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That's a good point. I'm overall positive about subscription software, but I don't like the fact that it always seems to go hand in hand with DRM and other nons

That's a good point. I'm overall positive about subscription software, but I don't like the fact that it always seems to go hand in hand with DRM and other nonsense. I'd rather they take some modest amount per year and let me do whatever I want with the software. Its a headache to make the software work when the computer is on an isolated network and will never be connected to the internet. Office 365 I'm looking at you.. :P

ryandrake 7y ago
On the other hand, I’m totally against subscription software because I resent having to pay again and again for the same product just to be able to use it a month later. What ever happened to making a product, selling it once to the customer, who then gets to use it as they wish for as long as it works? Why does everything have to be a recurring revenue stream? Because you have software engineers who need something to do? I don’t want to pay your software team over and over so they can keep changing it on me over and over. Just make it once, sell it, then go make something else!
- holy_city 7y ago
  Honestly? Because no software is free from bugs and there will always be a need for support. The difference between single sale and subscription can be life or death for a company, its products, and its support. But if you don't feel that a subscription to a service adds value, please don't buy it and voice your concern to the developers. Especially if they're a small shop. That said, subscriptions can be canceled. For example I needed Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator this month. Got to use those for a fraction of the cost I would have paid five years ago for each program and been stuck with a license. It's more flexible that way. But I understand it doesn't reflect every use case.
  - msla 7y ago
    > That said, subscriptions can be canceled. Ideally. Assuming you haven't bought into a contract, and assuming the company... you know... stops charging you once you stop using their product and "cancel" using the mechanism they provide. That second problem can be mitigated with single-use credit cards, like what privacy.com offers, but if that gets to be too common, I can imagine companies requiring you not use those as a condition of service.
    - a1369209993 7y ago
      > assuming the company [...] stops charging you This is what disputing charges is for. Once you have told them, even once, that you are canceling your subscription, any further charges are fraud and you should respond accordingly.
      - Silhouette 7y ago
        I agree with this, provided that you did notify them in a reasonable way. A random email from an unverified address to the first point of contact you can find with Google is not a reasonable way, for the purposes of this discussion. Nor is a casual ambiguous statement during a long phone call whose meaning clearly wasn't understood, if you don't clarify it at the time but then quote it out of context later. Personally, I like the rule of thumb that it should be no harder to cancel a subscription than to take one out and you should be able to give that notice via the same channel(s) you could use to sign up in the first place, but no-one on either side is required to go any further than that. It keeps everyone honest, but it's also obviously reasonable and proportionate.
        a1369209993 7y ago
        I wouldn't consider the second example telling them, and I wouldn't consider the first you, but I can see how it might be interpreted that way, so fair point. Ultimately, though, they're periodically asking you for money; if you decide to stop giving them money, then things need to work out such they don't get any more of your money.
        Silhouette 7y ago
        Ultimately, though, they're periodically asking you for money; if you decide to stop giving them money, then things need to work out such they don't get any more of your money. Agreed, that is the important thing (though it implicitly assumes that you don't have some contractual obligation to continue making payments for whatever reason). I'm not in any way advocating making legitimate cancellation artificially difficult here. I dislike shady businesses that do that as much as anyone else. I'm just also seeing it from the other side, as someone who has run subscription-based services, because sometimes customers will give ambiguous or conflicting signals and then assume you magically know how to interpret them correctly. A particularly common one in my experience is a subscriber sending an email to ask how to cancel, receiving a prompt reply from you answering their question, but then not actually doing it. Contractually speaking, there seems to be no doubt at that point that their subscription continues and further charges are legitimate. However, if they just forgot to act on the response, and then they come back six months later claiming that they're still being charged after "they asked to cancel", that's always an awkward situation. It gets more awkward if they really haven't been using your product/service since that time, or if they haven't actively been using it but they do have some sort of data stored in it that would be deleted if their subscription ended. It can get much more awkward if they really did literally ask to cancel, but in an insecure/unverifiable way such as an ad-hoc email, and if you did reply advising them of that and explaining the correct procedure, which they didn't then follow. Within reason, we tend to refund as a good will gesture in this sort of situation as long as we believe it was an honest mistake by a customer, but I don't think either the law or whatever payment service was used should be imposing any sort of obligation in that case. Insisting on a clearly defined cancellation process does have the advantage of being unambiguous and therefore reducing the risk of that sort of confusion.
