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How times a' changing. Just few years ago this would've shipped as a standalone desktop software that would've cost a one-time fee in low hundreds at most, but

How times a' changing. Just few years ago this would've shipped as a standalone desktop software that would've cost a one-time fee in low hundreds at most, but more likely under a $100. This is after all a vector editor with specialized clip art library. This BioRender thing apparently costs over 400 per year at its cheapest. I realize that this obviously means that there's a demand even at these terms, but that's just... disconcerting to see for some reason. It's one of the cases when conversion from an installable product to an online service is done merely to justify recurrent monthly charges rather than for any actual user benefits.

berdon 7y ago
Why is this being down-voted? It is a clip art application with a monthly subscription cost. It seems like a pretty on-the-mark comment.
- psychometry 7y ago
  They designed 20,000 specialized vector graphic icons. Do you think it's quick and/or cheap to do that?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It's not. But it's entirely orthogonal to this being an application vs. a Service as a Software Substitute.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  It may be so.Bu then again,JIRA is essentially an app that allows to drag a fancy digital post-it across 3 different stages..Yet somehow it is Atlassian booked 800M revenue last year...
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    JIRA is much more complex than that; unlike with BioRender, yours is an unfair simplification. Your argument can be rescued though by replacing JIRA with Trello.
    - wbl 7y ago
      Which makes it less, not more, useful. Zombie states, too many workflow possibilities tending to the baroque.
- arcticfox 7y ago
  This pricing is market-based though; if the market won't support it, the price won't exist. The parent's complaint is strange in that light: it's someone lamenting the loss of apparently vastly under-priced software, but framing it as unjust.
plufz 7y ago
I dont remember specialized software for medicine being exactly that cheap... But I see your point.
- ethelward 7y ago
  That's not specialized software for medicine, it's a clipart library (like we had on additional CDs for Paint Artist and the others) slapped on top of a basic vector editor. It does not take anything from the quality of this product, but you can not really compare it to programs that have dozens of norms and verification processes to go through.
  - digitalis_837 7y ago
    honestly, I thought it was just 'another' clipart platform at first, too but it seems like the CEO has some pretty solid experience in the field https://biorender.com/about/ https://biorender.com/about/. Been using it for a while learned a bit in their newsletter about their icon production process. looks like they consult experts in the field and update the library daily. pretty cool!
    - wyldfire 7y ago
      digitalis_837, your account is very young and you are making lots of claims about the software. Can you disclose more identifying details about yourself and your relationship with the vendor, beyond merely a customer, if any?
sdegutis 7y ago
A lot of software that should reasonably be desktop is now web only. I wanted to download a copy of http://8bitworkshop.com http://8bitworkshop.com so my son could try it at home where we don't have internet, but there is no download button. I could download the source code and run it locally via NPM, but that requires an internet connection to install properly. I get why companies are doing this, they want easier cross platform, easier deployability of updates, easier to find devs who know the toolchain, easier to make it work on mobile. Everything's easier with the web, I guess. But is it worth it?
- aaronharnly 7y ago
  I’m intrigued by “home where we don’t have Internet” — is that a deliberate choice, a side effect of other choices, a happenstance?
  - sdegutis 7y ago
    It was a choice. I was tired of my family being disconnected from one another, getting nothing done, and being always connected to some electronic consumption device. We got more done in the past 6 months with no TV, internet, or data plan, than in the past 6 years. Also, social media usually tends to dull a person's enjoyment of life, turn them pessimistic and depressed, make them lazy and prefer endless consumption to hard work, and make them feel resentful of the people in their life. Even "harmless" time killer websites do this like reddit and imgur, and even HN. I've seen all these affects and more for years on our family and many other families we know, and after getting rid of internet, TV and data plan, our life has turned around substantially. The internet is a great resource and I use it when I need it, by going to the library and using their wifi. But when I don't need it, it just becomes a burden and a crutch if I have it with me at all times.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Good to hear it works for you. I'm honestly surprised, though. I tried something like this on myself 10 years ago, during my university years - but I quickly discovered that not having Internet at home makes it hard to to get anything done (computer science studies, though) and keep up-to-date with university matters. It also disconnected me socially from other students. I abandoned this after ~a year, because the only thing it did was a) making me almost live on the campus by necessity, b) making life slightly more annoying for other people in the house. That was 10 years ago. I suppose today the social disconnection would be even more pronounced. So I have to ask: do you live in a small town or a large one? Are your kids pre-school/primary school aged? Are your and your spouse's professions outside of the technical or Internet-requiring fields?
vikramkr 7y ago
I think that online subscriptions come with a different set of expectations- I dont expect offline software to ever really get constant updates, work on any computer, and so on. Not have trouble transfering licenses when upgrading and so on. I think that I'm fine with this sort of shift in general as long as companies are actually delivering on those expectations, but I would def be miffed if i was paying monthly and the company stopped developing new icons/updating features etc.
- cheez 7y ago
  As someone who sells "offline" software, I can tell you customers expect you to be 100% up to date on everything. New Windows feature? Howcome you're not using it! And then they also want to use it on Windows 2K :)
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    I guess I would say I expect it in offline software, but I also expect it to be in the form of an upgrade to the new version of the software that i have to buy. Like having office 2007 installed and having to buy the new version of office when it comes out, vs office 365 where the new version is always part of the deal
    - cheez 7y ago
      Notice the example you used was 2007. Today's model is 365, everything is a subscription, which works great for offline software: no server to maintain except a static site.
tathougies 7y ago
