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A note taking app or password manager in the modern sense is not a product, it's a service. Your content is stored and this costs money. Not only is it a recurr
by fleddr 4y ago
A note taking app or password manager in the modern sense is not a product, it's a service. Your content is stored and this costs money. Not only is it a recurring cost, it's also a growing cost as content keeps getting added and rarely removed. It's not illogical that a recurring fee is asked.
It's very much possible that a large company subsidizes these costs or runs ads, thereby making it "free". But the costs are still there.
You do have a point about office and image editing programs. A local desktop app in itself has no recurring costs for the company that built it, at least not directly. Still, after market and customer saturation it would mean the companies go bankrupt, as little new revenue comes in.
- phrom 4y agoYou are making a subjective judgement on what a modern note taking app or password manager should be like. They could be developed as local desktop apps, just like the office and image editing programs are. Personally, my notes are not going on anyone else's servers. Part of the problem with being tired of subscriptions is being tired of applications that would be perfect to run locally being instead developed as a web app, for the benefit of requiring a server and justifying the subscription. I hate using a phone and its small screen. I don't need my data to sync with other devices. So there's nobody "modern" making software I'd like to use.
- fleddr 4y agoWe live in a multi-device reality. People expect their notes to sync. If you don't need sync, you might as well use notepad and store .txt files on local disk. Fine by me, but then there's nothing to discuss.
- phrom 4y agoYeah, I keep notes on org files in local disk and access them through Emacs. I have no need for SaaS to take notes. There's probably nothing an alternative could offer to pull me away from Emacs, even to a different desktop app. But the topic of discussion here is whether people are getting tired of subscriptions, and why that is. I don't like subscriptions, so that's the perspective I'm contributing to it. You can't limit the discussion to only people who want to use online services and then say you're having an honest discussion about subscriptions.
- JohnFen 4y ago> A note taking app or password manager in the modern sense is not a product, it's a service. Which is a very serious problem. Apps like that shouldn't be services. The only reason to make them that way is so the companies can continue to soak you over time. Break out the services separately. If the user wants cloud storage, sell that service as an option. But if the user doesn't, they shouldn't have to pay for it. > it would mean the companies go bankrupt, as little new revenue comes in. This is just not true, as the history of software sales reveals. Sell upgrades. Sell more than one product.
- princevegeta89 4y agoNote-taking apps are really simple, and I can't wrap my head around why I have to ever "subscribe" to use them. I would actually self-host the hell out of a ton of beautiful open-source ones on the cloud instance I own. It may be a thing to pay monthly in the enterprise world, but no way I am paying every month for simple note-taking apps. The growth of data stored is negligible - remember it's mostly text. Password manager is a good example, but I would love to have something as affordable as Bitwarden. One good example of a bad password manager that went in the wrong direction if you ask me is 1Password. Their licensing was such a mess and as someone who bought into their "permanent license" a long time ago I've been screwed real hard because they wouldn't let me use it on Linux at all. The prices became "subscription based" and then steadily went up ever since then.