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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 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
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    Number of competing video services with distinct libraries has kinda put it back in vogue, I think. No one I've ever talked to is really happy about paying for more than 1-2 streaming services, especially if some of them only have one show they're interested in. If that show is really tempting it becomes tempting to just pirate Severance or what have you instead of signing up to one new service for it on top of Netflix et al.
    - basisword 1y ago
      In my experience people tend to just move between services. A month on Netflix, then a month with Disney etc. The convenience of having those apps built-in to TV's and easily installed on phones shouldn't be overlooked. If you want easy access to your pirated content from all your devices (including TV's, phones, tablets) you have to have a bit more tech experience and be willing to deal with a bit more inconvenience. For most just rotating services subscribed to is much easier.
- dpkirchner 1y ago
  Hell, VHS tapes and DVDs often had brief clips shown before the movie talking about how you can get free movies by pirating.
yibg 1y ago
Similar situation as flights. People complain about lack of space, misc fees etc. But when it comes down to it, people for the most part, still pick the cheapest flight. I think the other factor is a bit of anchoring. I know this impacts me anyways. If there is a "free" alternative, then that's where I'm anchored at. I can watch youtube for free so paying for it seems like a bad deal. Where as there is no free alternative to Coke that still gets your Coke (as opposed to say water).
- sdeframond 1y ago
  > when it comes down to it, people for the most part, still pick the cheapest flight. Flight comparators don't show "avaliable legroom" in their metrics. As far as I know some companies charge more for seats near entrances where there's more space, so people are willing to pay more.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > As far as I know some companies charge more for seats near entrances where there's more space, so people are willing to pay more In my anecdotal experience, the people complaining about leg room are precisely those who are not paying for additional leg room. (Similar to how people who compare modern air travel with service in the 1960s aren't purchasing the inflation-adjusted equivalent ticket, which would almost always be a lay-flat seat today if not Wheels Up.)
    - SkyeCA 1y ago
      I may be the exception, but as someone who's 194cm tall I am both paying for more legroom and complaining about legroom.
    - account42 1y ago
      Airlines aren't paying inflation-adjusted equivalents from the 1960s for their expenses either.
  - skeeter2020 1y ago
    Google flights does - at least as well as they can base don the airline and plane. They'll also compare this to the average. All airlines charge more for exit rows and their extra legroom, typically as "premium economy" seats.
bsoles 1y ago
The problem with paying a small fee for a service is not the fee itself. It is the friction for paying for the service and the hassle that comes after the payment. Now the credit card company knows what service I am buying; I would get endless marketing emails from the service for buying additional things; my info as a person willing to pay for such a service would get sold to other companies; my credit card info would get leaked/stolen, ... If the whole experience was literally as simple as handing someone a $1 bill, I promise I would pay for many many internet services.
- mikedelfino 1y ago
  > It is the friction for paying for the service and the hassle that comes after the payment. I don't know. Paying for streaming services seems very natural nowadays.
- Xenoamorphous 1y ago
  I can guarantee none of your concerns apply to the people I was talking about, particularly the privacy ones. These people would pay for their meal at a restaurant using their debit/credit card without hesitation, and they still do, and that’s arguably more likely to get your card details stolen, and the issuer knowing about your life. Those worries you’re citing never crossed their minds. They just didn’t want to pay a tiny amount of money for an “abstract” thing.
  - bsoles 1y ago
    I don't disagree. I am mostly talking about my hesitations for not willing to pay small amounts of fees for bunch of internet services. I am afraid that the "cost" of paying for these services would end up being a lot more than the actual amount of money. Incidentally, this is also the reason, as much as I would like to, for not donating to public/non-profit organizations. Anybody who has donated to a political party or an organization like ACLU would know what I am talking about...
- xandrius 1y ago
  I really don't buy that the reason is the "tracking". It's the friction of paying for something at all. There is no free sandwich, so people don't generally expect it, on the other hand there's plenty of free software.
ignoramous 1y ago