Presumably they keep it updated. Also the 48 hour turnaround time for new icons seems like a valuavle service, not available with an installable
- digitalis_837 7y ago
  honestly, life-saver. I requested a few icons and asked for it to be done last minute... they actually pulled through! even consulted me about the accuracy. would recommend
  - apathy 7y ago
    This. I sent them some vector art that was already better than 99.9% of figures in quality review articles, and they made it better. Nobody I know that has signed up for this service has regretted it for one second. (Contrast with Dropbox for Business, which is a horrifying overengineered pile of shit that actively subtracts value) I get the impression that the engineer types are missing the point. Maybe it’s possible to produce a better product more cheaply and satisfy a greater segment of this market. But others have been trying that for 50 years and somehow biorender is the rising star in their market. Perhaps, and I’m just spitballing here, perhaps the haters might benefit from reviewing a Hacker News Classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 It’s not about the difficulty, or the effort, or the novelty of a service. It’s the value to a market that is willing to pay and underserved. Over and over again...
liamhawkins 7y ago
Fair points, however part of the service is 3-7 day turnaround time on custom illustrations at no extra cost. Also the Student rate is 15$/month and you can sign up for one month, close your subscriptions and your figures and custom commissioned illustrations are still available to you. My lab just started using BioRender and so far so good.
- orbifold 7y ago
  Given that adobe creative cloud subscriptions are something like ~30 euro a month, and adobe illustrator is far better than this program it seems like it is a totally overpriced product
  - _coveredInBees 7y ago
    "Better" is entirely subjective. If you are a graphic designer, sure. But that isn't the target market here. Making any one of the figures that are showcased in Illustrator would take even an experienced graphic designer a heck of a lot longer and you would end up paying a lot more to hire a graphic designer to do your graphics than if you just utilized this tool for your medical research graphics.
    - orbifold 7y ago
      There a lot of asset packs available for adobe illustrator. It would surprise me if there weren’t biomedical asset packs available. In fact in all likelihood this piece of software probably uses assets created in illustrator. I agree that this is targeted to a different audience, I just think that the price is off.
gjm11 7y ago
> one of the cases when conversion from an installable product to an online service is done merely to justify recurrent monthly charges rather than for any actual user benefits My impression is that that's pretty much all of the cases. Sometimes there happen to be benefits for the users, but that's mostly by coincidence.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Yup. Also, I've been reading the feature list at https://biorender.com/features https://biorender.com/features, and seeing this: SECURE, TEAM BASED COLLABORATION Store illustrations in our secure web-based application, forever Share illustrations with your lab, team or organization Add or remove team members as needed Secure, web-based portal that auto-saves your work as you go my first thought was literally: I don't want this; that's what files are for. I don't want yet another collaboration platform, on which I have to manage users. I don't want yet another piece of data locked in to a random vendor of uncertain expected lifetime. These features are better handled by Dropbox/Box/other file syncing services. This is not to deny that they did a nice and important job with these icons. They did. But they're also part of an annoying trend of "take what should be desktop software, move it on-line, slap on some 'collaboration' feature, enjoy recurring pricing and taking users' data hostage". I tend to whine a lot about SaaSS and user control, but even ignoring that, I wish we could remove the platform part from SaaS(S). There's no user benefit from each vendor doing their own half-assed reimplementation of a shared file system. There's only increased account management headache, and loss of data ownership.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- siamakfr 7y ago
  When academic teams collaborate on a paper or a poster, what do you think would be more useful- real-time WYSIWYG editor or "here's the file, make the changes you want and then let me know"? Github/Invision/Figma or file servers? Having worked as a researcher, I can tell you it's the latter.
  - nicodjimenez 7y ago
    Why?
    - apathy 7y ago
      Because these teams have never used (eg) google slides to put together a presentation from 3 different continents I have, and I’ll never go back to PowerPoint. Not coincidentally, my lab uses biorender all the time and it saves us an absurd amount of time. We often paste directly from biorender images into google slides. Yeah it’s pedestrian, but it works really, really well. Ask the penny pinchers who look down their nose at this who funds them, how many R01s/R37s/equivalents they hold, etc. $400 for a decently run lab is jack shit. Unless you’re buying Rain-X by the gallon at Sam’s Club and silanizing your own float glass for gels, I suspect there are other expenditures that offer less marginal value. YMMV, but it probably won’t. These guys are doing well because they solved a long standing problem that is worth a lot to a large group of people to make it go away. Every single signup I’ve seen went like this: “How’d you put that together in 5 minutes?” “We used biorender.” “What’s biorender?” “A web application that helps put biomedical illustrations together. If something is missing, you ask and they add it.” (Couple days pass) “Hey we just signed up for it too. Thanks!” YMMV, again. But probably not.
andy_ppp 7y ago
The market decides, if you don't like the cost of a high quality piece of software you don't have to pay for it. The lock-in is pretty standard business practice now. It's a specialised piece of software for biologists and doctors, I'm sure every industry has overpriced software.
- apathy 7y ago
  The phrase you may be looking for is “vertical market” and it’s a phrase that makes MBA types salivate. An underserved and overcapitalized vertical market can support amazing profits.
cosmodisk 7y ago
For people in these fields, $400 is a drop in the ocean. The value one can gain from using it professionally could easily offset yearly subscription costs.
sethbannon 7y ago
I wish you talked about the product itself instead of complaining about SaaS models vs desktop software models. But FWIW you're mistaken about the pricing. There exists a similar tool in the chemistry space called ChemDraw. It's desktop software to visualize chemistry. And the cheapest version costs over $1,500 [1]. The more expensive version costs nearly $5,000. 1: http://www.academac.co.il/cambridge.html http://www.academac.co.il/cambridge.html
- gewa 7y ago
  Coming from the field i have to object, that this software seems more like a Vektor based drawing program with some prebuild components and chemDraw is a huge ecosystem with tons of features.