  - grincho 7y ago
    Then charge for bug fixes. Charge for updates that make the application run on a new version of the OS. If those things provide sufficient value, users will pay for them. I've been paying for that for decades for my commercial text editor. And can subscriptions be canceled in practice? If you cancel your Photoshop subscription, your documents suddenly become unopenable. In this way, software subscriptions—at least for software you create with—are like protection money: "Nice documents there. It'd be a shame it anything were to happen to them."
    - Haga 7y ago
      Every system is gambled, if you pay for Bugfixes, company's will create synthetic bugs. Software is crystallized behavior, which rots when not in symbiosis with a developer. Software developer holds the software ecosystem hostage, trying to extract the maximum amount of value.
    - rabidrat 7y ago
      > ...we don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis. -- Bill Gates (1995)
    - mgfist 7y ago
      How would you sell bug fixes? "Hi grincho, how would you like an update for X feature where we fix Y bugs for Z dollars?" Most people would respond by asking why they have to pay more money for things that should be working in the first place. It'll become hard to know whether a developer is fixing new bugs or whether they just wrote some buggy software knowing they'll get more money by selling bug fixes separately rather than writing it correctly in the first place.
      - ryandrake 7y ago
        Right. I should not have to pay again, or subscribe to some “service” to have the company fix their product’s defects. If I buy a vacuum cleaner that randomly rips up my carpet once every 100 sessions, or a garage door that opens by itself in the middle of the night, I should not have to pay the companies to fix them. This is why we have warranties and product recalls, which are conspicuously absent in the software business.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    > The difference between single sale and subscription can be life or death for a company, its products, and its support. Oh come on. Companies have been in business selling stuff for the longest time. It wasn't exactly wrecking capitalism before subscriptions became the normality in the last decade.
    - la_barba 7y ago
      A lot of small companies that were selling shrink-wrapped software have shuttered down - for various reasons no doubt, but the effect of a steady revenue stream on any business cannot be dismissed. Most of the software I use is either free, under some kind of subscription, or has a large corporate brand/vendor behind it. What about you?
      - mehrdadn 7y ago
        What's so special about software here? > the effect of a steady revenue stream on any business cannot be dismissed Really? The effect of a steady revenue stream on any consumers can't be dismissed either, so how about we have those businesses pay us first? Then we can pay them back for their software. Is this how logic works? An effect can't be dismissed, therefore everyone else must dance to produce that effect?
        la_barba 7y ago
        As a consumer, you are free to engage with a business of your choice. Likewise, a business is free to adopt a business model of their choice. That is the only "logic" at play here.
        mehrdadn 7y ago
        > As a consumer, you are free to engage with a business of your choice. Likewise, a business is free to adopt a business model of their choice. That is the only "logic" at play here. So the logic behind "this model is objectively bad and means life or death for a company" was "well, it's a free country, so if you don't like it, go somewhere else"?
  - fredsanford 7y ago
    I bought Office 2007 around the time of its release because a client didn't like whatever word processor I was using. I've used Office 2007 ever since and absolutely have no need for any feature additions. And there were no bugs that affected my use. Why would I subscribe to the current overly bloated Office? Why should I?
    - tjalfi 7y ago
      Office 2007 went end of support in October 2017[0]. Office 365 is a support nightmare but it does have security patches. [0] https://products.office.com/en-us/office-2007-end-of-support https://products.office.com/en-us/office-2007-end-of-support
  - cm2187 7y ago
    I think software is one of the only industries where customers are charged for defects in the product.
    - Silhouette 7y ago
      Indeed. And software developers have largely enjoyed a free ride where they haven't been pursued under consumer protection laws for providing defective products because of the good will built by providing updates to fix defects for a reasonably long time after purchase. If the latter stops, why shouldn't the former?