> ... Whatsapp became a paid app ... it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter ... Interestingly, WhatsApp put up paid plans to slow down user acquisition [0]. On Androids, in some countries, WhatsApp continued to work even if you didn't pay the $1/year fee. [0] https://youtu.be/8-pJa11YvCs?t=952 https://youtu.be/8-pJa11YvCs?t=952
- debugnik 1y ago
  In Spain, most people who didn't pay in the first few days after the free period expired then received a free renewal.
  - hocuspocus 1y ago
    In my case I don't remember having to let the trial period expire, it just got renewed automatically a couple times before WhatsApp became free. I don't know any Android users who paid back then, only iPhone owners did.
makeitdouble 1y ago
> people would never pay for software. I mostly share your conclusion, but I think there is a specific twist: most people will pay for on the spot transactions. We see it in spades for games: in-app purchases and season passes have a lower barrier of acceptance. I assume buying stones to unlock a character must be thought at the same level as buying coffee, as just a one-time purchase that doesn't require further calculations.
- bobthepanda 1y ago
  at least for some of it what's nice is that you are getting exactly what you paid for on the tin, and most importantly you are not getting locked into some god-awful subscription with a cancellation process akin to pulling teeth. the urge to buy goes down if the subscription is cheap enough ($.99 songs versus $12 a spotify subsscription) but having been through my fair share of attempting contract cancellations this isn't surprising.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- AndrewDavis 1y ago
  It'd be interesting to see open data about this. My understanding is games with microtransactions optimise for "whales", people who spend inordinate amounts of money. While the majority of users don't pay anything, or at most very little.
  - fn-mote 1y ago
    You need a funnel to find the whales. Free users < sometimes pay a bit < regularly $10/week < whale
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    My understanding is whales make the mobile gaming industry the juggernaut it is, but without whales it would still be a sizeable market. My mental image of it is looking at Apple when the iPhone was 2 or 3 years old, and today's Apple: its current size dwarfs the Apple of back in the days, but it wasn't some small also-ran company, it's impact on the whole industry was still pretty big. AppsFlyer's data on this was interesting, while not straightforward to interpret from our angle. https://www.appsflyer.com/resources/reports/app-marketing-monetization/ https://www.appsflyer.com/resources/reports/app-marketing-mo...
486sx33 1y ago
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cherryteastain 1y ago
On the other hand, I did pay the $1 for Whatsapp back in the day and I was promised it'd be ad free. Want that $1 back, I actually even deleted my account and uninstalled Whatsapp!
- homefree 1y ago
  I feel a bit for Brian Acton - iirc he refused to sell because the 500M users paying $500M dollars was more than enough to fund his tiny team (of 30?), but when the offer went up to 19B$ it's just kind of hard to turn down - there's extreme opportunity cost there. Most people would sell before that, 19B$ of principle is quite a lot. I think it's just if you're empire building - and Zuck is insanely good at this, one of the best - then it'll never be optimal to charge vs. grow massively and then monetize the larger attention base. Zuck is also in a trench warfare competition with other social media players, it's far from a monopoly. He's historically been more inclined to do things that were worse for growth, but better for users when they had more of a dominant position - but he can't do that anymore. Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat. Instead they're going to be stuck with the modern equivalent of BBM while Zuck and Meta erase their only remaining stronghold in the US as iPhone users continue to move to WhatsApp.
  - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
    I have not had someone ask me to use WhatsApp in nearly ten years, I deal with people on iMessage every day...
    - Zak 1y ago
      I can predict the country you live in with reasonable reliability from this comment alone. This would not be true most places outside of the USA and maybe Canada. In a few countries/regions it might be a different third-party messaging app.
      - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
gsich 1y ago
Or because back then only credit card payment was possible?
socalgal2 1y ago
> people would never pay for software. I see this and not see this. See this = friend wants to check out app but it costs $1-$3. I'm like, that's less than a coffee or a candy bar that you consume disposably. Why not just try it and if it's sucks throw it away, the same way you might with a new food item? That argument doesn't work on them for some reason. not see = Steam
- emseetech 1y ago
  Also, do people not pay for it because there are still so many free competing services? If everything goes the way of ads and (for lack of a better term) enshittification, could consumer attitudes change?