berdon 7y ago

Why is this being down-voted? It is a clip art application with a monthly subscription cost. It seems like a pretty on-the-mark comment.

psychometry 7y ago
They designed 20,000 specialized vector graphic icons. Do you think it's quick and/or cheap to do that?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's not. But it's entirely orthogonal to this being an application vs. a Service as a Software Substitute.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
cosmodisk 7y ago
It may be so.Bu then again,JIRA is essentially an app that allows to drag a fancy digital post-it across 3 different stages..Yet somehow it is Atlassian booked 800M revenue last year...
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  JIRA is much more complex than that; unlike with BioRender, yours is an unfair simplification. Your argument can be rescued though by replacing JIRA with Trello.
  - wbl 7y ago
    Which makes it less, not more, useful. Zombie states, too many workflow possibilities tending to the baroque.
arcticfox 7y ago
This pricing is market-based though; if the market won't support it, the price won't exist. The parent's complaint is strange in that light: it's someone lamenting the loss of apparently vastly under-priced software, but framing it as unjust.

plufz 7y ago

I dont remember specialized software for medicine being exactly that cheap... But I see your point.

ethelward 7y ago
That's not specialized software for medicine, it's a clipart library (like we had on additional CDs for Paint Artist and the others) slapped on top of a basic vector editor. It does not take anything from the quality of this product, but you can not really compare it to programs that have dozens of norms and verification processes to go through.
- digitalis_837 7y ago
  honestly, I thought it was just 'another' clipart platform at first, too but it seems like the CEO has some pretty solid experience in the field https://biorender.com/about/ https://biorender.com/about/. Been using it for a while learned a bit in their newsletter about their icon production process. looks like they consult experts in the field and update the library daily. pretty cool!
  - wyldfire 7y ago
    digitalis_837, your account is very young and you are making lots of claims about the software. Can you disclose more identifying details about yourself and your relationship with the vendor, beyond merely a customer, if any?