    - stock_toaster 7y ago
      I think it is also one of the rare industries where the price of the good is so vastly under-priced (often zero!) for the value it provides -- especially if you use the "sell once, update forever" model people claim to desire. Few people would want to pay for it that way though, I would assume. Especially considering that so many people get extremely high quality software for free (open source, free software, apple style "comes with hardware purchase", etc) these days.
- la_barba 7y ago
  >What ever happened to making a product, selling it once to the customer, who then gets to use it as they wish for as long as it works? That was the old business model. It worked well for a while. Then most small software companies that sold general purpose software went out of business doing just that. And with App Stores basically stealing 30% of all your sales, its become even more harder to do that. A lot of major software companies have since moved to the subscription model and have seen a bump in revenue and profit. For me, its not a bad value proposition for things like Office or Photoshop where I appreciate the updates. >I don’t want to pay your software team over and over so they can keep changing it on me over and over. Just make it once, sell it, then go make something else! Interestingly, after Photoshop moved to the subscription model, Serif released their Affinity Photo software that was a one-time-payment-no-subscription software to compete with Photoshop and to cash in on the discontent. I bought it to support their efforts, but I kept using Photoshop because its just a better software and I'm more familiar with it. It will be interesting to see if Serif is still around in 5-10 years..
  - ch_sm 7y ago
    > It worked well for a while. […] And with App Stores basically stealing 30% of all your sales … I’ve never understood that argument. Physical media production, packaging and shelf space was way more expensive than 30%. Not trying to justify the Apple’s Premium here, just pointing out that it’s a lot cheaper than physical retail used to be. > I kept using Photoshop because its just a better software... In some ways it is, in others it is not.
    - la_barba 7y ago
      Well, I could sell it on my website and keep 100% of the sales? Modern operating systems seem to think any binary is malware these days. Windows ads a NTFS metadata tag to any file thats downloaded online and will throw up scary looking warnings when you try to run it. And the security folks spent years writing columns telling people not to download "random" binaries from the internet. So now we download "random" binaries from the App Store. Ofcource the app store has very little interest (beyond bad PR) in actually testing or ensuring that the application is not malicious, because who wants to hire tens of thousands of people for that when you can just use an "intelligent" algorithm to figure it out. They will pass the buck back to the vendor in a nanosecond when they discover malware in the app store. They're still going to keep the 30% of sales though. I'm not bitter, I promise! :)
- 8ytecoder 7y ago
  I like the jetbrains model. You can always stop paying whenever you want and you get to own whatever last version you hold.
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    I'm really curious how well that actually works for Jetbrains, and if it would work for a new entrant with a different financing structure.
  - Stratoscope 7y ago
    That's not exactly how the JetBrains perpetual fallback license works. You don't get a license for the last version you used under your subscription. You get a license for the version you had 12 months before you ended your subscription. If you buy an annual subscription, you are paying for 12 months up front, so you immediately get a fallback license for the version that is available at the time you start or renew the subscription. If you buy a monthly subscription, then after you've paid for 12 months you get a fallback license for the version that was available at the beginning of your subscription. If you then keep your subscription active and later cancel, you get a fallback license for the version that was available 12 months before you canceled. https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-a-perpetual-fallback-license- https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
    - Silhouette 7y ago
      That looks like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory -- a model that could have been a beneficial arrangement for everyone, turned into something overtly customer-hostile with a rip-off feel to it.
      - dodobirdlord 7y ago
        Doesn't seem that off to me. Perhaps you're just thinking about it from the wrong perspective. Jetbrains has a price in mind for what they want to sell their software for, $X. You can buy it whenever you want for $X. To demonstrate that you may want to buy the next version of their software, they'll let you use the most recent version of their software for 12 months after your purchase, at which point they will stop and you will have to use the version you purchased. Alternatively, as a different service, you can subscribe to the most up-to-date version of their software for a monthly fee. In an example of great customer service, Jetbrains will treat you at the end of each rolling 12 month period of subscription as though you had bought their product 12 months ago, and they will give you a free copy of that product! If you're bothered that you can't subscribe to their latest-version service and then end your subscription and keep using the product, that's just silly. The price of the product is not $X/12, it's $X, and if you want it you can freely pay $X for it.

