12 ms·

Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? I just don't wa

by mrtksn 1y ago

Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as content gets curated by those who extract money by giving us the "free" services. It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy.

blitzar 1y ago
> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services Rounded to the nearest meaningful number - 0%
- mrtksn 1y ago
  I don't know, I expect it to be at least %3 as this is the general conversion rate for "free" users AFAIK. There must be some some number that makes it viable to have free users and paid users. For games, the free users are usually those who provide the "content". People usually demonize freemium games but IMHO its much more benign than extracting huge sums by artificially making it worse and sell attention.
  - 1oooqooq 1y ago
    you're being too generous, as if people were on whatsbook because of a value they get. they are just there for the captive network effect, which will take a hit the second or becomes a freemium or ad ridden service.
    - xp84 1y ago
      Yeah, nobody uses Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or Google anymore now that they’re “ad-ridden”
      - 1oooqooq 1y ago
        none of those are blasting "encryption! only you can read your messages" as their main message and marketing. those are literal public forums people go to expose themselves. you don't have a very good point.
        xp84 1y ago
        Whatsapp is messaging-focused, but I'm willing to bet the quotation you just gave is not even 10% of the reason people choose to use it. If I understand it correctly, people use it mainly because MMS was a dumpster fire and WA was the first platform which got critical mass in most countries, which it achieved by being both pretty good overall and by being cross-platform. The encryption is a nice bonus that everybody likes, but you can't prove that is a primary or even major reason why plumbers in India, tour guides in Dubai, and school parent groups in the US all choose to communicate with it, personally and professionally. If anything, I feel like Signal must have by now poached a good number of the people whose main concern is "How encrypted is it?" Also, Gmail is not a public forum and people don't mind that it's 'ad-ridden' either.
        1oooqooq 1y ago
        Gmail is the least ad ridden property on google ever. i don't think people join because it's encrypted, but they wouldn't use when it's not. it too can became the dumpsterfire that sms was/is.
        dsego 1y ago
        I don't think anybody in my non-tech circle even knows that messages are encrypted. It's just a convenient way to message people and share pictures from android phones. At some point in the past it was viber and before that fb messenger. I know older people who wouldn't know how to attach a document to an email but can share vacation photos via whatsapp, and we have group chats between friends and family. People also care about their chat history, and if they don't know that the data is encrypted and needs to be backed up, they loose it when transferring to a new device. It's happening all the time, a lot of common users would expect chats to just stay in the cloud somewhere and be available.
  - blitzar 1y ago
    Most of those are tricked into it by manipulative UI or nearly impossible to cancel trials or forgotten monthly subscriptions.
    - mrtksn 1y ago
      How is it possible to have impossible to cancel trails? On AppStore it's in your account and takes 2 taps to cancel regardless of what the developer does. Are you talking for direct, by credit card payments that somehow you can't cancel? Can you explain a bit?
      - blitzar 1y ago
        The abuse was so rampant that even the US has had to legislate. US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) introduced a new regulation, known as the “click to cancel” rule. As for the darkest of dark patterns - give Adobe some money and see what happens.
        mrtksn 1y ago
        Right, my rule of thumb is to stick with AppStore and when that's not an option use a Virtual card that I can just abandon if I don't want to use the service.
      - esrauch 1y ago
        Play Store also does this now and it's a fundamentally radical departure from the era where if you give the company your card info directly theres a high chance you aren't going to be able to get out of it without paying at least some amount more than you should. Think gyms where you refuse to cancel even when you are physically there in person with someone to yell at and imagine trying to do the same online where there's not a phone number, or a phone number with a 1 hour wait and a CSR paid based on if they can successfully not give you what you want
- 1oooqooq 1y ago
  it's probably under 0% even including the 2% error margin.
  - blitzar 1y ago
    Rounding up
irjustin 1y ago
This is only true if they introduce them. i.e. FB doesn't have a paid service, but obviously Youtube does. The problem is Whatsapp is a closed ecosystem so unlike email we can't just buy a provider. And I do pay for youtube. The experience is well worth it and I'm thankful I can afford it (it's not a lot but many can't).
- xp84 1y ago
  “Can’t” is relative. I suspect there are a lot of people who pay for at least one streaming service that isn’t YouTube, but spend more hours watching YouTube in a month than they do watching that service. And of course there’s also the age-old comparison that if someone goes to Starbucks more than twice in a month, they probably spend more there than you would on YouTube Premium, and does that provide the person with as much value as YouTube does? In my opinion, it’s rarely about “can’t” when we’re talking about 12 bucks a month or whatever. It’s about the psychology: when a free tier exists, people reframe it in their heads that paying for that thing is an extravagance. Relatedly, removing the free tier altogether also has dangerous effects, as people immediately jump to “I can’t believe you’re taking away the free thing I used to have” outrage, while nobody complains about not having free access to say, HBO.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  > This is only true if they introduce them. i.e. FB doesn't have a paid service, but obviously Youtube does. FB does - “Meta Verified” for $16/month (presumably different depending on locale), but the benefits aren’t very good. (A verified badge, Increased account protection, Enhanced support, Upgraded profile features, Bonus stars and stickers)
  - irjustin 1y ago
    ... this thread is in the context of not seeing Ads. You can pay FB to serve your ads too. We're not talking about those things.
doix 1y ago
I remember WhatsApp costing money, 1$ per year or per lifetime or something. I paid for it, I think it was a WinRar situation though, where deleting and reinstalling the app gave it to you for free or something. I'm guessing most people didn't pay though, since they scraped the fee (even before FB bought them). I guess it was just too little money to be worth the effort.
- A_Duck 1y ago
  Yep I paid for Whatsapp, I've even dug out the receipt email. I want my £0.79 back!
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    Three years of WhatsApp service for phone just 2,67$... In 2015... So I think I got that...
- mschuster91 1y ago
  Pre acquisition Whatsapp had 450M users. Even accounting for half the revenue of 1$ going away for payment fees (30%) and taxes (20%), that would still have been a nice cushy 200 million $ a year in almost pure profit - WA had 55 (!) employees at acquisition and 550 servers [1]. That's nothing at this scale of users and speaks volumes for the ingenuity of their staff. The only ones driving even leaner than that are StackOverflow with just nine servers [2]. [1] https://highscalability.com/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-million-users-11000-cores-an/ https://highscalability.com/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843
  - paxys 1y ago
    That fee wasn't really enforced. I was in India at the time and no one paid because no one had credit cards tied to their account. Everyone still used WhatsApp just fine.
- roryirvine 1y ago
  Other way round. Facebook bought them in 2014, and they dropped the fee in early 2016. The fee wasn't enforced in many developing countries, and some users elsewhere will have been jumping through the delete-and-reinstall hoops (which was painful because it lost chat history) to avoid paying. But with 1bn active users at the time the fee was dropped, it would still have been bringing in more than enough revenue to have sustained Whatsapp as an independent business if they had chosen not to sell to FB.
