5 ms·

I really wish it were reasonable to provide monthly subscriptions that weren't several dollars per month, because I really can't support all the things that I w

• quietbritishjim 3y ago
  They have a $5/month "starving hacker" subscription level. Morally you ought not to use it if you can afford more, but I expect they'd rather you use it than give them no money at. Personally, I pay for "project leader" level ($16.00/month) so I can give them a bit more... But I'm not up to "maniacal supporer" ($50.00/month)!
  • fluoridation 3y ago
    "Morally"? According to what moral framework it's wrong to accept the lower price when someone offers you the exact same product at two different prices?
    • oasisaimlessly 3y ago
      ^ This guy gets his groceries from food banks.
    • nemetroid 3y ago
      Clearly if no such moral framework existed, LWN would not offer both prices.
    • quietbritishjim 3y ago
      When they clearly tell you so, and it's a good cause. Why overcomplicate things?
      • fluoridation 3y ago
        Do you always take what a seller says at face value? It seems to me that introducing morality into the discussion is overcomplicating it. I don't feel I have any moral obligations with the people I trade with, beyond not deceiving them.
        • irishsultan 3y ago
          When they tell you "the price is low if A is the case, and high if A is not the case" and you say "I'll take the lower price" and A is not the case then you are deceiving them.
          • fluoridation 3y ago
            When I said "deceive" I was thinking more along the lines of currency being counterfeit or product not being up to spec. Anything not directly related to the transaction is the private business of each party. I don't ask the people I buy things from to show me their accounting books to see if the price they ask for is fair, so why should I accept any questions regarding how much I'm able to afford?
    • devmor 3y ago
      If a hotel you are planning on staying at for a business trip is offering free rooms for people affected by a natural disaster, do you take the free room?
      • za3faran 3y ago
        Apples to oranges.
      • fluoridation 3y ago
        A hotel has a finite number of rooms. An online publication has no practical limit on the number of subscriptions it can sell, unless it sells them at below cost.
        • devmor 3y ago
          There are also a finite number of people needing to stay there. So imagine you know there are a lot of open rooms, do you still lie and take one?
          • fluoridation 3y ago
            I assume you're saying that in this hypothetical the hotel has so many rooms that it could host all of those people. In that case, no I probably wouldn't. Not because I think it's immoral, but because I don't know what repercussions I could face if I'm caught in my lie. If I knew for sure that there could be no repercussions then, yes, I probably would lie. I see literally no reason not to do so.
    • zamalek 3y ago
      I guess you're right, it's not about morals. It is about common decency (alongside things such as not littering), though.
    • marcodiego 3y ago
      The moral framework of those see the subscription price as a donation for a good cause.
• TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Would be nice to be able to centrally manage subscriptions through your bank. Or perhaps better yet, to roll them into taxes, which would avoid some issues going through banks would cause, and offer a nice symmetry to how one-time purchases work. To me, all those subscriptions have a management overhead that's often greater than their sticker price. Here, $30/month is actually better than $3/month, because there's only so many $30 things that will fit into my "I like it but it's not a strit necessity" monthly budget. But that same budget will fit 10x as many $3/month subscriptions, and the amount is small enough that it's easy to ignore, and it's easy to lose track of all such subscriptions (and then tracking them down and re-evaluating whether you need them feels like more effort per subscription than that $3 or $1 or whatever). The bigger overhead, however, is relationships. Each subscription is a business relationship, and one I do not want to have. This is where the tax angle, and aforementioned symmetry with one-time purchases, would come into play: for regular one-time payments for goods and services, I do not need to establish ongoing relationships with the providers, because government does it for me. It rolls them all into a neat package by means of generic consumer protection laws, which allow me to not care or remember about any particular vendor if all is right, and if something goes wrong, all I need is to have a standard proof of purchase (receipt or invoice), and a set of standard keywords to put into an e-mail ("warranty", "non-compliant goods", "GDPR", etc.), and things magically right themselves most of the time. Worst case, I need to also remember which form to fill to get courts involved. That's such a huge win, that most people don't even see it. Whenever you go to buy your daily bread, or get a haircut, you do not need to stick to the same vendor, or sign a contract with them, or otherwise care about ongoing relationship. You can, if you want, but you do not have to, and that's despite the vendor very much wanting you to. The relationship exists, but it's managed for you, centrally, by your local regulator - making purchases O(1) with respect to number of vendors. Whether you shop at one place or a thousand, the overhead is the same. I would like that to extend to recurring services too. There is absolutely no need for a random SaaS to force me into having a relationship with them. I would prefer to have a standardized process of billing and resolving disputes that lets avoid having to study everyone's individual ToS, or dealing with vendors' dark pattern bullshit. I want to focus on making use of the service, not on who provides it. That's the symmetry rolling subscriptions into tax system would provide.
  • 3y ago
• sylware 3y ago
  The no joke is to have a service public on internet: this is several tens of percent on top of the actual service.