if it's in my own short term best interest. It's not really screwing the system so much as screwing people trying to screw me, and I find the satisfaction that gives me as being worth substantially more than whatever I might lose in mone…