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You're right. The fact that people can make outsize rewards from subscription services are the reason that even small single use tools are now 'services'. I h
by kybernetikos 6y ago
You're right. The fact that people can make outsize rewards from subscription services are the reason that even small single use tools are now 'services'.
I have a piece of software that removes the background from my video feed. It's a subscription, and it regularly phones home.
I have a piece of software that lets me visually combine, rotate and reorder pdfs. It's a subscription.
Even the simplest things, like a 'torch' are ad-supported on android these days.
It's miserable fighting off a million people who want to help me for 'less than the daily price of your coffee'.
And that's ignoring the fact that so many of these subscriptions are really quite expensive - they adopt the standard cloud pricing of 9.99 per month, even when the service they're offering is not much difference than what a $5 piece of shareware would have provided in the distant past.
- devit 6y agoPretty sure there is normal software for those uses, and you can get free/open source apps with no ads from F-Droid for all basic needs (such as a "torch").
- TeMPOraL 6y agoUnfortunately, normal software cannot afford the marketing budget a service can (particularly a VC-backed service).
- bcrosby95 6y agoThere's gotta be a way to crowd source this. Like a subreddit for people interested in apps/software that isn't subscription based.
- sofixa 6y agoLike r/selfhosted?
- cratermoon 6y agoThere's a bible app called YouVersion that's by far the most popular app on both iOS and Android. "YouVersion Bible is notorious for privacy violations and dangerous data collection. Yet, here it is: still seated firmly in the Play Store, racking up over 100 million installs with a whopping 22 permission requests." https://www.cnet.com/news/why-so-many-android-christian-apps-have-unholy-privacy-policies/ https://www.cnet.com/news/why-so-many-android-christian-apps... They company owns the bible.com domain. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. billionaire founder/owner David Green as supported it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2012/09/18/david-green-the-biblical-billionaire-backing-the-evangelical-movement/?sh=55f585845807 https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2012/09/18/david-g...
- debaserab2 6y agoI don't think either of those subscription services are unicorns or making billionaires. If anything I'm happy to see indie developers able to maintain a decent income making useful (but often niche) tools that other people can use. Of all the SaaS services I pay for, it's one like these that I'm the least apprehensive spending money on. Video codecs are hard. PDFs are a labyrinth of a file format with traps everywhere. I bet whatever open source equivalent you'd find of these services either require some serious additional tooling to get what you want or are too outdated to be useful anymore because the maintainer moved on from the project.
- akiselev 6y agoVideo codecs are hard, but the reason video utils become services is because the best (by a mile) video codec libraries are (L)GPLed. I suspect the same is true for the best PDF libraries that would be integrated into desktop applications (meaning compiled like SumatraPDF's library, since there are plenty of JS/Python permissive licensed libraries). All the developers I know immediately jump down a level to ffmpeg command line utils or up a level to proper video editing software (often pirated, no less), so there's no incentive to develop a high quality simple video editor.
- mcoliver 6y agokdenlive - https://kdenlive.org https://kdenlive.org shotcut - http://www.shotcutapp.com http://www.shotcutapp.com olive - https://github.com/olive-editor/olive https://github.com/olive-editor/olive
- makapuf 6y agoBlender - https://www.blender.org/features/video-editing/ https://www.blender.org/features/video-editing/
- kybernetikos 6y agoYeah, I wonder if things like ffmpeg would have been created in the current culture, or if it would have been a VC funded webservice paid for with a monthly subscription, and when the company eventually failed, all the code would have vanished with it, rather than being progressively improved by a large number of people through the years and having a phenomenal positive impact on the world.
- yaomtc 6y ago> Even the simplest things, like a 'torch' are ad-supported on android these days. This has a built-in feature on every smartphone for years now. These apps are a scam.
- redkoala 6y agoApp stores should really prevent these type of no value add apps.
- naveen_jain07 6y agoAnd after that you will say big giant tech companies controlling our businesses.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoIt's a tough problem. Unconstrained market is a cesspool. Somebody needs to set some limits - the question is, who and what.