ryandrake 7y ago

On the other hand, I’m totally against subscription software because I resent having to pay again and again for the same product just to be able to use it a month later. What ever happened to making a product, selling it once to the customer, who then gets to use it as they wish for as long as it works? Why does everything have to be a recurring revenue stream? Because you have software engineers who need something to do? I don’t want to pay your software team over and over so they can keep changing it on me over and over. Just make it once, sell it, then go make something else!

holy_city 7y ago
Honestly? Because no software is free from bugs and there will always be a need for support. The difference between single sale and subscription can be life or death for a company, its products, and its support. But if you don't feel that a subscription to a service adds value, please don't buy it and voice your concern to the developers. Especially if they're a small shop. That said, subscriptions can be canceled. For example I needed Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator this month. Got to use those for a fraction of the cost I would have paid five years ago for each program and been stuck with a license. It's more flexible that way. But I understand it doesn't reflect every use case.
- msla 7y ago
  > That said, subscriptions can be canceled. Ideally. Assuming you haven't bought into a contract, and assuming the company... you know... stops charging you once you stop using their product and "cancel" using the mechanism they provide. That second problem can be mitigated with single-use credit cards, like what privacy.com offers, but if that gets to be too common, I can imagine companies requiring you not use those as a condition of service.
  - a1369209993 7y ago
    > assuming the company [...] stops charging you This is what disputing charges is for. Once you have told them, even once, that you are canceling your subscription, any further charges are fraud and you should respond accordingly.
    - Silhouette 7y ago
      I agree with this, provided that you did notify them in a reasonable way. A random email from an unverified address to the first point of contact you can find with Google is not a reasonable way, for the purposes of this discussion. Nor is a casual ambiguous statement during a long phone call whose meaning clearly wasn't understood, if you don't clarify it at the time but then quote it out of context later. Personally, I like the rule of thumb that it should be no harder to cancel a subscription than to take one out and you should be able to give that notice via the same channel(s) you could use to sign up in the first place, but no-one on either side is required to go any further than that. It keeps everyone honest, but it's also obviously reasonable and proportionate.
      - a1369209993 7y ago
        I wouldn't consider the second example telling them, and I wouldn't consider the first you, but I can see how it might be interpreted that way, so fair point. Ultimately, though, they're periodically asking you for money; if you decide to stop giving them money, then things need to work out such they don't get any more of your money.
        Silhouette 7y ago
        Ultimately, though, they're periodically asking you for money; if you decide to stop giving them money, then things need to work out such they don't get any more of your money. Agreed, that is the important thing (though it implicitly assumes that you don't have some contractual obligation to continue making payments for whatever reason). I'm not in any way advocating making legitimate cancellation artificially difficult here. I dislike shady businesses that do that as much as anyone else. I'm just also seeing it from the other side, as someone who has run subscription-based services, because sometimes customers will give ambiguous or conflicting signals and then assume you magically know how to interpret them correctly. A particularly common one in my experience is a subscriber sending an email to ask how to cancel, receiving a prompt reply from you answering their question, but then not actually doing it. Contractually speaking, there seems to be no doubt at that point that their subscription continues and further charges are legitimate. However, if they just forgot to act on the response, and then they come back six months later claiming that they're still being charged after "they asked to cancel", that's always an awkward situation. It gets more awkward if they really haven't been using your product/service since that time, or if they haven't actively been using it but they do have some sort of data stored in it that would be deleted if their subscription ended. It can get much more awkward if they really did literally ask to cancel, but in an insecure/unverifiable way such as an ad-hoc email, and if you did reply advising them of that and explaining the correct procedure, which they didn't then follow. Within reason, we tend to refund as a good will gesture in this sort of situation as long as we believe it was an honest mistake by a customer, but I don't think either the law or whatever payment service was used should be imposing any sort of obligation in that case. Insisting on a clearly defined cancellation process does have the advantage of being unambiguous and therefore reducing the risk of that sort of confusion.
