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> 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 millio

• OkGoDoIt 6y ago
  It’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 ago
    So 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 ago
      And 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.
      • carmen_sandiego 6y ago
        If you think an $x one-time payment is a great reward for making y, then make y and charge $x. Seems like a free opportunity to me. If it's really so simple, you can easily undercut those doing the subscription model. Unless, of course, $x is not actually that motivating a fee for the work. In which case, it's a bit entitled to expect others to work for a fee that doesn't spur you into action either.
        • Invictus0 6y ago
          It has nothing to do with entitlement. It has to do with the fruit of the labor not being worth the price necessary to remunerate that labor.
    • rightbyte 6y ago
      > So write your own software for your needs and sell it for a one off price? Should he tailor his tshirt too? It is totaly fine to whine about something without fixing the industry by yourself. I for one don't like the movement of commercial software to forced cloud integration. Big or small business. What would have been shareware or naggware would today be SaaS and be gone the day the server shuts down.
      • carmen_sandiego 6y ago
        > Should he tailor his tshirt too? No, because t-shirts are already available for one-off prices. He's already willing to pay enough to motivate people to make them for him. He and/or wider society are not willing to pay enough to motivate people to make him one-time-purchase software, apparently.
    • worldsayshi 6y ago
      Fells like the reason one off pricing is less common is because the model has felt broken since the time of Kazaa (file sharing app from way back), Napster etc. For some reason software is almost exclusively sold through app stores. I don't remember the last time I bought software that wasn't subscription based for a non mobile device. Ok, maybe one app.
      • carmen_sandiego 6y ago
        Well that and probably the pricing psychology of paying what would be your LTV as a subscriber up front. That’s also why I don’t agree subscription software is categorically detrimental but more of a trade off. The benefit is there for both parties: for the seller it’s easier to convert people because you’re only asking for the one month or one year price, for the buyer you’re at most out that same reduced price if the service doesn’t work out. The negative is of course that you don’t own it outright, but it seems a lot of people are happy with the trade off. Apart from HN.
  • yarcob 6y ago
    I think the problem is that people are overestimating the benefits of subscriptions. Yes, subscriptions make recurring revenue. But so does pay-once software, as long as you don't stop getting new users. But your SaaS subscribers also churn, so you can't stop getting new customers there either. Pay-once has the huge advantage that the barrier to entry is much lower. I'm pretty sure that it's much easier to sell a 50€ app than a 10€ subscription. And that 10€ subscription means you need to keep your customers for at least 5 months. If they don't need your app anymore for some reason before that, you would have made more with the pay once app. I mean, if you have recurring costs per user, please go for a subscription. But folks shouldn't assume that pay once is unsustainable. You just get the full lifetime value of the customer up front and you don't have to worry about them churning!
    • Xamayon 6y ago
      >I'm pretty sure that it's much easier to sell a 50€ app than a 10€ subscription. Very much this for me, I will go to great lengths to avoid using software with subscription fees. For example, I was fine with paying several thousand for the Adobe suite and upgrades in CS4-6.5 days but no way will I pay $50/month for the same software. The cost may be less upfront but I have an easier time justifying a single one time purchase than a continual unending string of fees. I don't use the software enough to justify the expense month after month so seeing the bill again and again wears on me until I cancel.
    • samatman 6y ago
      There is a hidden problem here, which is app store policy (all of them, afaik). Setting up a subscription? Easy. Selling software once.. and just once? Also easy. But if you want to follow the classic version model, where users pay for upgrades? Now you have problems. The app stores see a new version as a completely new piece of software, so you have to build up reputation for it from the ground up, and if you want to overlap the old and new version for awhile, which is usually a good idea, you run the risk of people buying the old one by accident and getting mad at you. It's just not a use case which is supported anymore, and it should be.