filoleg 1y ago
I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach. The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many people in the “a fee instead of ads” crowd consumes YT for hours a day, but so far I’ve only met one person (not counting myself) who actually pays for YT Premium. And yes, a major chunk of the people I talked about this with were FAANG engineers, so it isn’t like they cannot afford it. But it felt like they were more interested in complaining about the ad-funded-services landscape and muse on their stances around it, as opposed to actually putting their money where their mouth is. All I can say is, I am not paying for YT Premium out of some ideological standpoint or love for Google (not even close). It has genuinely been just worth it for me many times over in the exact practical ways I was expecting it to.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  By far the choice of most marginally savvy and above internet users is an ad-model where they themselves ad-block. Which somehow is spun to be morally righteous.
  - johncessna 1y ago
    Morally Righteous? I think it's more they don't have to so they don't. It's like the DVR days where you'd just fast forward ads. It wasn't a moral high ground, it was just easy to do and was better than the alternative.
    - card_zero 1y ago
      Dutifully watching the ads doesn't seem moral either, it seems insane.
    - ndriscoll 1y ago
      I do actually think that putting ads in front of children at least is immoral, and it is neglectful not to block ads for kids in the same way that it is to just hand them an unfiltered violence-and-porn device. It's probably at least irresponsible to not block ads for an elderly parent who's starting to experience cognitive decline.
A_Duck 1y ago
The trouble with charging people is you have to charge everybody the same[1], so you're leaving money on the table with wealthy users, and pricing out poorer users Ads mean each user 'pays' you according to their spending power Kinda socialist when you think about it! From each according from his ability... [1] Obviously companies try to get around this with price discrimination, but it's hard especially for a network effect platform
- xp84 1y ago
  That is the absolute beauty of the targeted ad situation, isn’t it: you can generate leads for mortgages or expensive enterprise SaaS services, that are happy to pay super high acquisition costs, maximizing revenue from your rich users, and with the same ad inventory, maximize the revenue from your poor users by advertising App Store casino games for children, payday loans, etc. You can see why Meta doesn’t bother offering a paid service here.
barnabee 1y ago
I’d love to know the expected ad revenue per user for makers of apps like WhatsApp, Instagram. I’m pretty convinced I’d pay 10x or more than that amount for a completely ad free version but I can’t be sure.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  You would not, because 90% of the years wouldn't pay and you wouldn't also to have nobody to talk to after everybody moves to the next chat app
  - barnabee 1y ago
    Why would users who can continue to receive exactly the same experience as today leave because some other users can opt to pay to go ad-free?
- detaro 1y ago
  I'm not sure if the number was for Facebook specifically or all Meta apps, but they did quote a number of around $70 revenue per year per US user a while ago. (with (much) lower numbers in other parts of the world)
  - barnabee 1y ago
    That’s interesting, thanks
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    These numbers are actually kinda interesting, in that they're based on user location, not advertiser. So basically all global companies target the US first because it's a big market with consistent regulations and mostly one language (compare to the EU where you'd need English/German/French/Spanish/Polish and still would miss a lot). So, those numbers reflect a capital inflow to the US market rather than (as many people think) absurdly high conversion US users. Meta stopped reporting user numbers/CPMs by geography after the market freaked out when user growth plateaued in the US (because they'd acquired basically everyone).
Workaccount2 1y ago
I can say from experience and from others who have been in this position (not email, but general services); its around 1-2% of people. Nebula, the answer to the tyranny of Youtube (who works for advertisers), has a <1% conversion rate despite tons of huge Youtubers pushing it. Vid.me, the previous answer to youtubes tyranny, went bankrupt because people hate ads and also hate subscriptions, nor do they donate. I could write pages about this, but I wish I could violently shake all the children (many who are now in their 40's) that so deeply feel entitled to free content on the internet, and scream "If you are not paying directly for the product, you have no right to complain about the product". In reality the ad model is not going anywhere. Given the choice, people overwhelmingly chose to let the advertisers steer the ship if it means "free" entry.
- 9283409232 1y ago
  Nebula just doesn't have a product I want. I don't care for early access to Youtube videos.
  - DreadY2K 1y ago
    Maybe this isn't the case for you, but a number of creators I watch have some videos that they only upload to Nebula. So it's worth it for me to see those videos I otherwise wouldn't ever get to see.
- paxys 1y ago
  Video is impossible to break into because of how expensive it is. Even YouTube by all accounts is just breaking even. And that is with Google's entire infrastructure and advertising machinery behind it. A new entrant simply doesn't stand a chance.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    Hold on... A ton of broadcasters, production companies, and individuals have done it and are doing it. YouTube have many competitors and some of them are enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production companies are popping up all the time and are making some of the world's highest quality material. The same for individuals who are making videos. Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does exactly the same thing as YouTube?
carlosjobim 1y ago
Most people go absolutely mentally deranged by a simple magical incantation. The powerful incantation or spell consists of only one word: "Free". That word will make people loose their mind and their soul. It will make people accept anything and everything that they would never otherwise accept. They will line up for hours, they will accept hostile and toxic messages being screamed into their faces, they will humiliate themselves, they will spend sleepless nights, they will willingly enslave themselves, they will wither away in sickness, they will murder millions in the most cruel way imaginable. All for "free". Societies in our history were not arranged in the same way around money, because probably there was some knowledge of the two-sided curse of avarice and stinginess. I'm talking about medieval and post-medieval society, where most people didn't use or have money in their everyday life. Instead they had duties.
- UnreachableCode 1y ago
  But Signal is free. And ad-free
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    Sure, it's a rare case of a project which is sponsored and paid for by a billionaire. I wish there were more such projects, but you can't base an economy on charity from billionaires.
    - UnreachableCode 1y ago
      True enough. But I think in this case it's worth just enjoying how great Signal is. Maybe one day it will bend to enshittification, but for now, it's the better app.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Signal has its own limitations. It wasn't that long ago that you couldn't use it on tablets at all, and Android tablets are still unsupported (even as linked devices). There are other weird limits on linking, too - e.g. why can't I have a secondary phone as a linked device? Why can't I have more than 5 linked devices in total?
Xenoamorphous 1y ago