  - bitmasher9 1y ago
    There is a market for paid software services with a promise of not enshittifying. Kagi and Fastmail are two examples. Now, this market probably isn’t going to put you in the Fortune 500, but is enough to run a profitable business.
    - account42 1y ago
      The problem is that there is also tons of services that promised not to enshittify but then changed their minds when they thought that fucking over their users would be more profitable. That includes even Google, look up their early views on ads. Because of this those promises are often (IMO rightfully) ignored as hot air. The only way to ensure that your software doesn't get enshittified is to legally guarantee that you are not dependent on a single vendor for future development - the most effective way to do that is insist on open source software.
      - bitmasher9 1y ago
        Yeah I love open source. Daily Linux desktop user and open source code contributor here. Open source doesn’t solve the problem “I need to be able to search the entire internet for a document.” Even “I want to safely receive email” is a challenge to do with open source software. At some point I need to use software as a service, and at that point I’d prefer to give money to the service directly than having the service target advertising at me.
SlowTao 1y ago
When the Apple App store came along it was wild seeing how quickly software went from $10 down to 0.99c in the space of less than a year. And then it was only a matter of time before it dropped to zero. Once it hit zero, the tolerance for payment of any kind went to zero as well for a very large portion of people. Apps and the internet in general, for most people, is considered almost weightless and zero cost. In the race for market dominance meant dropping the price as low as possible to drive out competition.
- jama211 1y ago
  Many good apps use subscription models still to great effect, if their user base is of the right type. E.g. overcast the podcast app. It makes excellent money because of the type of user who pays for it is looking for a premium experience. The $0 app thing is for race to the bottom style app markets, which, let’s be honest, has always been that way.
- DecentShoes 1y ago
  True. Yet, if you don't charge for the software itself, but instead you make that purchase only unlock a skin or some fake currency in that software, and worse, only have a small chance of being the one that user wants, suddenly people will pay 10, 20, or 100 dollars for your software, over and over again.
  - bapak 1y ago
    It's almost as if people are made of inconsistent meat
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    It's gambling at the core that's the issue here. We used to have robust regulation of it for decades (and it was recognized millennia ago that gambling is bad for societies anyway), the problem is that the global gambling industry moved far too fast for regulations to catch up - and now we're at a point where children, even toddlers are getting lured into gambling mechanisms. It's all lootboxes nowadays. Personal take on it: that's all just preparing children for the inevitable fact that everything from education over employment and housing to dating is mostly depending on luck...
farzd 1y ago
Consumer stance on paying for software has changed drastically now because of AI. Even outside of utility software like Chat GPT, people are paying for image generators etc.
- mr_toad 1y ago
  I that paying for software or paying for a service? When I pay Netflix it’s not because of their app.
  - farzd 1y ago
    Theres hundreds of apps utilising AI for simple consumer apps. And yes people are paying https://app.sensortower.com/overview/6449750416?country=US https://app.sensortower.com/overview/6449750416?country=US
obblekk 1y ago
A lot of normal consumers pay $20 a month for ChatGPT. I think most software gets bid down in price bc the marginal costs are zero. Where it’s not (llm token generation) prices don’t plummet and consumers build a different expectation.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  Please define "a lot". In term of percentage of users connected to the internet worldwide, I don't even think it reaches a percent.
camillomiller 1y ago
Sounds like my memories of being the computer guy in Italy.
account42 1y ago
I don't think you can make the conclusion you make. In this case the service started as free (and thereby training people that it costs nothing) and and only later tried to pull the rug out under people after locking them in via network effects. It's perfectly reasonable to refuse to financially reward such tactics. It's also that people already pay ridiculous amounts of money for their own internet connection. There is no reason why with A paying for internet and B paying for internet that A and B should pay again just to be able to talk to each other. Of course the technical reality is different but that's at least partially due to how WhatsApp designed their system.
fock 1y ago
all my family paid happily for Whatsapp. Then we got refunded because Facebook bought them. Now we get ads. Yay :)