      • 6y ago
• TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Complaining that subscriptions are a bad deal for me as a user is a valid, if weak, market signalling mechanism. And they are a bad deal, because with each subscription comes a business relationship you have to manage, which is annoying and prone to being forgotten (which is what many companies offering subscriptions, particularly the "less than coffee" types, are very much counting on). > 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? Yes, it is. Advertising is cancer, and quality of life improvements can be measured in your ability to limit your exposure to it. Also, like other commenter mentioned, that stuff isn't subscription-based. It's either consumables, or usable until it wears down - which is something I can control. And most importantly, none of these examples involve me having to manage relationships with any of the vendors. (Technically I have a relationship with each of the vendors, but it's entirely mediated by consumer protection laws. I have nothing to actively manage here, except saving receipts - I only need to know which government agency to write to if the vendor fucks up and doesn't want to reimburse me for it.)
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    > with each subscription comes a business relationship you have to manage, which is annoying and prone to being forgotten Though, this is one advantage of centralized services like Paypal and the iOS ecosystem. At any time, I can see the iOS apps that are auto-billing me and I can rescind the contract from that UI. I don't need to call anyone or hope their <button>Cancel</button> actually does anything. I don't need to watch my statement like a hawk just to make sure they actually stopped billing me or that the 7-day trial that I canceled actually canceled. Anyone can complain about yet another subscription. But tools that help us stay on top of our subscriptions are essential for subscriptions that aren't a bad deal. The banking/financial industry stopped evolving long ago and should have built ubiquitous tools for this. Finally, the complaints about subscription services in this thread aren't very compelling. Nobody wants to buy a subscription yet the app transaction they want on their terms (e.g. buy once, never expire) presumably doesn't exist. It's a pebble's throw from just complaining that you'd prefer if everything was free so that you could keep your hard earned money. Aside, iOS doesn't go far enough. Just so I don't seem like I'm too kind to Apple and subscription services here, they still have a long way to go. If they cared more about consumer protection, they would enact these changes: 1) iOS notification every time we get auto-billed. Every time we get charged, we should get reminded to consider if we actually want the subscription and that people aren't just getting taken advantage of by forgetting. iOS does nicely show you your auto-renewing subscriptions, but my parents don't know how to access it. 2) nuke the ability for weekly charges. A monthly billing cycle should be the minimum because that's what people are used to. It's kinda disgusting that an app can charge $7/wk when 99.9% of auto-renew cycles are monthly, and the user has to happen to notice the "wk" when they agree to it. And if weekly billing is allowed, then the iOS pricing page should standardize it showing you how much that costs per month to make it clear that it's not $7/mo. 3) An app shouldn't be able to default to the yearly billing cycle, it should default to monthly and the user can choose a yearly cycle if they want to, ugh. So many apps will default to the yearly cycle (so, 12*fee upfront) and even require you to pick that one if you want the 7-day free trial. It's hard to see how Apple could design the system to allow this behavior without knowing it's going to make people commit to a billing cycle they don't actually want. 4) You shouldn't be able to display a full-screen interstitial that makes it seem like you have to subscribe to use the app. I was just looking for a good daily workout iPhone app this week and every app had a full-screen splash page where you had to notice the tiny "X" to skip. That said, still better than the US system where giving someone your debit card number in 2021 lets them pull money from your account for years just because you bought a $3 hotdog from them once.
• UnpossibleJim 6y ago
  This was the attitude that made me not use the graphic design degree that I got and move into software development (other than the fact that I had been building and using computers since I was 12). People look at the arts as a "thing you should just do because you enjoy it". Can you make me a logo in your spare time is a common refrain. It seems to have trickled down to software development. Anything anyone has a true passion for, eventually, will be seen as a free commodity by interested parties, unfortunately. I wish it weren't so, but business acumen and true passion are often enemies.
• ajfapoiawejf 6y ago
  I pay for a T-shirt, then I use it for as long as I want. I don't pay every month to wear the T-shirt.
  • munk-a 6y ago
    That's fair - but if you tear that shirt through your own usage or because it was poorly made - that's on you. There is a very fair expectation of continued support when it comes to software, this doesn't need to include new features, but security issues in libraries should continue to be fixed. That implies an ongoing cost that might not have an ongoing revenue stream to sustain it. When it comes to shirts there is no similar expectation of ongoing maintenance - Nike isn't going to come to your house and resew a seam because they did a shoddy job the first time.