I remember when Whatsapp became a paid app, I can’t remember the details as I believe they varied by platform (iOS vs Android) but it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter. I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for a Coke at a bar that they’d piss down the toilet an hour later. It didn’t matter if it only took 3 or 4 messages to make Whatsapp pay off for itself, as they were sending dozens if not hundreds of messages per day, either images, videos and whatnot (MMSs were much more expensive). At that moment I realised many (most?) people would never pay for software. Either because it’s not something physical or because they’re stuck in the pre-Internet (or maybe music) mentality where copying something is not “stealing” as it’s digital data (but they don’t realise running Whatsapp servers, bandwidth etc cost very real money). And I guess this is why some of the biggest digital services are ad-funded. In contrast, literally never someone has voiced privacy concerns, they simply find ads annoying and they’ve asked for a way to get rid of them (without paying, of course). I should say, I’m from one of the European countries with the highest levels of piracy.
- basisword 1y ago
  >> I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. To be fair, that was in era when pirating was such a normal thing. Everybody at least knew about it. Cheap pirated DVD's were super common (I received them as gifts even) and everyone knew someone selling them. With people accustomed to paying for Netflix, music streaming, Office 365, etc. maybe a subscription version of WhatsApp would be more palatable. The problem is nobody will pay as long as the tech behemoths are offering the same thing for free.
  - schroeding 1y ago
    Interestingly, the pendulum at least in my friend group starts to kinda swing in the other direction, i.e. non-technical friends start to indirectly ask (me as the tech guy) about blatant piracy for (visual, Spotify is still very much accepted) media and (TOS-violating[1]) ad blockers for ad-supported streaming. I cannot overstate how unexpected this was and is to me, we talk about people in their mid-twenties with jobs - maybe (video) streaming / subscriptions services actually overplayed their hand in the current economic climate. Doesn't make me super optimistic in this regard. [1] even if most of it is void in my jurisdiction anyway
WhyNotHugo 1y ago
I pay a third party to host my email, and wouldn’t mind paying an honest service provider to host something like an XMPP service. I wouldn’t pay Meta or similar companies for messaging services. And especially not for siloed messaging networks.
- Xenoamorphous 1y ago
  HN crowd has never been representative in this regard. Sure, it’s easy to get some 20 or 30-something year old with a cushy 6 figure salary to pay 20 USD or similar per month for some digital service (esp. when they are building some digital service themselves, so they know what it entails). For someone strugling to make ends meet, there’s many higher priority things than some digital service when there’s free alternatives, let alone email. And your privacy concerns? In my experience, absolutely non-existent in the real world. Actually I only ever hear about them in HN, not even my software development coworkers. Just the other day there was some raffle where there was some weekend trip to somewhere as a prize, but you had to give all your personal details, there was a big queue, they would’ve given their blood type details (if not literally a few ccs of their blood) and told them all about their kinkiest fantasy if they’d asked for it. Literally, I’m not joking.
basisword 1y ago
>> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services Some of us actually paid for WhatsApp! I think it was about $1 a year when it launched. At the time it was providing significant value, especially in areas where cross-border communication was common. I'm sure $1 isn't enough to cover costs anymore but someone could make a nice living charging $5-10 a month for something similar. The problem is people will always sell out to investors and fuck over their users. It's inevitable.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"There must be a way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy." Internet is a paid service. When I first accessed the internet in the 1980s, the only paid "service" necessary to use it was internet service. There was not the plethora of VC-funded third parties trying to act as intermediaries. The term "internet" amongst younger generations usually means only www sites, maybe app "endpoints" and _nothing else_. This is such a waste of potential. Today's internet is more useful than the 1980s internet. But I do not attribute that to third party intermediaries that only seek to profit from other peoples' use of it. I attribute the increased utility to technological improvements in hardware, including networking equipment. I do not attribute the increased utility to "improvements" in software, and certainly not the proliferation of software distributed for free as a Trojan Horse for those seeking to profit from data collection, surveillance and advertising services. The idea of paying for what these intermediaries try to call "services" makes no sense to me. Certainly, paying these intermediaries will not prevent them from data collection and surveillance for commercial purposes. (There are already examples.) It only subsidises this activity. Perhaps people believe these intermediaries engage in data collection, surveillance and ad services because "no one will pay for their software" instead of considering that they do so because they can, because there are few laws to prevent them. It was unregulated activity and is stilll grossly underregulated activity. It is more profitable than software licensing.
GrantMoyer 1y ago
The problem with this is that once enough people are paying for an ad-free subscription, services reintroduce ads to the paid subscription, sometimes alongside the introduction of a new more expensive ad-free subscriotion.
temporallobe 1y ago
I would be fine with the consumption model as long as it’s reasonable, but I honestly believe that streaming services hate this idea because it’s not as profitable as the ad model. In fact I am becoming more and more frustrated with services that I am paying for which show me ads even for “ad-free” experiences. For example, I pay for the highest tier of ad-free Hulu and Disney+ but Hulu somehow carves out exceptions for so-called non-Hulu content. So during some of those shows, you will see very frequent, very repetitive ads and it is quite obnoxious. There is literally not even an option to pay for a higher level of ad-free experience (I would!) because I guess they REALLY want to sell me Wegovy and SNHU and whatever other nonsense. The interruptions have gotten so obnoxious that I have lost interest. The only other option is to simply buy the episodes I am interested in. Or stop watching streaming content altogether.
- flukas88 1y ago
  Or... Wait and buy the bluray version which has also the pro of being at better bitrate and quality
- int_19h 1y ago
  We've circled back to the point where pirating content one way or another is more convenient than streaming it legally. I use StreamFab + Plex for most providers these days precisely because it offers a better experience than their own native apps. Just the other day, I tried to watch a show on Amazon only to discover that subtitles were skewed because someone messed up cutting out the ad breaks - it'd shift the subtitles by ~10s for each cut. Plex not only has the ability to adjust offsets, but it can actually analyze the audio and perform autocorrection (which works flawlessly, I must add). Of course, this also means that this show is now permanently in my video library, even if I drop my Amazon subscription. And no, I don't feel bad about that.
nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? Probably not many. OTOH, I pay for Fastmail and NextDNS (both for at least 5 years at this point). People give strange looks when I mention paying for e-mail, even people "in the know." SAAS offerings for individuals don't have a lot of market share (streaming services aside). The exception might be iCloud/GMail harassing people about running out of storage, and people just eventually going "sure, here's 3 bucks a month."
ajsnigrutin 1y ago
Me? Never again. I used to... like some app, paid for a "PRO" version to get additonal features. Everything was ok. Then 6 months went by, and they added a cloud feature, to upload some stuff and configs and sync between devices, and it turned from one time payment to a subscription plan. Then built-in features got moved into the cloud, and previously working stuff didn't work without subscriptions anymore. Then they added ads. PRO has maybe 2 more features than a free version and no nag screen at the start, and that's it.
- PenguinCoder 1y ago
  Which app? I paid for pro fairmail and don't have that issue with the app, currently. Which is what I'd expect.
  - ajsnigrutin 1y ago
