Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

>I was baffled that we invented a bulb that could last 100 years over a century ago and I still have to change bulbs every year or two.

You need to buy better bulbs.

In 2015 my local utility subsidized the purchase of LED light bulbs and I replaced 59 light bulbs all at once from a variety of vendors including Cree, GE, and Philips.

I've had one, an overhead PAR (led equivalent) bulb in my shower, fail since then and that's almost certainly due to the repeated bouts of 100% humidity and frequent temperature changes.

Of course, I purchased higher-end bulbs knowing that the bargain basement ones are built to cost.

edit: it is actually really weird that you have to replace your bulbs so often because every manufacturer who isn't a ABOLENSKLONG (or something nonsensical like that) Shenzhen-special amazon drop shipper has a 5-10 year warranty and they'd drown in RMA requests if their products failed after a year.

Let me present a great counterexample - Adobe want a monthly subscription for Premiere that's about 40 quid a month.

DaVinci Resolve has a free-as-in-beer and a paid-for version. It works equally well (modulo some codec licensing) on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. If you go with the Free version, you get a maximum of 2160-height timelines (so 4k landscape video or if you want your Tiktoks in high def, 2k portrait) and you don't get the neural network filtering, denoising, and certain fancy effects (film simulation and so on).

If you want to pay for it, it's (currently) about 300 quid, forever. If you bought a key way back in the early days it'll still work in current (18.1.1 at the time of posting this).

This is serious high-end editing, colour grading, and compositing software, at that, it's not iMovie. Things like Midsommar were cut on it. It appears to be the weapon of choice within Netflix.

You can download it for free, stick it on a potato PC with 16GB of RAM and a GT1030, and expect it to at least work, if slowly.

No subscriptions, ever.

Yes, and the only practical answer is to consider how many of these subscriptions you actually need.

For instance, I see no reason why a password manager should be a SaaS. I don't care how long these companies have been around thusfar; in my opinion, using a password manager as-a-service is asking for trouble and is a waste of money. The closer you approach "perfect" security, the more of your personal security you end up handing off to someone else for their profit. Having a handful of sufficiently complex yet memorable passwords and something like Authenticator or Yubikey might be an appropriate compromise.

Image editor? There's Kirta, GIMP, and Inkscape. No, they're not as good as Adobe software, but maybe that's less important to you than not paying Adobe.

Maybe just using Apple Notes can be good enough for you, if you can get used to it. No subscription necessary. Back it up on occasion. There are of course other note taking apps that aren't SaaS.

Too many streaming services? Consider watching less in general. The less you live vicariously through fictional characters, the less those fictional worlds will matter to you. Spend that extra time learning a skill or spending non-screen time with others. Not watching television only seems abnormal in the context of the last half century.

Tired of "live service" games? There's a million older games that you buy once, probably for way cheaper, and don't have a ton of bugs. Nothing is wrong with older games.

Subscriptions are mostly a problem for those with FOMO. Don't care so much about living in the now. Create some distance between you and the technological machine while still being able to interact with it when you think it's sensible. The only way that companies will back off from everything being a subscription is if enough people who don't appreciate it actually take action in their own lives.

Yes, mobile provider and ethics is generally a contradiction in terms. I suppose the issue in your case is with the pricing, not the subscription model: $10 for never expiring 100 GB is objectively better than $10/month for 100 GB/month, even if in some months you would pay a total of $20, some others months you would pay $0. I was thinking more of compute-intensive software services as photo/video manipulation with a server-side (AI models running remote, etc.)

"1 eur per 10mb in the prepaid version vs 13.50 eur per month for 2gb" is simply speechless pricing, mafiosos have a gentler racket.

I am incredibly tired of it. I cancelled every subscription except what I need for my job, and I'm working on moving to one time payment and free software there too.

I've discovered the joy of hosting my own services at my own home, and it has been life changing.