15 ms·

The link doesn’t talk about the SAAS model, which is probably the most profitable (and ubiquitous) one these days. I know people like to rail against it, but I

• nightski 3y ago
  I feel it's the opposite. The incentive is to lock you in and provide as little value as possible for as much money as possible. Get you hooked, take your data hostage, and then jack up the price as much as possible while delivering little to no additional functionality. Bugs? who cares. Broken functionality? No big deal. You are locked in baby!
  • teeray 3y ago
    It reminds me of the dining hall at my university. The food would always be unbelievably good on parents weekend and any time there were tours that would eat there. Every other time it was mediocre at best. The check for the meal plan money cleared and the goal was to give back the bare minimum.
  • lawn 3y ago
    What exactly is the difference from paying up front? There there's even less incentives to fix bugs, fix broken functionality and god forbid new functionality.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • labcomputer 3y ago
      The difference is that with upfront payment developers are forced to actually add features that provide more utility. Otherwise customers don’t upgrade. With SAAS you have to keep paying, even with if the software is completely static with no new features or bug fixes. As for bug fixes, do you think I am more or less likely to recommend your software to my friends if it is full of bugs and you don’t fix them?
    • skydhash 3y ago
      You buy what is offered (and a support period in most cases). Not a promise. No one buys a consumer car and expects it to run on water the next month.
      • eastbound 3y ago
        People totally buy Tesla and expects them to be self-driving next month. Every month since 7 years.
    • robinsonb5 3y ago
      In the case of Sage, the difference was about 500% cost increase for each of my two small businesses.
    • PeterisP 3y ago
      With SAAS, if the software is barely usable but lacks competition, vendor gets paid even if they don't fix bugs or broken functionality. When paying up-front, there always is competition - your own old version; so the vendor has strong financial motivation to make improvements since the recurring "maintenance" upgrade revenue is conditional on them, unlike in SAAS.
  • r00fus 3y ago
    Where have you experienced data lockin? That sounds like poor SaaS strategies from the 2000s.
    • zer8k 3y ago
      Fusion 360 is one example off the top of my head.
      • r00fus 3y ago
        I think I would agree for large traditional software companies like Autodesk or Adobe that charged large sums for software versions you typically don't update yearly (Creative Cloud), that a flat subscription model seems to be a bad fit. Probably less so for software you use daily or make your living off of.
        • zer8k 3y ago
          I use a text editor daily. I see no revolutionary methods being added to text editing that could ever justify me paying monthly. Even something as simple as a calorie counter has a monthly charge for features that never change (MyFitnessPal).
          • skydhash 3y ago
            I pay for Bear.app. It amounts to something like $14 dollars a year. But it's a beautifully crafted app and while it uses a database instead of files, it has good export capabilities. I consider that a donation at this point.
  • ZephyrBlu 3y ago
    I don't think this is connected with reality. Most companies don't have such strong lock-in, and those that do often have extremely valuable products.
    • karaterobot 3y ago
      I dunno, this describes my reality pretty accurately. Apple, Figma, and Adobe all try to lock you in with cloud storage and proprietary storage formats: the more you invest in their products, the more you'd lose by not paying them. I used to run some websites off Squarespace, and there's no way to export them and move somewhere else, so you end up paying ~$200 a year to host a static web page, else recreate it from scratch. Gmail has me locked in by having all my emails from the last twenty years. Slack owns my conversation history with my friends. And so on... > those that do often have extremely valuable products. I agree with that. All those products above are valuable and useful to me. But, the price is not commensurate with the value of the product alone. The price only makes sense when you add both the value I get from using the product and the pain I would experience by not using the product anymore. The product developers work hard not only to make the product useful, but also to punish you if you leave. That's the gross part.
      • conradfr 3y ago
        You can connect an IMAP client to Gmail and retrieve all your emails.
        • dizhn 3y ago
          Which is something everybody should do before they remove that feature.
  • greatwave1 3y ago
    I don't think that the incentive to "provide as little value as possible for as much money as possible" is in any way unique to the SAAS pricing model. Theoretically, every optimized pricing model will attempt to maximize revenue at a given value level. And in practice, what does "get you hooked, take your data hostage" mean? I can't think of many SAAS subscriptions in my personal life where this is a real issue.
    • minsc_and_boo 3y ago
      Transition costs are prohibitive. Some SaaS platforms bill just enough to stay under the cost of transitioning to a competitor (or building first party) to maximize revenue.
• jehb 3y ago
  This has not been my experience at all with SaaS. I find SaaS products, including ones I have paid for, disappear at a much greater rate than the rate at which the desktop tools they replaced stop working. There's also next to nothing I can do as an end user when they do disappear. If I'm very lucky, I get a limited window to be able to export a portion of my data. But we've eroded data formats to the point where even if I can export my data, there might be nothing to plug it into. What good is a CSV, even, when what I need is a tool that processes the data in the CSV? There's no option for me to keep an old machine or a VM around and self-support on a discontinued piece of SaaS. That's to say nothing of the price hikes. $10 a month today becomes $14.99 next month, $17.99 in a year, and before you know it the proprietary system you've locked yourself into now costs five times what you originally paid. Sure, they might add some more features, but since it's SaaS, in many cases you have no choice to seek out a different vendor to provide the same feature, as again, your data is locked up in a format you can't easily extract and work with elsewhere.