    I forgot what it was called, it was years ago. It was one of those "scan" with the camera to create PDFs of documents with some basic OCR included. The cloud feature gave you some cloud space, but OCR has to be done on the cloud (used to be locally done). Even some quasi opensource software is no better... OsmAnd (openstreetmaps for android app) had a paid "OsmAnd+" version (that i bought), and then they decided they need a "pro" version too, 2.99/month, to get 3d relief and "colored routes".
    - int_19h 1y ago
      To be fair, OsmAnd bears the cost of hosting those maps, and when you consider that OsmAnd+ allows you to literally download the entire globe for offline use (which translates to hundreds of gigabytes of traffic), it's clear that they need some kind of ongoing revenue stream to be sustainable. And hillshade tiles (3D terrain) are particularly large since they need to be bitmaps rather than vectors like basic maps, so making their users bear more of that cost is not unreasonable.
browningstreet 1y ago
I think every business model on the planet is subject to “and ads” consideration. I wish it wasn’t true, but it’s the business equivalent of “every app becomes a social graph”.
- amelius 1y ago
  Hence the free market needs a government to stop the enshittification.
tonyhart7 1y ago
problem is google and meta prefer you not to buy Ads money is larger than user buying subscription they don't want you to buy software lol
paulcole 1y ago
> IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use Do you use any free (as in no money comes out of your wallet) services today? If so, which ones?
chias 1y ago
I remember reading that one reason you often can't escape ads by paying for the service is that through the act of choosing to pay for the service, you are self-identifying as someone willing to pay for things, and are thereby ironically putting yourself into the most valuable ad-targeting demographic there is.
furyofantares 1y ago
I think the problem is that we all pay for ads whether we're exposed to them or not. Ads result in higher prices, and a higher barrier to entry for competition. It's a collective action problem.
lurkshark 1y ago
I have a pet theory that the world would be slightly better place if the United States Postal Service had launched a convenient and free (taxpayer-funded) email service before Google: 1. I think folks would be naturally more skeptical of the government than they are of big tech, ideally leading to E2EE for email that's usable by the masses. 2. Phishing and scams could have a dedicated law enforcement arm (Postal Inspectors). 3. We'd reduce the amount of email-based personal data being mined and turned into entirely unregulated ad-tech nightmares.
- ezst 1y ago
  > 1. I think folks would be naturally more skeptical of the government than they are of big tech, ideally leading to E2EE for email that's usable by the masses. That is so weird to me. "Institutions that exist for the sole purpose of serving the people might end up having some power, so let's instead give it all to the literal oligarchs."
  - elbear 1y ago
    Depends on where you are. In some countries people don't trust institutions unfortunately.
    - account42 1y ago
      And in some countries trust institutions too much unfortunately. Ideally you shouldn't just to just blindly trust them.
martinohansen 1y ago
Telegram has 15 million premium users paying ~$50/year They also issue bonds which is another fun way to collect money.
TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
People pay for their mobile phone service and internet service. Growing up one of my first emails was bundled with our dial-up ISP. Just because you're paying for a service doesn't mean your data won't get sold and monetized, nor does it protect you from ads getting shoved down your throat. ISPs and mobile phone service providers both sell your data. It's a common practice for services to keep raising prices and introduce ad-supported tiers in order to squeeze pay-piggies as much as possible. Any time someone has tried starting a service that competed with big tech it either gets bought out or ripped off. And big tech's infinitely deep pockets means they can run at a loss for years until all the competition has disappeared. I think in order to truly solve these problems it will require legislation and breaking up big tech into smaller companies. We also need legislation to require tech companies to stop creating walled gardens that cannot integrate with other platforms.
whiplash451 1y ago
At this point, you could have governments finance this piece of infrastructure. This would cost $350M/year to Europe [1] -- which is a drop of the ocean in their budget -- in exchange for control of information. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. [1] assuming the initial business model of whatsapp was cash neutral, which I think it was
aiono 1y ago
I think solution is neither. Such apps are now as much as essential as schools, hospitals and public infrastructure. Hence governments should build them with tax money.
johannes1234321 1y ago
It's extremely hard to compete in a commodity market where a large corp can do a free product to drive competition away. Gmail's promise of 1GB free storage was an incredible offer at those times, where many people used "paid" mailers. Paid as part of the Internet subscription with a worse Webmailer and less storage than Google provided. It is especially complicated with Mail, where Anti-Spam measures make operating an own server work (on one side for filtering incoming mail, on the other side to prevent being blocked for spamming)
tremon 1y ago
how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? Why are you using that as an example, and not asking how many people pay for their cellular data plan?
perlgeek 1y ago
Y'know what, I'd have no problem paying for my "core services" if it were that easy. What I have a problem with is paying for potentially so many services: * phone * email * whatsapp, because others use it * signal, because it's actually good * telegram, because that one group is on it * my todo list app * duolingo * a good mapping app without ads ... and so on. And the same for my kids. And before you blink, you suddenly pay several hundred dollars per month. Aka the slippery slope. One of the problems seems to be that everything comes with transaction costs, so for example Signal cannot easily charge me a single dollar per month, which I suspect is a price point that would work for both me and them (if every one of their users paid it).
hliyan 1y ago
It is my view that you will never escape ads by paying for any content/service that is suitable for displaying ads. Reason: by the very act of paying for the service, you signal to advertisers that you are a person with purchasing power -- the very type of person they want to target. So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in. And if your service provider is under pressure to increase profits, and they're finding it hard to increase market share or innovate, they will reach for one of two solutions: (1) let service quality decline through cost cutting, and then introduce higher priced service tiers, or (2) ads. This is unfortunately what we see in reality.
fritzo 1y ago
In defense of ads: Ads do solve the pay-per-use problem, where most apps are subscription based so I'm constantly leaking subscription fees for apps / services I no longer use. Ads are great in that if I stop using a service, I stop paying the attention cost. Ads also solve the price stratification problem: wealthy users pay with their valuable time, and poor users pay with their less valuable time.
keybored 1y ago
> It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy. Can this corporate propaganda stop? Premises: 1. That we (the corporation) offer a free service is because people don’t wanna pay 2. Those freeloaders are costing us money 3. Eventually we have to introduce ads, shrugs we hate to do it but the freeloaders force our hands Instead: 1. The strategy IS to be free to use 2. INVEST money in building the network effect 3. When a critical mass has been reached: MONETIZE Where is the user’s preference in this? Nowhere. Why assume anything else? Why? It is patently irrational for all parties to spend money (“pay for what you use”) on a buergoning social media platform: - Business: why add any friction at all to a social media platform that you are supposed to grow? - ... and why concede any talking points to the naive people who think that paid service equals no ads or monetized “attention” if you do both? - Just monetize people instead - User: why would anyone on God’s Green Earth pay to use a social media platform that was pay-to-use on day zero when there are no users?

