Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Subscription Hell

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 610 posts

Re: Subscription Hell

#441

Post by jackgolding »

nitrogen wrote: post #356
chiefalchemist wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly off topic, but semi related. My parents had a one year membership at Costco. The level where you get some percentage back. I think it was 2%. Long to short, the "rebate" was paid ~60 days prior to the end of the 12 months. The remaining 60 days' purchased will only be rebated if they renew. I presume this is in the small print somewhere. None the less, it's complete crap.

Sounds similar to employers who pay contracted bonuses late, don't pay if you quit before the bonus date, and use bonuses to make up for reduced salaries.

This is really annoying for me, how can I work for a full financial year (and get my shares allocated), receive my performance review but not get a bonus because I quit before October where they pay the bonuses on the last FY?

Re: Subscription Hell

#442

Post by zinckiwi »

opencl wrote: post #392
tokyodude wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Am I doing my math wrong? Photoshop upgrades were always $199. Photoshop subscriptions are $239 a year. So upgrading every 3 year is $199 vs paying a subscription for 3 year is $747. How is paying nearly 3x keeping money in your business?

The $199 upgrades were only after the initial PS purchase price of $699. The PS-only subscription is $9.99 a month. The $239 a year one "Includes 100GB of cloud storage, your own portfolio website, premium fonts, and social media tools". It is way cheaper now unless you go 5+ years without upgrades.

I wouldn't put any value to those perks. The average use of that 100GB storage is likely to be a very small fraction of that and all will cost pennies or less for Adobe to provide. Yes, if you just so happen to be in the market for all of those it would cost you some amount to source them independently. But the trend of bundling low-cost tangential services as a pricing defence strikes me as rather cynical.

Re: Subscription Hell

#443

Post by tonyedgecombe »

lajhsdfkl wrote: post #218
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I don't think it would be a great loss to forgo most of the advertising funded content.

>Honestly, I don't think it would be a great loss to forgo most of the advertising funded content. Since you clearly haven't put much thought into this comment let's just start listing things that are funded by ads - News - content creators on youtube - music - twitch - search - blogs - websites with tutorials - a thousand different things which I have missed and then facebook, snapchat, instagram, and twitter which…

Since you clearly haven't put much thought into this comment

Sorry, did I say something to offend you?

Re: Subscription Hell

#444

Post by freddie_mercury »

FPGAhacker wrote: post #162
weavie wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the developers perspective though it is way easier to run a business when your software is sold on a subscription basis. If you know to a decent level of accuracy how much income you have, you can easily work out how much you can afford to spend to keep running and growing the business. If you have no idea how much income you are going to make, stuff become a hell of a lot more complicated, unless you have a sub…

I get this, but how much more predictable are subscriptions? I mean, unless you are holding customers hostage with data lock-in, they are going to come and go. And if you get a reputation as a hostage holder, you will likely spawn competition that avoids your negatives. I’m sure you will get some residual low hanging fruit in the form of people that buy subscriptions and don’t care enough to cancel. Doesn’t seem like…

Subscriptions are MASSIVELY more predictable. I say this after working daily for years with FP&A team on building revenue projections for a product that had both subscription and non-subscription sales models.

You realise that your post sounds like the stereotype of every bad manager ever? "How much harder could it be to build the new feature if we did X, Y, Z? Surely you can get it done in just three days?"

Re: Subscription Hell

#445

Post by ozim »

lajhsdfkl wrote: post #285
ozim wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How showing ads is against GDPR? You still can show ads, you just need consent for tracking users. If they are going out of business because of GDPR they were not just showing ads.

There are no ads without tracking.

You don't have CTR in newspapers and people still buy adverts in those.

Re: Subscription Hell

#446

Post by Kliment »

shripadk wrote: post #333
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.

> 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…

I'm not an accountant but presumably you treat it the same as the fairly common purchase+service contract. You have a sale of a license (of the version at time of purchase) and the prepaid service contract that either converts to revenue over time, or, if non-refundable, converts to revenue immediately. The proportion between the two components is fairly arbitrary. There is no constraint on how they implement this from an accounting perspective - they can change to allowing the user to keep the latest version they upgraded to without serious consequence (you can just as easily sell "product version X with one year of updates" which is very common as well, and mark that as revenue right away).

Re: Subscription Hell

#447

Post by exolymph »

petra wrote: post #249
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 ?

Even with zero marginal cost, you can still have substantial fixed costs. And actually costs don't define prices — what the market will bear defines prices.

Re: Subscription Hell

#448

Post by nobrains »

rolleiflex wrote: post #277
wpietri wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A model I really like is the one IntelliJ uses. They encourage you to buy a subscription. But when you buy a year at once, you get a "perpetual fallback license" such that you can always keep using the version that is current when you buy: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What... That means I always will have access to my projects and to the level of functionality I start with. But I keep getti…

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.

I think the solution is delayed gratification

Don't upgrade until after renewing the subscription for next year.

Re: Subscription Hell

#449

Post by majidazimi »

microtonal wrote: post #67
baxtr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. A subscription to Office 365 comes down to 99 Euros per years. Of course you’d pay maybe 150 every three years or so for a new version back in the days, but still that’s double. Also, I wonder whether this will lead to a slower development of the software. Before you’d have to create a leap forward to impress people to buy the new version, if the old version was still good enough.

It is also surprising how much other subscriptions cost compared with Office 365. Office 365 contains the most complete office suite in existence, probably larger than many operating systems. It also includes 1TB of OneDrive, and free monthly Skype minutes. And the 99 Euros that you quote are for five persons. Most subscription software is a terrible deal in comparison. I have tried to avoid subscription software as…

> Most subscription software is a terrible deal in comparison.

This is actually my way of making decision to buy a subscription-based product. It must provide comparable service. Office 365 single user license costs around 70$/year. Now:

- Evernote is asking 60$/year. Seriously? One note is already offering same service with 1TB storage.

- Pocket is asking 45$/year. WTF? It is just a bookmarking service which is already offered by one note web clipper.

- Proton mail is asking 50$/year for 5GB mail box. Dude, Office 365 offers 50GB add-free mail box. However NSA is able to read your emails, which is not the problem here. At least MS is not selling my information to advertisers.

Other than streaming services, It is getting really difficult to find any subscription-based product that gets close to Office 365.

Re: Subscription Hell

#450

Post by concerned_user »

shripadk wrote: post #353
ehnto wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it work that way? You get the updates based on the assumption you are a subscriber, and you get the fallback license based on the assumption that you made a one off purchase at the date of purchase. It's logical the way it works.

It doesn't for the simple reason that they provide updates for the entire year. Surely those updates aren't provided for free. They are provided for purchase you made in advance for a year. If I cancel midway I should be entitled for all the updates till the end of the period. Unless those updates were free and not part of the sale. In which case, the licensee should still get those updates anyways for the period. Yo…

They sell you version at the time of purchase (fallback license) + access to updates, all accounted at the date of purchase. So when your subscription runs out in theory you could get old version then apply updates but you have no access so no updates for you.
Post reply on HN