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    SaaS from established firms seems to be more durable & maintained. The problem is all the flash in the pan ZIRP VC funded never-profit SaaS startups out there. Hopefully these get shaken out over the next couple years finally. For example, I've used Adobe products for a very long time, and they get a lot of flack. I was an extensive user of Photoshop (PS) and Lightroom (LR) for a long time. However, the old model was - PS pay $600 once, then $200 for updates every 2 years or so. LR was $200/100 as I recall. So your run-rate for both was over $150/year (factoring in the initial $800). This was in like year 2000 dollars. For $150 2023 dollars.. I get constant feature updates, cloud storage & sync, licensed to run on at least 2 machines, etc. Inflation adjusted this is nearly half the price of paying $150 in 2000. I'm also intrigued by how many very wealthy people are unwilling to pay $10/mo to stream music/video and/or share passwords, when I recall paying $20/CD at the record store in 1998 dollars. You can listen to basically every song you want for the year for the price of (inflation adjusted) 2.5 CDs purchased by my mallrat teenage self back then. I think we are all just very spoiled..
    • AlexandrB 3y ago
• hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  SaaS is DRM done right.
• zer8k 3y ago
  SaaS works when not everything is atomized into micro-profitable businesses. The problem with SaaS is it enabled subscription hell and destroyed ownership. When I buy software I reasonably expect to own my copy. No different than when I go to the store and buy a book, or buy a CD of music, or buy food. With SaaS I own nothing. My data is theirs. My stuff is theirs. It is no different than your example where software no longer works with your operating system. If you squint, you can see that once the company changes their model/raises their prices/etc it's no different than my software suddenly not working. The real difference is at least I only paid the exact cost for my utility vs. 5, 10, or even 20x as much for the same utility. There is a dramatic difference between a world where some software is SaaS but most is owned vs. our current environment where everything is SaaS. It's the gestalt of the SaaS economy you have to look at and not the isolated cases. Moveover the issue isn't "productivity software" really. That enhances your life. The fact I can't even own some books, music, simple software, movies, etc is the problem. It creates an environment where the average person is tied down with so many subscriptions just for things they'd normally buy once that they become more poor than would be otherwise. I am at the point where piracy now makes more sense again and I will basically refuse to purchase any more software. To be honest, I don't care who it hurts. I am tired of being victimized by companies. One of the only software I pay for is the Jetbrains product suite because they are a company whose SaaS model is actually cooperative. Sublime is another one who has more than acceptable terms.
  • hooverd 3y ago
    You can add Alibre to that list. They do the JetBrains perpetual license plus N years updates for CAD software.
• smeyer 3y ago
  Were people actually paying $200 for a piece of productivity software, though? I'm no expert but sort of got the impression that a lot of the consumer-facing software currently charging $10 a month used to retail for 2 figures, not 3.
• swagasaurus-rex 3y ago
  I think subscriptions would be more popular if you could manage subscriptions on the bank's end. How is it a company can give me recurring charges and I have no ability to turn them on or off?
• stronglikedan 3y ago
  I avoid saas precisely because of the subscription model. Occasionally, I need to make a flowchart, but I don't need to make flowcharts every month. I used to be able to pay for a flowchart software once, and then use it occasionally. Now it seems that, to get quality flowchart software, I have to pay monthly for something I don't use monthly. So instead, I find some free flowchart software which may or may not be limited in some way that I just deal with, and no one gets my money. Or maybe I find something with a buy-me-a-coffee link, but they would still get more from me if I could just buy a perpetual license for a reasonable price. Of course, the flowchart is just one example. The same can be said for a lot of utility software I only need occasionally.
  • cudgy 3y ago
    Some companies saw this issue by providing a read only client. The users can open files that they created but are not able to modify them without a subscription. By the way, if you are on Apple ecosystem, I recently tried the newly included Apple tool, Freeform, and found it to be surprisingly capable.
  • robertlagrant 3y ago
    It's constrained as to how it renders, but check out d2lang[0]. [0] https://d2lang.com https://d2lang.com
  • crazygringo 3y ago
    Funny, your scenario to me seems like SAAS is an improvement. If I only use flowchart software 2x/yr, I can just pay those two individual months and nothing else. Six times over three years is way cheaper than buying it outright ever would have been. Plus after three years I'd be needing something that the newer version introduced anyways. So in your scenario SAAS saves a bunch of money and keeps your features and OS compatibility up to date. You just have to remember to cancel it once you're done each month, but that's easy enough with a calendar reminder. This way you get to save a lot of money over buying it outright.
  • HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    Yes. I have some audio waveform generation software I use only once in a long while. I paid about $50 for it almost 5 years ago. If it were SaaS, I'd have paid a lot more than that over the last 5 years. A long time ago I worked out an agreement with a local gym. To avoid a membership that I would only need for a few months (I was living in a hotel temporarily with no access to my own equipment), I paid $10 each time I showed up. This could be a useful model for rarely-used software.
• arrosenberg 3y ago
  If you pay every month and never own it, that's rent. The landlord will try and lock you in and extract value while providing as little as possible. Sometimes you get a good one that takes care of all the issues, but the majority just want their money. JetBrains figured this out already. Sell me a perpetual software license that I own and charge me separately to get the updates.
• ilyt 3y ago
  Saas is a model that looks great for some cases but overall leads to shittification of many apps as the way it is often done, to make 100% sure nobody can just use a copy of a program they have, is by putting it in the cloud, which means higher costs to them and worse experience to user (even the best web apps feel pretty laggy compared to native).
• throwA29B 3y ago
  I dislike SaaS very strongly. I will not repeat the "why"s mentioned in this thread, just add one that I haven't seen yet: SaaS incentivize doing busywork that is visible but not necessarily useful. For example JetBrain's products: Oh look, we have changed our icons/ updated UI/ improved UX/ etc! We know that nobody asked for this, but it will be shoved into your mouth anyway! Pretty much sure you can find that everywhere.