by mrtksn 1y ago

blitzar 1y ago

> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services Rounded to the nearest meaningful number - 0%

mrtksn 1y ago
I don't know, I expect it to be at least %3 as this is the general conversion rate for "free" users AFAIK. There must be some some number that makes it viable to have free users and paid users. For games, the free users are usually those who provide the "content". People usually demonize freemium games but IMHO its much more benign than extracting huge sums by artificially making it worse and sell attention.
- 1oooqooq 1y ago
  you're being too generous, as if people were on whatsbook because of a value they get. they are just there for the captive network effect, which will take a hit the second or becomes a freemium or ad ridden service.
  - xp84 1y ago
    Yeah, nobody uses Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or Google anymore now that they’re “ad-ridden”
    - 1oooqooq 1y ago
      none of those are blasting "encryption! only you can read your messages" as their main message and marketing. those are literal public forums people go to expose themselves. you don't have a very good point.
      - xp84 1y ago
        Whatsapp is messaging-focused, but I'm willing to bet the quotation you just gave is not even 10% of the reason people choose to use it. If I understand it correctly, people use it mainly because MMS was a dumpster fire and WA was the first platform which got critical mass in most countries, which it achieved by being both pretty good overall and by being cross-platform. The encryption is a nice bonus that everybody likes, but you can't prove that is a primary or even major reason why plumbers in India, tour guides in Dubai, and school parent groups in the US all choose to communicate with it, personally and professionally. If anything, I feel like Signal must have by now poached a good number of the people whose main concern is "How encrypted is it?" Also, Gmail is not a public forum and people don't mind that it's 'ad-ridden' either.
        1oooqooq 1y ago
        Gmail is the least ad ridden property on google ever. i don't think people join because it's encrypted, but they wouldn't use when it's not. it too can became the dumpsterfire that sms was/is.
        dsego 1y ago
        I don't think anybody in my non-tech circle even knows that messages are encrypted. It's just a convenient way to message people and share pictures from android phones. At some point in the past it was viber and before that fb messenger. I know older people who wouldn't know how to attach a document to an email but can share vacation photos via whatsapp, and we have group chats between friends and family. People also care about their chat history, and if they don't know that the data is encrypted and needs to be backed up, they loose it when transferring to a new device. It's happening all the time, a lot of common users would expect chats to just stay in the cloud somewhere and be available.
- blitzar 1y ago
  Most of those are tricked into it by manipulative UI or nearly impossible to cancel trials or forgotten monthly subscriptions.
  - mrtksn 1y ago
    How is it possible to have impossible to cancel trails? On AppStore it's in your account and takes 2 taps to cancel regardless of what the developer does. Are you talking for direct, by credit card payments that somehow you can't cancel? Can you explain a bit?
    - blitzar 1y ago
      The abuse was so rampant that even the US has had to legislate. US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) introduced a new regulation, known as the “click to cancel” rule. As for the darkest of dark patterns - give Adobe some money and see what happens.
      - mrtksn 1y ago
        Right, my rule of thumb is to stick with AppStore and when that's not an option use a Virtual card that I can just abandon if I don't want to use the service.
    - esrauch 1y ago
      Play Store also does this now and it's a fundamentally radical departure from the era where if you give the company your card info directly theres a high chance you aren't going to be able to get out of it without paying at least some amount more than you should. Think gyms where you refuse to cancel even when you are physically there in person with someone to yell at and imagine trying to do the same online where there's not a phone number, or a phone number with a 1 hour wait and a CSR paid based on if they can successfully not give you what you want
1oooqooq 1y ago
it's probably under 0% even including the 2% error margin.
- blitzar 1y ago
  Rounding up

irjustin 1y ago

This is only true if they introduce them. i.e. FB doesn't have a paid service, but obviously Youtube does. The problem is Whatsapp is a closed ecosystem so unlike email we can't just buy a provider. And I do pay for youtube. The experience is well worth it and I'm thankful I can afford it (it's not a lot but many can't).

xp84 1y ago
“Can’t” is relative. I suspect there are a lot of people who pay for at least one streaming service that isn’t YouTube, but spend more hours watching YouTube in a month than they do watching that service. And of course there’s also the age-old comparison that if someone goes to Starbucks more than twice in a month, they probably spend more there than you would on YouTube Premium, and does that provide the person with as much value as YouTube does? In my opinion, it’s rarely about “can’t” when we’re talking about 12 bucks a month or whatever. It’s about the psychology: when a free tier exists, people reframe it in their heads that paying for that thing is an extravagance. Relatedly, removing the free tier altogether also has dangerous effects, as people immediately jump to “I can’t believe you’re taking away the free thing I used to have” outrage, while nobody complains about not having free access to say, HBO.
Marsymars 1y ago
> This is only true if they introduce them. i.e. FB doesn't have a paid service, but obviously Youtube does. FB does - “Meta Verified” for $16/month (presumably different depending on locale), but the benefits aren’t very good. (A verified badge, Increased account protection, Enhanced support, Upgraded profile features, Bonus stars and stickers)
- irjustin 1y ago
  ... this thread is in the context of not seeing Ads. You can pay FB to serve your ads too. We're not talking about those things.

doix 1y ago

I remember WhatsApp costing money, 1$ per year or per lifetime or something. I paid for it, I think it was a WinRar situation though, where deleting and reinstalling the app gave it to you for free or something. I'm guessing most people didn't pay though, since they scraped the fee (even before FB bought them). I guess it was just too little money to be worth the effort.

A_Duck 1y ago
Yep I paid for Whatsapp, I've even dug out the receipt email. I want my £0.79 back!
- Ekaros 1y ago
  Three years of WhatsApp service for phone just 2,67$... In 2015... So I think I got that...
mschuster91 1y ago
Pre acquisition Whatsapp had 450M users. Even accounting for half the revenue of 1$ going away for payment fees (30%) and taxes (20%), that would still have been a nice cushy 200 million $ a year in almost pure profit - WA had 55 (!) employees at acquisition and 550 servers [1]. That's nothing at this scale of users and speaks volumes for the ingenuity of their staff. The only ones driving even leaner than that are StackOverflow with just nine servers [2]. [1] https://highscalability.com/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-million-users-11000-cores-an/ https://highscalability.com/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843
- paxys 1y ago
  That fee wasn't really enforced. I was in India at the time and no one paid because no one had credit cards tied to their account. Everyone still used WhatsApp just fine.
roryirvine 1y ago
Other way round. Facebook bought them in 2014, and they dropped the fee in early 2016. The fee wasn't enforced in many developing countries, and some users elsewhere will have been jumping through the delete-and-reinstall hoops (which was painful because it lost chat history) to avoid paying. But with 1bn active users at the time the fee was dropped, it would still have been bringing in more than enough revenue to have sustained Whatsapp as an independent business if they had chosen not to sell to FB.

filoleg 1y ago

I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach. The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many people in the “a fee instead of ads” crowd consumes YT for hours a day, but so far I’ve only met one person (not counting myself) who actually pays for YT Premium. And yes, a major chunk of the people I talked about this with were FAANG engineers, so it isn’t like they cannot afford it. But it felt like they were more interested in complaining about the ad-funded-services landscape and muse on their stances around it, as opposed to actually putting their money where their mouth is. All I can say is, I am not paying for YT Premium out of some ideological standpoint or love for Google (not even close). It has genuinely been just worth it for me many times over in the exact practical ways I was expecting it to.

