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Subscription fatigue and related musings

morrick.me

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Re: Subscription fatigue and related musings

#41

Post by MichaelNolan »

xoa wrote: post #8
mrtksn wrote: post #4

Some apps that I purchased before in full, later turned into subscription based apps(giving me a year of free subscription). This made me feel bad and I lost my warm and fizzy feelings towards these apps. That said, I understand why they are doing it. It doesn't make sense whatsoever to receive one time payment and provide updates forever. Also, despite that people claim that they want "one time payment apps" that do…

> It doesn't make sense whatsoever to receive one time payment and provide updates forever. Duh? This is written in English but I genuinely have trouble making sense of your words. We had this for decades without subscriptions, they're called UPGRADES! You buy 1.x, or 2.x or whatever, and then when 3.x comes out new customers pay full price but existing ones get it at a much reduced price. But they can do so on their…

> UPGRADES! You buy 1.x, or 2.x or whatever, and then when 3.x comes out new customers pay full price

Upgrades like that kind of suck for everyone though. The users, the developers, the businesses.

Users expect software to get bug and security fixes. By having 1.x, 2.x and 3.x versions, developers have to maintain 3 different versions.

It also forces developers to add new features even if no one wants them. Plenty of good apps are essentially feature complete, but in an upgrade centric world there has to be constant new features. This often makes apps worse.

Subscriptions are a good way to balance the needs of users, developers and businesses.

Re: Subscription fatigue and related musings

#42

Post by quickthrower2 »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #28
brookst wrote: post #15

Subscriptions align developer and user interests and produce better products and less wasted money in the long run. One-time up front purchases only reward developers for expanding the target market of their product; whether the product improves over time has no bearing on revenue. From a developer’s perspective, the one-time price should be the CLV of what they’d get with a subscription. For users, that means much h…

>> I would much rather have 20 apps that I pay $10/mo/ea for than to buy one new $600 Right, and that's a fair preference, as long as we understand that some people have different preferences. I'm in completely opposite camp - I'm paying ridiculous amount of money a month for apps that I use once or twice a year. I am also paying money for apps I use all the time but that I'll lose the moment I stop paying. I have fr…

It is almost game theory:

The SaaS wants to extract as much value as possible. They don't know YOUR individual use case or threshold, but they need to price in a general way so that based on the model of reality, the most revenue will come in (+ whatever other goals).

You want to get as much value as possible.

If they know that you use it twice a year, they could offer you a special price. But doing that for just you might be not worth the extra code in their licensing and usage tracking system. So there needs to be lots of you.

In addition there could be high paying whale users happy to pay a lot and only use it twice a year.

So they need to know how tight/loose each customer is, in addition to what they want, to come up with appropriate pricing.

It would be like a bazaar where the price for a vase is 1000 but locals will haggle it down to 100, expats will get it for 150, tourists that haggle get it down to 250, and naive tourists pay 1000, the full price. And the seller can look at them, their body language, the look in their eyes, and judge the price accordingly.

AI might get us there!

Re: Subscription fatigue and related musings

#43

Post by ghaff »

deergomoo wrote: post #39

My biggest issue with App Store subscriptions is that I'm effectively only renting the software, as opposed to buying into future updates. If I cancel my subscription to a JetBrains IDE or the database client I use, I get to use the most recent version I paid for forever. Those are more like auto-opting into paid upgrades, which I'm totally fine with. For an iOS app, if I cancel my subscription I'm left with nothing.…

>I get to continue to use the most recent version I paid money for forever

Or until it stops working with an OS upgrade/update.

Re: Subscription fatigue and related musings

#44

Post by mrtksn »

swatcoder wrote: post #26
mrtksn wrote: post #4

Some apps that I purchased before in full, later turned into subscription based apps(giving me a year of free subscription). This made me feel bad and I lost my warm and fizzy feelings towards these apps. That said, I understand why they are doing it. It doesn't make sense whatsoever to receive one time payment and provide updates forever. Also, despite that people claim that they want "one time payment apps" that do…

It's interesting that in your thoughtful survey of alternatives, you don't consider simply challenging the assumption "and provide updates forever". Subscriptions do indeed fund perpetual development in a way that one time purchases don't, but the implication that comes along with that is that features are to be added along the way. If you only released maintenance patches, you subscriber satisfaction would dry up re…

I actually considered that, just didn't call its name explicitly.

> Maybe the AppStores can implement something like version limiting and you can ask for a payment for upgrading to the new version.

I'm also not sure how I feel about it. Having people using multiple versions of the app in the wild seems wrong. Also, many apps have a server component which has ongoing costs and as a result user who choose not to pay for an upgrade will still cost you money and maintenance of the server for old versions OR they will lose functionality. I guess it can work for offline apps.