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
- nemomarx 1y ago
  Number of competing video services with distinct libraries has kinda put it back in vogue, I think. No one I've ever talked to is really happy about paying for more than 1-2 streaming services, especially if some of them only have one show they're interested in. If that show is really tempting it becomes tempting to just pirate Severance or what have you instead of signing up to one new service for it on top of Netflix et al.
  - basisword 1y ago
    In my experience people tend to just move between services. A month on Netflix, then a month with Disney etc. The convenience of having those apps built-in to TV's and easily installed on phones shouldn't be overlooked. If you want easy access to your pirated content from all your devices (including TV's, phones, tablets) you have to have a bit more tech experience and be willing to deal with a bit more inconvenience. For most just rotating services subscribed to is much easier.
dpkirchner 1y ago
Hell, VHS tapes and DVDs often had brief clips shown before the movie talking about how you can get free movies by pirating.

yibg 1y ago

Similar situation as flights. People complain about lack of space, misc fees etc. But when it comes down to it, people for the most part, still pick the cheapest flight. I think the other factor is a bit of anchoring. I know this impacts me anyways. If there is a "free" alternative, then that's where I'm anchored at. I can watch youtube for free so paying for it seems like a bad deal. Where as there is no free alternative to Coke that still gets your Coke (as opposed to say water).

sdeframond 1y ago
> when it comes down to it, people for the most part, still pick the cheapest flight. Flight comparators don't show "avaliable legroom" in their metrics. As far as I know some companies charge more for seats near entrances where there's more space, so people are willing to pay more.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > As far as I know some companies charge more for seats near entrances where there's more space, so people are willing to pay more In my anecdotal experience, the people complaining about leg room are precisely those who are not paying for additional leg room. (Similar to how people who compare modern air travel with service in the 1960s aren't purchasing the inflation-adjusted equivalent ticket, which would almost always be a lay-flat seat today if not Wheels Up.)
  - SkyeCA 1y ago
    I may be the exception, but as someone who's 194cm tall I am both paying for more legroom and complaining about legroom.
  - account42 1y ago
    Airlines aren't paying inflation-adjusted equivalents from the 1960s for their expenses either.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  Google flights does - at least as well as they can base don the airline and plane. They'll also compare this to the average. All airlines charge more for exit rows and their extra legroom, typically as "premium economy" seats.

bsoles 1y ago

The problem with paying a small fee for a service is not the fee itself. It is the friction for paying for the service and the hassle that comes after the payment. Now the credit card company knows what service I am buying; I would get endless marketing emails from the service for buying additional things; my info as a person willing to pay for such a service would get sold to other companies; my credit card info would get leaked/stolen, ... If the whole experience was literally as simple as handing someone a $1 bill, I promise I would pay for many many internet services.

mikedelfino 1y ago
> It is the friction for paying for the service and the hassle that comes after the payment. I don't know. Paying for streaming services seems very natural nowadays.
Xenoamorphous 1y ago
I can guarantee none of your concerns apply to the people I was talking about, particularly the privacy ones. These people would pay for their meal at a restaurant using their debit/credit card without hesitation, and they still do, and that’s arguably more likely to get your card details stolen, and the issuer knowing about your life. Those worries you’re citing never crossed their minds. They just didn’t want to pay a tiny amount of money for an “abstract” thing.
- bsoles 1y ago
  I don't disagree. I am mostly talking about my hesitations for not willing to pay small amounts of fees for bunch of internet services. I am afraid that the "cost" of paying for these services would end up being a lot more than the actual amount of money. Incidentally, this is also the reason, as much as I would like to, for not donating to public/non-profit organizations. Anybody who has donated to a political party or an organization like ACLU would know what I am talking about...
xandrius 1y ago
I really don't buy that the reason is the "tracking". It's the friction of paying for something at all. There is no free sandwich, so people don't generally expect it, on the other hand there's plenty of free software.