Workaccount2 1y ago
By far the choice of most marginally savvy and above internet users is an ad-model where they themselves ad-block. Which somehow is spun to be morally righteous.
- johncessna 1y ago
  Morally Righteous? I think it's more they don't have to so they don't. It's like the DVR days where you'd just fast forward ads. It wasn't a moral high ground, it was just easy to do and was better than the alternative.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    Dutifully watching the ads doesn't seem moral either, it seems insane.
  - ndriscoll 1y ago
    I do actually think that putting ads in front of children at least is immoral, and it is neglectful not to block ads for kids in the same way that it is to just hand them an unfiltered violence-and-porn device. It's probably at least irresponsible to not block ads for an elderly parent who's starting to experience cognitive decline.

A_Duck 1y ago

The trouble with charging people is you have to charge everybody the same[1], so you're leaving money on the table with wealthy users, and pricing out poorer users Ads mean each user 'pays' you according to their spending power Kinda socialist when you think about it! From each according from his ability... [1] Obviously companies try to get around this with price discrimination, but it's hard especially for a network effect platform

xp84 1y ago
That is the absolute beauty of the targeted ad situation, isn’t it: you can generate leads for mortgages or expensive enterprise SaaS services, that are happy to pay super high acquisition costs, maximizing revenue from your rich users, and with the same ad inventory, maximize the revenue from your poor users by advertising App Store casino games for children, payday loans, etc. You can see why Meta doesn’t bother offering a paid service here.

barnabee 1y ago

I’d love to know the expected ad revenue per user for makers of apps like WhatsApp, Instagram. I’m pretty convinced I’d pay 10x or more than that amount for a completely ad free version but I can’t be sure.

owebmaster 1y ago
You would not, because 90% of the years wouldn't pay and you wouldn't also to have nobody to talk to after everybody moves to the next chat app
- barnabee 1y ago
  Why would users who can continue to receive exactly the same experience as today leave because some other users can opt to pay to go ad-free?
detaro 1y ago
I'm not sure if the number was for Facebook specifically or all Meta apps, but they did quote a number of around $70 revenue per year per US user a while ago. (with (much) lower numbers in other parts of the world)
- barnabee 1y ago
  That’s interesting, thanks
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  These numbers are actually kinda interesting, in that they're based on user location, not advertiser. So basically all global companies target the US first because it's a big market with consistent regulations and mostly one language (compare to the EU where you'd need English/German/French/Spanish/Polish and still would miss a lot). So, those numbers reflect a capital inflow to the US market rather than (as many people think) absurdly high conversion US users. Meta stopped reporting user numbers/CPMs by geography after the market freaked out when user growth plateaued in the US (because they'd acquired basically everyone).

Workaccount2 1y ago

I can say from experience and from others who have been in this position (not email, but general services); its around 1-2% of people. Nebula, the answer to the tyranny of Youtube (who works for advertisers), has a <1% conversion rate despite tons of huge Youtubers pushing it. Vid.me, the previous answer to youtubes tyranny, went bankrupt because people hate ads and also hate subscriptions, nor do they donate. I could write pages about this, but I wish I could violently shake all the children (many who are now in their 40's) that so deeply feel entitled to free content on the internet, and scream "If you are not paying directly for the product, you have no right to complain about the product". In reality the ad model is not going anywhere. Given the choice, people overwhelmingly chose to let the advertisers steer the ship if it means "free" entry.

9283409232 1y ago
Nebula just doesn't have a product I want. I don't care for early access to Youtube videos.
- DreadY2K 1y ago
  Maybe this isn't the case for you, but a number of creators I watch have some videos that they only upload to Nebula. So it's worth it for me to see those videos I otherwise wouldn't ever get to see.
paxys 1y ago
Video is impossible to break into because of how expensive it is. Even YouTube by all accounts is just breaking even. And that is with Google's entire infrastructure and advertising machinery behind it. A new entrant simply doesn't stand a chance.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  Hold on... A ton of broadcasters, production companies, and individuals have done it and are doing it. YouTube have many competitors and some of them are enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production companies are popping up all the time and are making some of the world's highest quality material. The same for individuals who are making videos. Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does exactly the same thing as YouTube?

carlosjobim 1y ago

Most people go absolutely mentally deranged by a simple magical incantation. The powerful incantation or spell consists of only one word: "Free". That word will make people loose their mind and their soul. It will make people accept anything and everything that they would never otherwise accept. They will line up for hours, they will accept hostile and toxic messages being screamed into their faces, they will humiliate themselves, they will spend sleepless nights, they will willingly enslave themselves, they will wither away in sickness, they will murder millions in the most cruel way imaginable. All for "free". Societies in our history were not arranged in the same way around money, because probably there was some knowledge of the two-sided curse of avarice and stinginess. I'm talking about medieval and post-medieval society, where most people didn't use or have money in their everyday life. Instead they had duties.

UnreachableCode 1y ago
But Signal is free. And ad-free
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  Sure, it's a rare case of a project which is sponsored and paid for by a billionaire. I wish there were more such projects, but you can't base an economy on charity from billionaires.
  - UnreachableCode 1y ago
    True enough. But I think in this case it's worth just enjoying how great Signal is. Maybe one day it will bend to enshittification, but for now, it's the better app.
- int_19h 1y ago
  Signal has its own limitations. It wasn't that long ago that you couldn't use it on tablets at all, and Android tablets are still unsupported (even as linked devices). There are other weird limits on linking, too - e.g. why can't I have a secondary phone as a linked device? Why can't I have more than 5 linked devices in total?