Re: Subscription fatigue and related musings

#45

Post by codetrotter »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #28
brookst wrote: post #15

Subscriptions align developer and user interests and produce better products and less wasted money in the long run. One-time up front purchases only reward developers for expanding the target market of their product; whether the product improves over time has no bearing on revenue. From a developer’s perspective, the one-time price should be the CLV of what they’d get with a subscription. For users, that means much h…

>> I would much rather have 20 apps that I pay $10/mo/ea for than to buy one new $600 Right, and that's a fair preference, as long as we understand that some people have different preferences. I'm in completely opposite camp - I'm paying ridiculous amount of money a month for apps that I use once or twice a year. I am also paying money for apps I use all the time but that I'll lose the moment I stop paying. I have fr…

> I have frequently rejected a $5/month app that I would've happily both for $30, even if I know I only need it once and can cancel after a month (utility type software usually).

I agree but I also want to point out that it is possible to cancel the subscription right after you start it, and that way you are only charged once and you get to use it for the month that you paid for, without having to remember to cancel the subscription later. This is very helpful to me at least.

Re: Subscription fatigue and related musings

#46

Post by wlesieutre »

gnicholas wrote: post #33
cglong wrote: post #17

This article misses the elephant in the room: Apple. For years after the App Store launched, developers asked for an integrated way to provide upgrade pricing to help support major upgrades. Instead, they usually had to resort to creating an entirely new entry in the App Store. How many customers were lost because they didn't know they had to go back to the Store to download a separate app named Thing 2? And how many…

> Unlike paid upgrades, a subscription guarantees recurring revenue not only for the developer, but for Apple themselves. Actually, Apple would get more revenue the other way. They only take 15% on subscription revenue after the first year.

Assuming that the cost to users of paid upgrades versus subscriptions are the same, which I don't think is a good assumption.

Paid upgrades I only had to buy when they were worth buying, so often I wouldn't. I was using Photoshop CS5 for quite a long time, well after CS6 came out and then into the subscription era, and I got a great value out of that purchase even as someone who wasn't using it professionally.

Subscriptions can keep on charging me the same price even when development is stopped or focused on features I don't want. Keep paying forever or you lose it.

Re: Subscription fatigue and related musings

#47

Post by comfypotato »

brookst wrote: post #15

Subscriptions align developer and user interests and produce better products and less wasted money in the long run. One-time up front purchases only reward developers for expanding the target market of their product; whether the product improves over time has no bearing on revenue. From a developer’s perspective, the one-time price should be the CLV of what they’d get with a subscription. For users, that means much h…

I think your last paragraph has a lot of merit. It’s that subscription costs are too high. Netflix and company are a completely different animal because there’s content involved; I’m talking about non-professional non-content apps. Obviously .17 is too low, but often I feel that 3 or 4 would be more appropriate than the 12-20 standard. Especially when the paid app only offers 20% more utility than the free app. But I’m no business major.

Re: Subscription fatigue and related musings

#48

Post by rebeccaskinner »

louison11 wrote: post #20
xoa wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't make sense whatsoever to receive one time payment and provide updates forever. Duh? This is written in English but I genuinely have trouble making sense of your words. We had this for decades without subscriptions, they're called UPGRADES! You buy 1.x, or 2.x or whatever, and then when 3.x comes out new customers pay full price but existing ones get it at a much reduced price. But they can do so on their…

Updates have disappeared because most software today is no longer full offline (as was the case of those CD-ROMs you’d use to install softwares back in the days), but a hybrid of offline and online, with a local client making calls to an API. A software company can’t ship a hybrid product and stop running the API, the API has to be kept up, which is often no small feat, and costs money. On top of that, if they had to…

I actually look at this from the other direction: the need to somehow justify a monthly subscription fee has encouraged developers to add further user hostile features, including a move toward owning customers data and forcing customers to share data (often with egregious privacy invasive policies) and makes it harder for customers to interoperable with other software.

Re: Subscription fatigue and related musings

#49

Post by lazycouchpotato »

silvestrov wrote: post #6

A significant problem is that the App Store just says "In App Purchases" on the App page. We don't even get a list of prices and functionality of the IAPs. In EU it is a requirement that: "When you buy goods or services in the EU, you have to be clearly informed about the total price, including all taxes and additional charges." https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/pri... I don't think the App sto…

Pretty sure Apple lists the name and price of IAPs on the App Store.

Google on the other hand only provides a range on the Play Store. "In-app purchases: $0.99 – $74.99 per item" is worthless information.

Re: Subscription fatigue and related musings

#50

Post by mrtksn »

deergomoo wrote: post #30
mrtksn wrote: post #4

Some apps that I purchased before in full, later turned into subscription based apps(giving me a year of free subscription). This made me feel bad and I lost my warm and fizzy feelings towards these apps. That said, I understand why they are doing it. It doesn't make sense whatsoever to receive one time payment and provide updates forever. Also, despite that people claim that they want "one time payment apps" that do…

> Maybe the AppStores can implement something like version limiting and you can ask for a payment for upgrading to the new version I can only assume this is a deliberate omission to push people into subscriptions.

IMHO it's not that. I think they don't want to have users with outdated apps. It makes the experience of the device worse and especially Apple is very protective over the user experience since that's how they sell iPhones.
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