• potta_coffee 6y ago
  The parent isn't arguing against paying for software, they're arguing against the subscription model. I was a professional designer once. I happily purchased Adobe software to do my job; it was the best out there. Adobe switched to a subscription model and I no longer use their products. Thankfully, alternatives have presented themselves, and there are now capable software suites that I can pay a fair price for.
• kelnos 6y ago
  > You seem to think that they are so simple, that they should be free. I don't think anyone is claiming that; the opposite of subscription SaaS is not freeware. At some point companies realized that they could have more predictable, long-term, higher revenue streams if instead of selling you a bit of client-side software a single time (with uncertain future business from upgrades), they sold you a subscription to their software, which is often (unnecessarily?) cloud-based. This all feels weird to those of us who have been around for a while and got used to buying software the "old way". Building a cloud/web-based app means it's (mostly) effortlessly multi-platform. You don't have to build separate apps for Windows, Mac, and (occasionally) Linux. (But there's also the e.g. Electron option.) And meanwhile, you can push bugfixes and new features out to your customers near-instantly. Your release cycles are small, and are often measured in days or weeks, not quarters or years. You can justify charging on a subscription model because you are constantly working for your customers. On the flip side, if a customer wants to cancel their subscription, what happens to any data generated with your app? If it's in a proprietary format, IMO it's unethical to hold a user's data hostage like that. Selling software by the download is a hard business to be in, and the incentives are not always aligned well. You're expected to fix bugs and release patch versions for "free". But usually you can charge for new major version upgrades. So the incentive is to skimp on bugfixes and instead work on new, big features. Beyond that, there's an incentive to make big, sweeping changes to your app so you can justify calling it a new major release, which triggers an upgrade fee, even if those changes don't actually benefit users. (Then again, this phenomenon, for some reason, exists with subscription apps too.) But many people just see it as a money grab, especially for products that used to not require a subscription. In 1998 I could go and buy a copy of MS Office in a box from my local store, and it was then mine. I could use it as long as I could find an OS that would run it. Likely I could still run it today under wine or something if I still had a copy. But now we have Office 365. I have to sign up for a subscription. If at any point I want to cancel, I can't use the software anymore. The data I've created with it is still mine, but I have to deal with imperfect format conversions done by other office apps. You could perhaps draw a similar parallel with Adobe's creative software. Regarding money, I think there's also an aversion to having to pay indefinitely. Sure, MS Office was expensive to buy, at several hundred dollars or whatever it was. But when I forked over that cash, I knew I was done paying for that version. Even if the SaaS version is priced at a few dollars a month, and I'm unlikely to ever subscribe long enough to pay the old "full price", there's still an irrational feeling of getting a raw deal. I think most people are more comfortable with known, one-time costs than with recurring costs, which may change if the company later decides to charge more.
• ganafagol 6y ago
  It's not about "getting paid for labour" It's the attitude and environment a whole generation of devs is brought up in. In the olden days, if you encountered a problem and had an idea how to solve it, you sat down and hacked a solution. No matter at work or in the evening at home. You had fun doing it, it improved your life, you open sourced it to share it with the community with the goal of having other people help you improve it or even helping your peers. That's how most of the small tools in the GNU toolchain were created as well as even Linux etc. And many of them live on today even as the original maintainers left or didn't keep improving by way of forks. Today, if somebody has such an idea, they sit down make a MVP, find a cofounder, apply for YC, move to the valley, wonder about seed funding and product/market fit of their SaaS. And hope for getting acquired for big money. And most don't, they just fail and die. It's about money first and making it big.
• r00fus 6y ago
  This. However, the burden of dealing with dozens of not only subscriptions, but change in subscription models (none->monthly, annual only like Prime, or per-usage) is daunting to many. In particular, if I can't get family subscription for services like VPN, video, etc, I simply don't bother - because I'm not maintain 2-3x subs and I'm not going request close family to pay for something they may not need. So I choose not to pay and look for simpler alternatives in that case.