Xenoamorphous 1y ago

I remember when Whatsapp became a paid app, I can’t remember the details as I believe they varied by platform (iOS vs Android) but it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter. I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for a Coke at a bar that they’d piss down the toilet an hour later. It didn’t matter if it only took 3 or 4 messages to make Whatsapp pay off for itself, as they were sending dozens if not hundreds of messages per day, either images, videos and whatnot (MMSs were much more expensive). At that moment I realised many (most?) people would never pay for software. Either because it’s not something physical or because they’re stuck in the pre-Internet (or maybe music) mentality where copying something is not “stealing” as it’s digital data (but they don’t realise running Whatsapp servers, bandwidth etc cost very real money). And I guess this is why some of the biggest digital services are ad-funded. In contrast, literally never someone has voiced privacy concerns, they simply find ads annoying and they’ve asked for a way to get rid of them (without paying, of course). I should say, I’m from one of the European countries with the highest levels of piracy.

basisword 1y ago
>> I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. To be fair, that was in era when pirating was such a normal thing. Everybody at least knew about it. Cheap pirated DVD's were super common (I received them as gifts even) and everyone knew someone selling them. With people accustomed to paying for Netflix, music streaming, Office 365, etc. maybe a subscription version of WhatsApp would be more palatable. The problem is nobody will pay as long as the tech behemoths are offering the same thing for free.
- schroeding 1y ago
  Interestingly, the pendulum at least in my friend group starts to kinda swing in the other direction, i.e. non-technical friends start to indirectly ask (me as the tech guy) about blatant piracy for (visual, Spotify is still very much accepted) media and (TOS-violating[1]) ad blockers for ad-supported streaming. I cannot overstate how unexpected this was and is to me, we talk about people in their mid-twenties with jobs - maybe (video) streaming / subscriptions services actually overplayed their hand in the current economic climate. Doesn't make me super optimistic in this regard. [1] even if most of it is void in my jurisdiction anyway

WhyNotHugo 1y ago

I pay a third party to host my email, and wouldn’t mind paying an honest service provider to host something like an XMPP service. I wouldn’t pay Meta or similar companies for messaging services. And especially not for siloed messaging networks.

Xenoamorphous 1y ago
HN crowd has never been representative in this regard. Sure, it’s easy to get some 20 or 30-something year old with a cushy 6 figure salary to pay 20 USD or similar per month for some digital service (esp. when they are building some digital service themselves, so they know what it entails). For someone strugling to make ends meet, there’s many higher priority things than some digital service when there’s free alternatives, let alone email. And your privacy concerns? In my experience, absolutely non-existent in the real world. Actually I only ever hear about them in HN, not even my software development coworkers. Just the other day there was some raffle where there was some weekend trip to somewhere as a prize, but you had to give all your personal details, there was a big queue, they would’ve given their blood type details (if not literally a few ccs of their blood) and told them all about their kinkiest fantasy if they’d asked for it. Literally, I’m not joking.

basisword 1y ago

>> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services Some of us actually paid for WhatsApp! I think it was about $1 a year when it launched. At the time it was providing significant value, especially in areas where cross-border communication was common. I'm sure $1 isn't enough to cover costs anymore but someone could make a nice living charging $5-10 a month for something similar. The problem is people will always sell out to investors and fuck over their users. It's inevitable.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"There must be a way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy." Internet is a paid service. When I first accessed the internet in the 1980s, the only paid "service" necessary to use it was internet service. There was not the plethora of VC-funded third parties trying to act as intermediaries. The term "internet" amongst younger generations usually means only www sites, maybe app "endpoints" and _nothing else_. This is such a waste of potential. Today's internet is more useful than the 1980s internet. But I do not attribute that to third party intermediaries that only seek to profit from other peoples' use of it. I attribute the increased utility to technological improvements in hardware, including networking equipment. I do not attribute the increased utility to "improvements" in software, and certainly not the proliferation of software distributed for free as a Trojan Horse for those seeking to profit from data collection, surveillance and advertising services. The idea of paying for what these intermediaries try to call "services" makes no sense to me. Certainly, paying these intermediaries will not prevent them from data collection and surveillance for commercial purposes. (There are already examples.) It only subsidises this activity. Perhaps people believe these intermediaries engage in data collection, surveillance and ad services because "no one will pay for their software" instead of considering that they do so because they can, because there are few laws to prevent them. It was unregulated activity and is stilll grossly underregulated activity. It is more profitable than software licensing.

GrantMoyer 1y ago

The problem with this is that once enough people are paying for an ad-free subscription, services reintroduce ads to the paid subscription, sometimes alongside the introduction of a new more expensive ad-free subscriotion.

temporallobe 1y ago

I would be fine with the consumption model as long as it’s reasonable, but I honestly believe that streaming services hate this idea because it’s not as profitable as the ad model. In fact I am becoming more and more frustrated with services that I am paying for which show me ads even for “ad-free” experiences. For example, I pay for the highest tier of ad-free Hulu and Disney+ but Hulu somehow carves out exceptions for so-called non-Hulu content. So during some of those shows, you will see very frequent, very repetitive ads and it is quite obnoxious. There is literally not even an option to pay for a higher level of ad-free experience (I would!) because I guess they REALLY want to sell me Wegovy and SNHU and whatever other nonsense. The interruptions have gotten so obnoxious that I have lost interest. The only other option is to simply buy the episodes I am interested in. Or stop watching streaming content altogether.

flukas88 1y ago
Or... Wait and buy the bluray version which has also the pro of being at better bitrate and quality
int_19h 1y ago
We've circled back to the point where pirating content one way or another is more convenient than streaming it legally. I use StreamFab + Plex for most providers these days precisely because it offers a better experience than their own native apps. Just the other day, I tried to watch a show on Amazon only to discover that subtitles were skewed because someone messed up cutting out the ad breaks - it'd shift the subtitles by ~10s for each cut. Plex not only has the ability to adjust offsets, but it can actually analyze the audio and perform autocorrection (which works flawlessly, I must add). Of course, this also means that this show is now permanently in my video library, even if I drop my Amazon subscription. And no, I don't feel bad about that.

nyarlathotep_ 1y ago

> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? Probably not many. OTOH, I pay for Fastmail and NextDNS (both for at least 5 years at this point). People give strange looks when I mention paying for e-mail, even people "in the know." SAAS offerings for individuals don't have a lot of market share (streaming services aside). The exception might be iCloud/GMail harassing people about running out of storage, and people just eventually going "sure, here's 3 bucks a month."

ajsnigrutin 1y ago

Me? Never again. I used to... like some app, paid for a "PRO" version to get additonal features. Everything was ok. Then 6 months went by, and they added a cloud feature, to upload some stuff and configs and sync between devices, and it turned from one time payment to a subscription plan. Then built-in features got moved into the cloud, and previously working stuff didn't work without subscriptions anymore. Then they added ads. PRO has maybe 2 more features than a free version and no nag screen at the start, and that's it.