sdegutis 7y ago

A lot of software that should reasonably be desktop is now web only. I wanted to download a copy of http://8bitworkshop.com http://8bitworkshop.com so my son could try it at home where we don't have internet, but there is no download button. I could download the source code and run it locally via NPM, but that requires an internet connection to install properly. I get why companies are doing this, they want easier cross platform, easier deployability of updates, easier to find devs who know the toolchain, easier to make it work on mobile. Everything's easier with the web, I guess. But is it worth it?

aaronharnly 7y ago
I’m intrigued by “home where we don’t have Internet” — is that a deliberate choice, a side effect of other choices, a happenstance?
- sdegutis 7y ago
  It was a choice. I was tired of my family being disconnected from one another, getting nothing done, and being always connected to some electronic consumption device. We got more done in the past 6 months with no TV, internet, or data plan, than in the past 6 years. Also, social media usually tends to dull a person's enjoyment of life, turn them pessimistic and depressed, make them lazy and prefer endless consumption to hard work, and make them feel resentful of the people in their life. Even "harmless" time killer websites do this like reddit and imgur, and even HN. I've seen all these affects and more for years on our family and many other families we know, and after getting rid of internet, TV and data plan, our life has turned around substantially. The internet is a great resource and I use it when I need it, by going to the library and using their wifi. But when I don't need it, it just becomes a burden and a crutch if I have it with me at all times.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Good to hear it works for you. I'm honestly surprised, though. I tried something like this on myself 10 years ago, during my university years - but I quickly discovered that not having Internet at home makes it hard to to get anything done (computer science studies, though) and keep up-to-date with university matters. It also disconnected me socially from other students. I abandoned this after ~a year, because the only thing it did was a) making me almost live on the campus by necessity, b) making life slightly more annoying for other people in the house. That was 10 years ago. I suppose today the social disconnection would be even more pronounced. So I have to ask: do you live in a small town or a large one? Are your kids pre-school/primary school aged? Are your and your spouse's professions outside of the technical or Internet-requiring fields?

vikramkr 7y ago

I think that online subscriptions come with a different set of expectations- I dont expect offline software to ever really get constant updates, work on any computer, and so on. Not have trouble transfering licenses when upgrading and so on. I think that I'm fine with this sort of shift in general as long as companies are actually delivering on those expectations, but I would def be miffed if i was paying monthly and the company stopped developing new icons/updating features etc.

cheez 7y ago
As someone who sells "offline" software, I can tell you customers expect you to be 100% up to date on everything. New Windows feature? Howcome you're not using it! And then they also want to use it on Windows 2K :)
- vikramkr 7y ago
  I guess I would say I expect it in offline software, but I also expect it to be in the form of an upgrade to the new version of the software that i have to buy. Like having office 2007 installed and having to buy the new version of office when it comes out, vs office 365 where the new version is always part of the deal
  - cheez 7y ago
    Notice the example you used was 2007. Today's model is 365, everything is a subscription, which works great for offline software: no server to maintain except a static site.

tathougies 7y ago

Presumably they keep it updated. Also the 48 hour turnaround time for new icons seems like a valuavle service, not available with an installable

digitalis_837 7y ago
honestly, life-saver. I requested a few icons and asked for it to be done last minute... they actually pulled through! even consulted me about the accuracy. would recommend
- apathy 7y ago
  This. I sent them some vector art that was already better than 99.9% of figures in quality review articles, and they made it better. Nobody I know that has signed up for this service has regretted it for one second. (Contrast with Dropbox for Business, which is a horrifying overengineered pile of shit that actively subtracts value) I get the impression that the engineer types are missing the point. Maybe it’s possible to produce a better product more cheaply and satisfy a greater segment of this market. But others have been trying that for 50 years and somehow biorender is the rising star in their market. Perhaps, and I’m just spitballing here, perhaps the haters might benefit from reviewing a Hacker News Classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 It’s not about the difficulty, or the effort, or the novelty of a service. It’s the value to a market that is willing to pay and underserved. Over and over again...

liamhawkins 7y ago

Fair points, however part of the service is 3-7 day turnaround time on custom illustrations at no extra cost. Also the Student rate is 15$/month and you can sign up for one month, close your subscriptions and your figures and custom commissioned illustrations are still available to you. My lab just started using BioRender and so far so good.