- grincho 7y ago
  Then charge for bug fixes. Charge for updates that make the application run on a new version of the OS. If those things provide sufficient value, users will pay for them. I've been paying for that for decades for my commercial text editor. And can subscriptions be canceled in practice? If you cancel your Photoshop subscription, your documents suddenly become unopenable. In this way, software subscriptions—at least for software you create with—are like protection money: "Nice documents there. It'd be a shame it anything were to happen to them."
  - Haga 7y ago
    Every system is gambled, if you pay for Bugfixes, company's will create synthetic bugs. Software is crystallized behavior, which rots when not in symbiosis with a developer. Software developer holds the software ecosystem hostage, trying to extract the maximum amount of value.
  - rabidrat 7y ago
    > ...we don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis. -- Bill Gates (1995)
  - mgfist 7y ago
    How would you sell bug fixes? "Hi grincho, how would you like an update for X feature where we fix Y bugs for Z dollars?" Most people would respond by asking why they have to pay more money for things that should be working in the first place. It'll become hard to know whether a developer is fixing new bugs or whether they just wrote some buggy software knowing they'll get more money by selling bug fixes separately rather than writing it correctly in the first place.
    - ryandrake 7y ago
      Right. I should not have to pay again, or subscribe to some “service” to have the company fix their product’s defects. If I buy a vacuum cleaner that randomly rips up my carpet once every 100 sessions, or a garage door that opens by itself in the middle of the night, I should not have to pay the companies to fix them. This is why we have warranties and product recalls, which are conspicuously absent in the software business.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  > The difference between single sale and subscription can be life or death for a company, its products, and its support. Oh come on. Companies have been in business selling stuff for the longest time. It wasn't exactly wrecking capitalism before subscriptions became the normality in the last decade.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    A lot of small companies that were selling shrink-wrapped software have shuttered down - for various reasons no doubt, but the effect of a steady revenue stream on any business cannot be dismissed. Most of the software I use is either free, under some kind of subscription, or has a large corporate brand/vendor behind it. What about you?
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      What's so special about software here? > the effect of a steady revenue stream on any business cannot be dismissed Really? The effect of a steady revenue stream on any consumers can't be dismissed either, so how about we have those businesses pay us first? Then we can pay them back for their software. Is this how logic works? An effect can't be dismissed, therefore everyone else must dance to produce that effect?
      - la_barba 7y ago
        As a consumer, you are free to engage with a business of your choice. Likewise, a business is free to adopt a business model of their choice. That is the only "logic" at play here.
        mehrdadn 7y ago
        > As a consumer, you are free to engage with a business of your choice. Likewise, a business is free to adopt a business model of their choice. That is the only "logic" at play here. So the logic behind "this model is objectively bad and means life or death for a company" was "well, it's a free country, so if you don't like it, go somewhere else"?
- fredsanford 7y ago
  I bought Office 2007 around the time of its release because a client didn't like whatever word processor I was using. I've used Office 2007 ever since and absolutely have no need for any feature additions. And there were no bugs that affected my use. Why would I subscribe to the current overly bloated Office? Why should I?
  - tjalfi 7y ago
    Office 2007 went end of support in October 2017[0]. Office 365 is a support nightmare but it does have security patches. [0] https://products.office.com/en-us/office-2007-end-of-support https://products.office.com/en-us/office-2007-end-of-support
- cm2187 7y ago
  I think software is one of the only industries where customers are charged for defects in the product.
  - Silhouette 7y ago
    Indeed. And software developers have largely enjoyed a free ride where they haven't been pursued under consumer protection laws for providing defective products because of the good will built by providing updates to fix defects for a reasonably long time after purchase. If the latter stops, why shouldn't the former?
