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Subscription Hell

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Re: Subscription Hell

#471

Post by drukenemo »

d2p wrote: post #27
ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want. The issue many people, myself included, have with subscriptions are that you pay $x / month whether or not you read that month's product. And whether or not you read every article or just one. So for me, as a consumer, my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity (pay but read zero articles). Now the pa…

This is my issue with most subscriptions too. The price has to be set based on the average use, which makes it really expensive for the infrequent user (and ultimately this means less conversions, yet nobody seems to care about this?!). I've had the same gripe with games for years. I stopped paying for Xbox live and World of Warcraft because they're the same - if I only played for a few hours in a month, I've paid ov…

This can be relative, in some cases at least. My go-to notes app is Bear and they charge EUR14/Year. For me that's a decent price to keep the software existing in the long run.

Re: Subscription Hell

#472

Post by chii »

nobrains wrote: post #448
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.

I think the solution is delayed gratification Don't upgrade until after renewing the subscription for next year.

so you miss out on the new features/bugfixes (which you presumably want, since you are paying already).

Re: Subscription Hell

#473

Post by madeofpalk »

tokyodude wrote: post #389
madeofpalk wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never became more expensive. They were extremely expensive to begin with and now they’re a lot cheaper. Previously it was like 500€ or so? That's too much for the casual user as well. Here’s the reality. I used to pirate Adobe software because there was no way I was going to pay 1500k or whatever Photoshop was. Adobe got $0 from me. Now I subscribe to get access to Photoshop. Adobe now gets £100 from me a year.…

they are way way more expensive now. I only upgraded every other version so $199 every 4 years or $50 a year. current Photoshop subscriptions is $239 a year or nearly 5x the price

Honestly, the price I actually pay surprised me. I looked it up on my statement and I’m only paying £8.32/month (excluding VAT) for Photoshop.

Re: Subscription Hell

#474

Post by chii »

scarface74 wrote: post #298
gravity_123 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a way to provide upgrade pricing for iOS. It's an ugly hack though.... 2015 - you sold v1 for $5.00 2017 - you start selling v2. You sell v1 for $5.00 but in the description tell everyone not to buy it. You sell v2 for $5.00 but direct people who have already bought v1 to buy the bundle of v1 and v2 that you price at $8. Anyone who has already bought v1 can buy the bundle for $3.

and now, you have v3. The bundling will grow exponentially!

Re: Subscription Hell

#475

Post by chii »

marklgr wrote: post #455
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.

> No one cares what the product costs to make The production cost is one of the metrics customers use to decide if a price is fair or not, to them. There are other metrics, like the time that can be saved by using the product (ie. some way to quantify the product "use value"), but the production cost is often quite useful to detect abuses--and boy, aren't there a lot of attempts of such abuses.

> production cost is one of the metrics customers use to decide if a price is fair or not

only approximately, and only if the consumer really knows the cost.

Think jewlery (like diamonds), or expensive brand name goods like designer clothing. The production cost for those goods is "low", but the charge is in marketing and status symbol representation (which is modified via marketing).

Re: Subscription Hell

#476

Post by chii »

sincerely wrote: post #244
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> if you need them for your career.

if you need 'em for your career, then make the person providing your career pay for it.

if you're self-employed, then use an open alternative.

Re: Subscription Hell

#477

Post by QAkICoU7IDNkpFu »

vladdanilov wrote: post #462
zenhack wrote: post #108

> Take my colleague Connie Loizos’ article from yesterday reporting on a new venture fund. The text itself is about 3.5 kilobytes uncompressed, but the total payload of the page if nothing is cached is more than 10 MB, or more than 3000x the data usage of the actual text itself. This pattern has become so common that it has been called the website obesity crisis. Yet, all of our research shows people want high-defini…

There are glaring optimization issues. Over 6MB of those 10MB is just one bloated photo [1]. It can be compressed down to 1-2MB. Moreover, if it was a proper responsive image, it would not be larger than 100-200 KB for most readers because a good JPEG compressor can pull 2 bits per pixel [2]. Ironically, image optimization apps don't get that much coverage. [1] https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/vikbaj…

I just took that image (which is 3300 x 2200), resized it to 50% and got 1.05 MiB, instead of 5.85. Threw it through JPEGMini (a paid product, mind you) and got 729 KiB.

Guetzli is nice, but it's slow as balls. JPEGMini is a decent alternative. (I'm a happy customer of JPEGMini, BTW. No other affiliations.)

Re: Subscription Hell

#478

Post by chii »

koliber wrote: post #453
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…

There is a difference between paying for tools that bring value, and discretionary spending. If I am paying for software that I use to be more efficient and increases my profits, I am OK with a subscription model, or whatever model is offered. This is, as long as the cost of the software is considerably lower than the value bump I get from using it. With discretionary spending, it takes a lot for me to buy a subscrip…

> If there was a way to pay, say $20 per month, and have a set of credits that I could redeem at Washington Post, The Economist, New York Times, Bloomberg, etc, on a per-article basis

i think this model doesn't work (but i'm willing to be pleasantly surprised). Imagine you read 10 articles a day, 30 days a month. That's 300 articles - that's about 6.6 cents an article, spread across many different organizations.

Those articles will need a readership in the 10,000's per article for any sort of return on investment with those sort of prices. Granted, a high quality article is going to be able to reach that, but there's limited time per person to read, and that 10 articles per day read is on the high end - most people read much less than that.

Re: Subscription Hell

#479

Post by chii »

Sylos wrote: post #107
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 the EU, the GDPR will make data takeout APIs (or some guy exporting as CSV and mailing it to you) mandatory.

> data takeout APIs

the data will be useless other than as a source of information. If you have data for an online vector editor, the vector data can be legally taken out via a common format (such as json), but there'll be no importers for this shape of data.

Any business can easily construe a common machine readable format that's also completely custom, and unimportable anywhere else, to satisfy the letter of the law.

Re: Subscription Hell

#480

Post by chii »

exolymph wrote: post #447
petra wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> what the market will bear defines prices.

only if there's no competition, or there are substantial barriers to entry (such as regulation).

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