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Subscription Hell

techcrunch.com

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Re: Subscription Hell

#371

Post by coldtea »

gravity_123 wrote: post #284
coldtea wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mobile app stores killed that model, when they made continuous, perpetual updates the norm. Continuous, perpetual updates are definitely NOT the norm in mobile apps. Some get some bug-fixes and the occasional new feature, but any major update lands a version 2.0. Far more (the "long tail") are just abandoned (like all those thousands of 32-bit apps being deprecated in the iOS store).

Both apple and google don't support 'pay for upgrade' model. Its either subscription or pay once. Of course, you can roll out your own payment gateway(which apple has further issues with) or re upload the app under a new v2 name, but those are not very satisfactory solutions.

>or re upload the app under a new v2 name, but those are not very satisfactory solutions.

Not very satisfactory, but very prevalent.

And, I'd say, given the low price of apps, it might be just right to not offer any special discount for an upgrade. You could always reward older users some other way.

Re: Subscription Hell

#372

Post by ada1981 »

siidooloo wrote: post #198
ada1981 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been really stoked with Adobes offering around this, full access to all their products for $30 a month or so.

Except, if the only app you need is photoshop you can own Affiniy Photo for $30. Or, you can own Affinity Design for $30. And this one is the real kicker, Blackmagic is giving away most of what you need for free, and if you need more you can get a permanent license for a few hundred bucks. How long do you think it will be before Adobe starts really bleeding.

I’ll have to checkout black magic.

Re: Subscription Hell

#373

Post by bencompanion »

dgudkov wrote: post #275

The level of naivete in this article is frustrating. >I’m frustrated that the web’s promise of instant and free access to the world’s information appears to be dying. Free access won't die as long as there are people who are willing to work for free. It's not that subscriptions and paywalls charge money for something that was made by someone for free. >I’m frustrated that subscription usually means just putting forme…

Agreed.

> the web’s promise of instant and free access to the world’s information appears to be dying.

That wasn't ever a promise, or rather, it wasn't "the web's" promise to make. It might have been the ad-hoc default for a while, but it turns out that it's not sustainable or scalable, no matter how much we'd like it to be.

Re: Subscription Hell

#374

Post by mindcrime »

I can totally relate to this. If I added up the price of all the various subscriptions I'm paying for right now, I'd probably be very sad. Luckily for the vendors, I'm too lazy to do the exercise right now. Sadly for any future vendors who might want my money, I'm vaguely aware of the problem to the point that I'm highly, highly, unlikely to sign up for any new subscription based service now, unless it REALLY offers massive value. And even then it's iffy.

That said, I will still take this ala-carte world over Cable TV style bundling. But if some vendors of Internet content can work out some revenue sharing / cross-subscription mechanisms, I would be willing to give that a look if it mapped to my interests cleanly enough.

Re: Subscription Hell

#375

Post by gerbilly »

chrisseaton wrote: post #217
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.

> consumers price goods by value, not by costs But the point is he's a consumer and he isn't pricing by value - he's pricing by costs.

I disagree, I saw it as him pricing by value, but mentioning that the costs don't seem to make sense either.

Re: Subscription Hell

#376

Post by AndrewKemendo »

madeofpalk wrote: post #231
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not directly comparable, however the two year upgrade is what they really want people to do - after all it was pretty definitive that they were degrading experience as a trade off on the battery issue.

Re: Subscription Hell

#377

Post by banishwashtub »

lajhsdfkl wrote: post #54

People need to understand that the alternative to ads is paying hundreds of dollars a month in subscription fees and then still not having access to all the services you would have had access to in an ad economy world. People in Europe will soon get this wakeup call. Services that were only marginally profitable are already shutting down because of GDPR. I'm confident that the EU government and its citizens have litt…

Thing is, ads don't have to track users as individuals or at all. TV ads and print media ads are based on the content, why can't web based ads also be based on content? No more GDPR issues, we still get free content. Perhaps we can still do a pay-to-remove-ads option.

Re: Subscription Hell

#378

Post by djsumdog »

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…

Look at our old software from the past decades. Old archived documents sitting in some obscure presentation program like Harvard Graphics. Now imagine not being able to load that data at all, even though you have the save file and the program, because the licensing server literally no longer exists.

Now imaging a world 15 years from now where Adobe totally goes under due to competitors making much better programs. Their servers go away and now, and you can't even start your licensed software without running it through a debugger and trying to crack the license check.

Re: Subscription Hell

#379

Post by taneq »

lultimouomo wrote: post #280
rolleiflex wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that always rubbed me wrong about this is that, logically speaking, if you buy a license for a year, the perpetual fallback license should be the version you had at the end of the license, not the one that was on the market at the beginning of it. It doesn't really make sense the way they do it, and it feels like a particularly hamfisted attempt to grab an almost negligible amount of money, so I'm puzzled.

It's not the negligible amount of money that matters. The trick is that at the end of your yearly subscription you have already upgraded to a newer version, so falling back to the perpetual license means downgrading, which is both often a practical problem and (perhaps most importantly) something that I think many have an emotional aversion to. I'm pretty sure that if the fallback license was to the most recent versi…

I think this:

> The trick is that at the end of your yearly subscription you have already upgraded to a newer version, so falling back to the perpetual license means downgrading, which is both often a practical problem and (perhaps most importantly) something that I think many have an emotional aversion to.

Qualifies as

> a particularly hamfisted attempt to grab an almost negligible amount of money

OK, so maybe it's not as negligible an amount but it feels petty and I'd not pay money to a company that pulls stunts like that on its customers.

Re: Subscription Hell

#380

Post by djsumdog »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #158
jstarfish wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proxy and cache articles using a standard set of credentials from a set list of origin IPs, most likely. The traffic would appear as that of an average reader.

That sounds very likely to get you sued for copyright infringement.

Or just provide a front end for caching via archive.is and other archive sites?
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