  - stock_toaster 7y ago
    I think it is also one of the rare industries where the price of the good is so vastly under-priced (often zero!) for the value it provides -- especially if you use the "sell once, update forever" model people claim to desire. Few people would want to pay for it that way though, I would assume. Especially considering that so many people get extremely high quality software for free (open source, free software, apple style "comes with hardware purchase", etc) these days.
la_barba 7y ago
>What ever happened to making a product, selling it once to the customer, who then gets to use it as they wish for as long as it works? That was the old business model. It worked well for a while. Then most small software companies that sold general purpose software went out of business doing just that. And with App Stores basically stealing 30% of all your sales, its become even more harder to do that. A lot of major software companies have since moved to the subscription model and have seen a bump in revenue and profit. For me, its not a bad value proposition for things like Office or Photoshop where I appreciate the updates. >I don’t want to pay your software team over and over so they can keep changing it on me over and over. Just make it once, sell it, then go make something else! Interestingly, after Photoshop moved to the subscription model, Serif released their Affinity Photo software that was a one-time-payment-no-subscription software to compete with Photoshop and to cash in on the discontent. I bought it to support their efforts, but I kept using Photoshop because its just a better software and I'm more familiar with it. It will be interesting to see if Serif is still around in 5-10 years..
- ch_sm 7y ago
  > It worked well for a while. […] And with App Stores basically stealing 30% of all your sales … I’ve never understood that argument. Physical media production, packaging and shelf space was way more expensive than 30%. Not trying to justify the Apple’s Premium here, just pointing out that it’s a lot cheaper than physical retail used to be. > I kept using Photoshop because its just a better software... In some ways it is, in others it is not.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    Well, I could sell it on my website and keep 100% of the sales? Modern operating systems seem to think any binary is malware these days. Windows ads a NTFS metadata tag to any file thats downloaded online and will throw up scary looking warnings when you try to run it. And the security folks spent years writing columns telling people not to download "random" binaries from the internet. So now we download "random" binaries from the App Store. Ofcource the app store has very little interest (beyond bad PR) in actually testing or ensuring that the application is not malicious, because who wants to hire tens of thousands of people for that when you can just use an "intelligent" algorithm to figure it out. They will pass the buck back to the vendor in a nanosecond when they discover malware in the app store. They're still going to keep the 30% of sales though. I'm not bitter, I promise! :)
8ytecoder 7y ago
I like the jetbrains model. You can always stop paying whenever you want and you get to own whatever last version you hold.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  I'm really curious how well that actually works for Jetbrains, and if it would work for a new entrant with a different financing structure.
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  That's not exactly how the JetBrains perpetual fallback license works. You don't get a license for the last version you used under your subscription. You get a license for the version you had 12 months before you ended your subscription. If you buy an annual subscription, you are paying for 12 months up front, so you immediately get a fallback license for the version that is available at the time you start or renew the subscription. If you buy a monthly subscription, then after you've paid for 12 months you get a fallback license for the version that was available at the beginning of your subscription. If you then keep your subscription active and later cancel, you get a fallback license for the version that was available 12 months before you canceled. https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-a-perpetual-fallback-license- https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
  - Silhouette 7y ago
    That looks like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory -- a model that could have been a beneficial arrangement for everyone, turned into something overtly customer-hostile with a rip-off feel to it.
    - dodobirdlord 7y ago
      Doesn't seem that off to me. Perhaps you're just thinking about it from the wrong perspective. Jetbrains has a price in mind for what they want to sell their software for, $X. You can buy it whenever you want for $X. To demonstrate that you may want to buy the next version of their software, they'll let you use the most recent version of their software for 12 months after your purchase, at which point they will stop and you will have to use the version you purchased. Alternatively, as a different service, you can subscribe to the most up-to-date version of their software for a monthly fee. In an example of great customer service, Jetbrains will treat you at the end of each rolling 12 month period of subscription as though you had bought their product 12 months ago, and they will give you a free copy of that product! If you're bothered that you can't subscribe to their latest-version service and then end your subscription and keep using the product, that's just silly. The price of the product is not $X/12, it's $X, and if you want it you can freely pay $X for it.