- a1369209993 6y agoApp store monopoly and monopsony status is a seperate (albeit related) problem from app stores having no or shitty quality control. If a non-monop'y app store wants to control peoples' business... well, they can't; people will just use a different app store; that's the point.
- eecc 6y agoI guess it was a mere rhetorical artifice to mean "if not useless, of very scarse added value".
- jfengel 6y agoIs there a standard way to get at "turn the screen white and the brightness up"? I used to have a torch app that had that mode (presumably, lower power than driving the flash LED), along with a few others (like a night-vision-preserving red screen). Hardly the most challenging app in the world, but it was worth the $.99 I paid for it. I probably could have written it myself, and while I personally would likely have made it free, I felt ok giving somebody a tiny tip for it.
- yabudemada 6y agoMS Office is a great example of this because they squeeze money out of folks when it seems the features added are minimal. The only interesting aspect is cloud-collaboration, but that could be P2P instead. I'm willing to wager most folks still use the same subset of office functionality: page layouts and fonts and such have been around for a while; financial formulas rarely change; etc. But yet, they are charged an arm-and-a-leg for the "cloud." And then there's Amazon with their lambdas—trying to convince people that they should forget how to program and rely on a plethora of beautiful, shiny one-liners.
- deckard1 6y agoMS Office is a good example, and like you mentioned Word is pretty much Word from 10 years ago. But you know who else does this? Book publishers. Specifically, textbook publishers. Every year there is a new edition of a calculus or algebra book. So this is a business model that has been around for awhile, and takes a variety of shapes. Such as planned obsolescence. Software has it easy today, though. They can just cry "security updates" and instantly have a solid case for the subscription model. Even if it is nonsense.
- mgkimsal 6y ago> They can just cry "security updates" and instantly have a solid case for the subscription model or they can cry "changes in browser and OS!" stuff that worked 5 years ago may not work the same today, or at all. Having a business model around it to help keep up with changes that are largely outside the control of that vendor helps ensure the value still stands. Or... new value can be unlocked - want your useful service to be able to handle that new video format, or compression, or audio format? I seem to remember something as 'trivial' as Apple moving MacBooks to "retina" displays caused a lot of problems and non-trivial amount of work for a lot of tools and services to be able to work 'correctly' with the new formats.
- cratermoon 6y agoThree words: Adobe Creative Cloud
- 6y ago
- whack 6y ago> It's miserable fighting off a million people who want to help me for 'less than the daily price of your coffee'. Is it also miserable "fighting off" a million companies who want to sell you stuff for the daily price of a coffee? Stuff like T-Shirts, books, newspapers, candy, etc? You seem to have a patronizing attitude towards software products/services. You seem to think that they are so simple, that they should be free. And you seem to be upset that the software's author would dare to charge money for their work. I would never begrudge someone wanting to get paid for their labor. I probably wouldn't hire them... just like I don't buy the vast majority of things that people try to sell to me. But I would never begrudge someone for wanting to get paid for their time either. If you don't think a piece of software is deserving of its subscription fee, you can always... not buy it.
- OkGoDoIt 6y agoIt’s not hard to find a T-shirt I can wear over and over again without having to keep paying for it. Nowadays it’s nearly impossible to find software that lets you pay once at a reasonable price. So yeah, it is very frustrating to fight off subscriptions.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoSo write your own software for your needs and sell it for a one off price? But you presumably won't because the incentive isn't great enough. Which is exactly why people milk subs. And if you're not willing to do it for the incentive of a one off price, why should anyone else be?
- Invictus0 6y agoAnd the end result of this whole thing is too-expensive software that no one is willing to pay for and doesn't get used, and no one's problem is actually solved. And then when the "startup" fails, the code is of course not turned into a library, and it all starts again.
- Grollicus 6y agoI think this is especially annoying on the app stores, as there is no way to filter for a specific price (range) or in apple's case for apps that don't sell your data to everyone and your neighbor
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> I have a piece of software that lets me visually combine, rotate and reorder pdfs. It's a subscription. That's on you; you can easily get software to do that for free.
- secondcoming 6y agoI think I know which 'torch' app you're talking about as I worked in adtech. That app's author did very well for themselves.