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Subscription Hell

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581–590 of 610 posts

Re: Subscription Hell

#581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd expect prompting users to choose whether reading a story is worth $0.05 to them every time will cause them to read and engage significantly less. The example that gives me a little bit of optimism in the long run is power: people don't really have a problem with the fact that their power bill is pay-per-use, and if it discourages them from unduly wasting power, all the better. But the problem you describe is st…

Regarding bags, that's a strange reaction given that everywhere else I've heard of that introduced a bag tax has seen usage drop dramatically. It's not the price - clearly most people can afford what they charge - it's the psychology that makes you stop and think whether you really need a single use bag for what you've bought.

Oh I completely agree. It's extremely effective as a reminder and has been extremely effective in my city. I think it's great example of damn near Pareto-efficient govt policy.

But when I _do_ forget my reusable bag for whatever reason and have an unwieldy amount of stuff to carry, it would be beyond idiotic to ride that psychological effect all the way into the absurdity of stuffing my arms full of thing (I gather from the original comment I responded to that he wasn't talking about carrying an item or three).

Re: Subscription Hell

#582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They tried several variations for Google Contributor, each less appealing than the last. More recently they introduced Subscribe With Google.

I never got the chance to try. Would anyone care to describe why it wasn't great? (Short summary of why I think it should be great: I want to support the sites and blogs I read. I don't want ads as they are still next to useless.)

From looking at it, it seems like it's active only on a really tiny number of sites.

Re: Subscription Hell

#583

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…

The best model I know is the one used by Sketch ( https://sketchapp.com/pricing/ ): A year of updates. A lifetime of Sketch Your license comes with a year’s worth of updates. Once that year is up, you can keep using the last version of Sketch you downloaded, forever. * You can always open the files you have made * There is no incentive for feature creep caused by having to "sell" the next version to your current user…

IMO this is much better than what IntelliJ does.

Re: Subscription Hell

#584
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a flaw in your logic: You assume that everyone keeps using every app they bought forever. If that was the case, pay-once would be unsustainable. There's also a flaw in this logic: It assumes that all apps require some kind of server provided by the developer in order to run. Once upon a time, standalone software was standalone and could run in perpetuity without requiring anything more of the original devel…

Until your standalone software answers customer support requests automatically, you‘re still going to have variable costs that grow with your user base.

It's trivial to only supply customer support for a limited time after sale of the software, or to offer a separate support contract for customers who require support.

Re: Subscription Hell

#585
post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until your standalone software answers customer support requests automatically, you‘re still going to have variable costs that grow with your user base.

It's trivial to only supply customer support for a limited time after sale of the software, or to offer a separate support contract for customers who require support.

“Hi, I lost my license key!”

“Thanks for contacting us! Our standard license includes support for 12 months after purchase. I’ve attached an offer for our extended support contract. I’m looking forward to your response!”

Re: Subscription Hell

#586

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…

One con of the pay per article is that it siphons money into the money making kinds of stories. The sports and celebrity pages can do a lot of funding for the slow grind investigations that are important for holding those in power accountable. It’s not like an a la carte model couldn’t also fund profitless journalism, but I think it might push things even more in that direction. I think they do understand what people…

When I am paying by the article, I personally am much less likely to pay to see garbage stories.

Re: Subscription Hell

#587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got the chance to try. Would anyone care to describe why it wasn't great? (Short summary of why I think it should be great: I want to support the sites and blogs I read. I don't want ads as they are still next to useless.)

From looking at it, it seems like it's active only on a really tiny number of sites.

If I understand you correctly that means you'd pay but get ads anyway on most pages?

That would explain why it didn't succeed.

In fact it would seem like it was rigged to fail which wouldn't surprise me as both Google and Facebook seems to prefer ad revenue over payments.

Re: Subscription Hell

#588
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 ?

Well, one could argue that the price is near zero. It is very rare software product that does not have somehow usable open source competitor. Then what you are paying for is something else than the zero marginal cost basic functionality. Like support, branding, network effect rents or something else.

Basically user's time invested. They know how to use the current software "I NEED Photoshop to do my job!!!".

Even if some other software has the same or even slightly better abilities at a lower cost, the overall cost of switching is much greater. Especially if someone else is paying for the tools.

Until some software appear that make user's competition more efficient and they are forced to learn new ways to not get out competed.

Then the cycle starts all over again.

Re: Subscription Hell

#589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's strange, as that was not my experience not long ago. I'm thinking there was some miscommunication about the rebate with your family. I received my rebate after I had let my membership lapse without any issue. You can use the rebate even without an active membership. You can even walk up to the customer service counter and get your rebate amount in cash if you want. I ended up getting pizza and took the rest as…

Thanks. I'll report back to The 'Rents.

Actually, I might have been an edge case and not representative of their normal rules.

"The Reward is issued approximately 3 months prior to the member’s renewal date in a Renewal Statement and reflects rewards earned up until the issue date. A member must be an active, paid Executive Member when the Reward is earned and issued to receive the Reward. To receive a refund for the Executive upgrade fee the membership must be canceled or downgraded to a Gold Star or Business Membership and any 2% Reward issued or accrued will be forfeited. Any additional savings and services exclusively for Executive Members will be rescinded." https://www.costco.com/executive-rewards.html

Re: Subscription Hell

#590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They tried several variations for Google Contributor, each less appealing than the last. More recently they introduced Subscribe With Google.

I never got the chance to try. Would anyone care to describe why it wasn't great? (Short summary of why I think it should be great: I want to support the sites and blogs I read. I don't want ads as they are still next to useless.)

Conceptually it's exactly what you'd want, but sites had to opt-in to "some weird experiment" instead of Google rolling upgrading their adsense TOS for a year, and then rolling this out on all sites that use adsense.

The reasons it's stuck in infancy, then, is the list of sites which support it which is here: https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/7324995

(Linked to from https://contributor.google.com/ )

There are about two dozen sites, and even then the only one I even recognize is tvtropes.

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