PenguinCoder 1y ago
Which app? I paid for pro fairmail and don't have that issue with the app, currently. Which is what I'd expect.
- ajsnigrutin 1y ago
  I forgot what it was called, it was years ago. It was one of those "scan" with the camera to create PDFs of documents with some basic OCR included. The cloud feature gave you some cloud space, but OCR has to be done on the cloud (used to be locally done). Even some quasi opensource software is no better... OsmAnd (openstreetmaps for android app) had a paid "OsmAnd+" version (that i bought), and then they decided they need a "pro" version too, 2.99/month, to get 3d relief and "colored routes".
  - int_19h 1y ago
    To be fair, OsmAnd bears the cost of hosting those maps, and when you consider that OsmAnd+ allows you to literally download the entire globe for offline use (which translates to hundreds of gigabytes of traffic), it's clear that they need some kind of ongoing revenue stream to be sustainable. And hillshade tiles (3D terrain) are particularly large since they need to be bitmaps rather than vectors like basic maps, so making their users bear more of that cost is not unreasonable.

browningstreet 1y ago

I think every business model on the planet is subject to “and ads” consideration. I wish it wasn’t true, but it’s the business equivalent of “every app becomes a social graph”.

amelius 1y ago
Hence the free market needs a government to stop the enshittification.

tonyhart7 1y ago

problem is google and meta prefer you not to buy Ads money is larger than user buying subscription they don't want you to buy software lol

paulcole 1y ago

> IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use Do you use any free (as in no money comes out of your wallet) services today? If so, which ones?

chias 1y ago

I remember reading that one reason you often can't escape ads by paying for the service is that through the act of choosing to pay for the service, you are self-identifying as someone willing to pay for things, and are thereby ironically putting yourself into the most valuable ad-targeting demographic there is.

furyofantares 1y ago

I think the problem is that we all pay for ads whether we're exposed to them or not. Ads result in higher prices, and a higher barrier to entry for competition. It's a collective action problem.

lurkshark 1y ago

I have a pet theory that the world would be slightly better place if the United States Postal Service had launched a convenient and free (taxpayer-funded) email service before Google: 1. I think folks would be naturally more skeptical of the government than they are of big tech, ideally leading to E2EE for email that's usable by the masses. 2. Phishing and scams could have a dedicated law enforcement arm (Postal Inspectors). 3. We'd reduce the amount of email-based personal data being mined and turned into entirely unregulated ad-tech nightmares.

ezst 1y ago
> 1. I think folks would be naturally more skeptical of the government than they are of big tech, ideally leading to E2EE for email that's usable by the masses. That is so weird to me. "Institutions that exist for the sole purpose of serving the people might end up having some power, so let's instead give it all to the literal oligarchs."
- elbear 1y ago
  Depends on where you are. In some countries people don't trust institutions unfortunately.
  - account42 1y ago
    And in some countries trust institutions too much unfortunately. Ideally you shouldn't just to just blindly trust them.

martinohansen 1y ago

Telegram has 15 million premium users paying ~$50/year They also issue bonds which is another fun way to collect money.

TheAceOfHearts 1y ago

People pay for their mobile phone service and internet service. Growing up one of my first emails was bundled with our dial-up ISP. Just because you're paying for a service doesn't mean your data won't get sold and monetized, nor does it protect you from ads getting shoved down your throat. ISPs and mobile phone service providers both sell your data. It's a common practice for services to keep raising prices and introduce ad-supported tiers in order to squeeze pay-piggies as much as possible. Any time someone has tried starting a service that competed with big tech it either gets bought out or ripped off. And big tech's infinitely deep pockets means they can run at a loss for years until all the competition has disappeared. I think in order to truly solve these problems it will require legislation and breaking up big tech into smaller companies. We also need legislation to require tech companies to stop creating walled gardens that cannot integrate with other platforms.

whiplash451 1y ago

At this point, you could have governments finance this piece of infrastructure. This would cost $350M/year to Europe [1] -- which is a drop of the ocean in their budget -- in exchange for control of information. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. [1] assuming the initial business model of whatsapp was cash neutral, which I think it was

aiono 1y ago

I think solution is neither. Such apps are now as much as essential as schools, hospitals and public infrastructure. Hence governments should build them with tax money.

johannes1234321 1y ago

It's extremely hard to compete in a commodity market where a large corp can do a free product to drive competition away. Gmail's promise of 1GB free storage was an incredible offer at those times, where many people used "paid" mailers. Paid as part of the Internet subscription with a worse Webmailer and less storage than Google provided. It is especially complicated with Mail, where Anti-Spam measures make operating an own server work (on one side for filtering incoming mail, on the other side to prevent being blocked for spamming)

tremon 1y ago

how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services? Why are you using that as an example, and not asking how many people pay for their cellular data plan?

perlgeek 1y ago

Y'know what, I'd have no problem paying for my "core services" if it were that easy. What I have a problem with is paying for potentially so many services: * phone * email * whatsapp, because others use it * signal, because it's actually good * telegram, because that one group is on it * my todo list app * duolingo * a good mapping app without ads ... and so on. And the same for my kids. And before you blink, you suddenly pay several hundred dollars per month. Aka the slippery slope. One of the problems seems to be that everything comes with transaction costs, so for example Signal cannot easily charge me a single dollar per month, which I suspect is a price point that would work for both me and them (if every one of their users paid it).

hliyan 1y ago

It is my view that you will never escape ads by paying for any content/service that is suitable for displaying ads. Reason: by the very act of paying for the service, you signal to advertisers that you are a person with purchasing power -- the very type of person they want to target. So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in. And if your service provider is under pressure to increase profits, and they're finding it hard to increase market share or innovate, they will reach for one of two solutions: (1) let service quality decline through cost cutting, and then introduce higher priced service tiers, or (2) ads. This is unfortunately what we see in reality.

fritzo 1y ago

In defense of ads: Ads do solve the pay-per-use problem, where most apps are subscription based so I'm constantly leaking subscription fees for apps / services I no longer use. Ads are great in that if I stop using a service, I stop paying the attention cost. Ads also solve the price stratification problem: wealthy users pay with their valuable time, and poor users pay with their less valuable time.

keybored 1y ago

> It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy. Can this corporate propaganda stop? Premises: 1. That we (the corporation) offer a free service is because people don’t wanna pay 2. Those freeloaders are costing us money 3. Eventually we have to introduce ads, shrugs we hate to do it but the freeloaders force our hands Instead: 1. The strategy IS to be free to use 2. INVEST money in building the network effect 3. When a critical mass has been reached: MONETIZE Where is the user’s preference in this? Nowhere. Why assume anything else? Why? It is patently irrational for all parties to spend money (“pay for what you use”) on a buergoning social media platform: - Business: why add any friction at all to a social media platform that you are supposed to grow? - ... and why concede any talking points to the naive people who think that paid service equals no ads or monetized “attention” if you do both? - Just monetize people instead - User: why would anyone on God’s Green Earth pay to use a social media platform that was pay-to-use on day zero when there are no users?