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Subscription Hell

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Re: Subscription Hell

#71

Post by bastawhiz »

always_good wrote: post #58
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…

One-time payments for software amount to a pyramid scheme where you benefit from the money of future users. That's not without its downsides either, where your userbase grows indefinitely yet doesn't pay for its own support-email rent. There's obviously a middle ground, like being able to at least use the version you paid for indefinitely but having to pay a smaller price to upgrade. But which direction a pricing str…

There's a difference between charging for updates and charging for continued use. What if Sublime Text started charging a monthly fee just to use it? There's no excuse.

> But as far as most software pricing goes, if it's so bad, then people wouldn't pay.

And yet people keep paying ransomware for access to their important files.

Re: Subscription Hell

#72

Post by hsljekskfh »

always_good wrote: post #58
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…

One-time payments for software amount to a pyramid scheme where you benefit from the money of future users. That's not without its downsides either, where your userbase grows indefinitely yet doesn't pay for its own support-email rent. There's obviously a middle ground, like being able to at least use the version you paid for indefinitely but having to pay a smaller price to upgrade. But which direction a pricing str…

No, it demands that you create new features and bug fixes that are worth the cost of upgrading and then people buy it. this is great.

photoshop was fine in 2012. now you can’t get a copy of it from adobe and cd keys sell for more than they originally cost. this is only because adobe wants to take more money from people until the end of time.

Re: Subscription Hell

#74

Post by ChuckMcM »

lajhsdfkl wrote: post #42
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…

How do they win if they end up making less money? What you are paying for is journalists doing research every month to produce those articles so you could access them on demand. If you want that on demand access you need to pay them for the work they do every month not the work they do one off.

They win because they make more money.

One of the challenges is that if you look at this as a single consumer / single producer model it is very hard to see the economics. That is why internet advertising is also hard to see sometimes. Nearly everyone I know tells me "How do they make any money on internet ads? I never click on them." And for lots of people that is true, but for another population it is not true. And when you look at page views as a 'population' of say a million different people, and 1% of them, or 10,000 of them click on an advertisement that pays $0.10 per click, that is $1,000 of revenue from that one article. And if the marginal cost to host a single article on a web site is $1 per month, there is tremendous leverage there.

So this model insures that nearly everybody that reads and article has paid a small amount. This is more reliable income than Internet Ads even with 99% of the readers not clicking. And the article lives forever, and as we see on this web site some articles get cycled through popularity again and again every couple of years. People who have blog sites and track metrics see this effect when someone puts them on Reddit (for example).

A static article page can service a lot of page views with very little hardware. Nginx on a current server can serve the same article up at 50,000 page views per second if there is enough network bandwidth and the article is on an SSD. Hosting costs go up when you add a bunch of dynamic content but much of that can be hosted on CDNs and distributed to the edge. Done with any mount of care and planning and it costs little to host material on the web.

Re: Subscription Hell

#75

Post by lajhsdfkl »

rahoulb wrote: post #65
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…

Maybe if the service is only marginally profitable without acting unethically it should shut down.

Showing ads is unethical now?

>Maybe if the service is only marginally profitable without acting unethically it should shut down.

Also I love this neo puritan thinking. I'm sure all the users of these services agree with your ideology and you forcing it down their throats is for their own good correct?

Re: Subscription Hell

#77

Post by xab9 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #71
always_good wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One-time payments for software amount to a pyramid scheme where you benefit from the money of future users. That's not without its downsides either, where your userbase grows indefinitely yet doesn't pay for its own support-email rent. There's obviously a middle ground, like being able to at least use the version you paid for indefinitely but having to pay a smaller price to upgrade. But which direction a pricing str…

There's a difference between charging for updates and charging for continued use. What if Sublime Text started charging a monthly fee just to use it? There's no excuse. > But as far as most software pricing goes, if it's so bad, then people wouldn't pay. And yet people keep paying ransomware for access to their important files.

Like Webstorm?

I do feel that I get value for my money and with the yearly fee I get all the updates (which are important in the ever changing world of web development), but sometimes it still feels like protection racket.

Re: Subscription Hell

#78

Post by wernercd »

techsupporter wrote: post #45
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.

I like that you mentioned Office 365 because I see that as "subscription done right." You can still buy perpetual licenses for the components of Office, you can easily store the data you created with those components locally, and if you stop paying for Office-as-a-subscription the same programs still let you view (but not edit) your data. Carrot Weather App is another good one. Pay $5 once to get a really polished we…

Jetbrains also has it done "right" I think... yearly license fee... and the version at the time of payment is "perpetual" while you get to continue getting updates as long as your license is "current".

Stop paying? When you aren't "current" you can either pay up... or downgrade to your perpetual version "owned".

Re: Subscription Hell

#79

Post by hedora »

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…

The real innovation of the *aaS model is that you no longer need to compete with prior versions of your own software or hardware infrastructure. You can hike prices, cut engineering costs, cut some nines off your availability, defeature, or just plain embrace incompetence, and, in the short term, it will improve your balance sheet.

Of course, in the long term, customers will revolt, and do so swiftly, and without mercy.

Re: Subscription Hell

#80

Post by thetruthseeker1 »

I think the problem is the pricing model. If I watch one Netflix movie a month, it’s not really worth 11$ to me. These subscriptions should have tiers starting from few cents - but it may be less a Netflix problem and more a problem of labels and production companies who may not be willing to see it that way and force higher Subscriptions implicitly.
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