orbifold 7y ago
Given that adobe creative cloud subscriptions are something like ~30 euro a month, and adobe illustrator is far better than this program it seems like it is a totally overpriced product
- _coveredInBees 7y ago
  "Better" is entirely subjective. If you are a graphic designer, sure. But that isn't the target market here. Making any one of the figures that are showcased in Illustrator would take even an experienced graphic designer a heck of a lot longer and you would end up paying a lot more to hire a graphic designer to do your graphics than if you just utilized this tool for your medical research graphics.
  - orbifold 7y ago
    There a lot of asset packs available for adobe illustrator. It would surprise me if there weren’t biomedical asset packs available. In fact in all likelihood this piece of software probably uses assets created in illustrator. I agree that this is targeted to a different audience, I just think that the price is off.

gjm11 7y ago

> one of the cases when conversion from an installable product to an online service is done merely to justify recurrent monthly charges rather than for any actual user benefits My impression is that that's pretty much all of the cases. Sometimes there happen to be benefits for the users, but that's mostly by coincidence.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Yup. Also, I've been reading the feature list at https://biorender.com/features https://biorender.com/features, and seeing this: SECURE, TEAM BASED COLLABORATION Store illustrations in our secure web-based application, forever Share illustrations with your lab, team or organization Add or remove team members as needed Secure, web-based portal that auto-saves your work as you go my first thought was literally: I don't want this; that's what files are for. I don't want yet another collaboration platform, on which I have to manage users. I don't want yet another piece of data locked in to a random vendor of uncertain expected lifetime. These features are better handled by Dropbox/Box/other file syncing services. This is not to deny that they did a nice and important job with these icons. They did. But they're also part of an annoying trend of "take what should be desktop software, move it on-line, slap on some 'collaboration' feature, enjoy recurring pricing and taking users' data hostage". I tend to whine a lot about SaaSS and user control, but even ignoring that, I wish we could remove the platform part from SaaS(S). There's no user benefit from each vendor doing their own half-assed reimplementation of a shared file system. There's only increased account management headache, and loss of data ownership.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
siamakfr 7y ago
When academic teams collaborate on a paper or a poster, what do you think would be more useful- real-time WYSIWYG editor or "here's the file, make the changes you want and then let me know"? Github/Invision/Figma or file servers? Having worked as a researcher, I can tell you it's the latter.
- nicodjimenez 7y ago
  Why?
  - apathy 7y ago
    Because these teams have never used (eg) google slides to put together a presentation from 3 different continents I have, and I’ll never go back to PowerPoint. Not coincidentally, my lab uses biorender all the time and it saves us an absurd amount of time. We often paste directly from biorender images into google slides. Yeah it’s pedestrian, but it works really, really well. Ask the penny pinchers who look down their nose at this who funds them, how many R01s/R37s/equivalents they hold, etc. $400 for a decently run lab is jack shit. Unless you’re buying Rain-X by the gallon at Sam’s Club and silanizing your own float glass for gels, I suspect there are other expenditures that offer less marginal value. YMMV, but it probably won’t. These guys are doing well because they solved a long standing problem that is worth a lot to a large group of people to make it go away. Every single signup I’ve seen went like this: “How’d you put that together in 5 minutes?” “We used biorender.” “What’s biorender?” “A web application that helps put biomedical illustrations together. If something is missing, you ask and they add it.” (Couple days pass) “Hey we just signed up for it too. Thanks!” YMMV, again. But probably not.

andy_ppp 7y ago

The market decides, if you don't like the cost of a high quality piece of software you don't have to pay for it. The lock-in is pretty standard business practice now. It's a specialised piece of software for biologists and doctors, I'm sure every industry has overpriced software.

apathy 7y ago
The phrase you may be looking for is “vertical market” and it’s a phrase that makes MBA types salivate. An underserved and overcapitalized vertical market can support amazing profits.

cosmodisk 7y ago

For people in these fields, $400 is a drop in the ocean. The value one can gain from using it professionally could easily offset yearly subscription costs.

sethbannon 7y ago

I wish you talked about the product itself instead of complaining about SaaS models vs desktop software models. But FWIW you're mistaken about the pricing. There exists a similar tool in the chemistry space called ChemDraw. It's desktop software to visualize chemistry. And the cheapest version costs over $1,500 [1]. The more expensive version costs nearly $5,000. 1: http://www.academac.co.il/cambridge.html http://www.academac.co.il/cambridge.html

gewa 7y ago
Coming from the field i have to object, that this software seems more like a Vektor based drawing program with some prebuild components and chemDraw is a huge ecosystem with tons of features.