ignoramous 1y ago

> ... Whatsapp became a paid app ... it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter ... Interestingly, WhatsApp put up paid plans to slow down user acquisition [0]. On Androids, in some countries, WhatsApp continued to work even if you didn't pay the $1/year fee. [0] https://youtu.be/8-pJa11YvCs?t=952 https://youtu.be/8-pJa11YvCs?t=952

debugnik 1y ago
In Spain, most people who didn't pay in the first few days after the free period expired then received a free renewal.
- hocuspocus 1y ago
  In my case I don't remember having to let the trial period expire, it just got renewed automatically a couple times before WhatsApp became free. I don't know any Android users who paid back then, only iPhone owners did.

makeitdouble 1y ago

> people would never pay for software. I mostly share your conclusion, but I think there is a specific twist: most people will pay for on the spot transactions. We see it in spades for games: in-app purchases and season passes have a lower barrier of acceptance. I assume buying stones to unlock a character must be thought at the same level as buying coffee, as just a one-time purchase that doesn't require further calculations.

bobthepanda 1y ago
at least for some of it what's nice is that you are getting exactly what you paid for on the tin, and most importantly you are not getting locked into some god-awful subscription with a cancellation process akin to pulling teeth. the urge to buy goes down if the subscription is cheap enough ($.99 songs versus $12 a spotify subsscription) but having been through my fair share of attempting contract cancellations this isn't surprising.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
AndrewDavis 1y ago
It'd be interesting to see open data about this. My understanding is games with microtransactions optimise for "whales", people who spend inordinate amounts of money. While the majority of users don't pay anything, or at most very little.
- fn-mote 1y ago
  You need a funnel to find the whales. Free users < sometimes pay a bit < regularly $10/week < whale
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  My understanding is whales make the mobile gaming industry the juggernaut it is, but without whales it would still be a sizeable market. My mental image of it is looking at Apple when the iPhone was 2 or 3 years old, and today's Apple: its current size dwarfs the Apple of back in the days, but it wasn't some small also-ran company, it's impact on the whole industry was still pretty big. AppsFlyer's data on this was interesting, while not straightforward to interpret from our angle. https://www.appsflyer.com/resources/reports/app-marketing-monetization/ https://www.appsflyer.com/resources/reports/app-marketing-mo...

486sx33 1y ago

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cherryteastain 1y ago

On the other hand, I did pay the $1 for Whatsapp back in the day and I was promised it'd be ad free. Want that $1 back, I actually even deleted my account and uninstalled Whatsapp!

homefree 1y ago
I feel a bit for Brian Acton - iirc he refused to sell because the 500M users paying $500M dollars was more than enough to fund his tiny team (of 30?), but when the offer went up to 19B$ it's just kind of hard to turn down - there's extreme opportunity cost there. Most people would sell before that, 19B$ of principle is quite a lot. I think it's just if you're empire building - and Zuck is insanely good at this, one of the best - then it'll never be optimal to charge vs. grow massively and then monetize the larger attention base. Zuck is also in a trench warfare competition with other social media players, it's far from a monopoly. He's historically been more inclined to do things that were worse for growth, but better for users when they had more of a dominant position - but he can't do that anymore. Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat. Instead they're going to be stuck with the modern equivalent of BBM while Zuck and Meta erase their only remaining stronghold in the US as iPhone users continue to move to WhatsApp.
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  I have not had someone ask me to use WhatsApp in nearly ten years, I deal with people on iMessage every day...
  - Zak 1y ago
    I can predict the country you live in with reasonable reliability from this comment alone. This would not be true most places outside of the USA and maybe Canada. In a few countries/regions it might be a different third-party messaging app.
    - ocdtrekkie 1y ago

gsich 1y ago

Or because back then only credit card payment was possible?

socalgal2 1y ago

> people would never pay for software. I see this and not see this. See this = friend wants to check out app but it costs $1-$3. I'm like, that's less than a coffee or a candy bar that you consume disposably. Why not just try it and if it's sucks throw it away, the same way you might with a new food item? That argument doesn't work on them for some reason. not see = Steam

emseetech 1y ago
Also, do people not pay for it because there are still so many free competing services? If everything goes the way of ads and (for lack of a better term) enshittification, could consumer attitudes change?
- bitmasher9 1y ago
  There is a market for paid software services with a promise of not enshittifying. Kagi and Fastmail are two examples. Now, this market probably isn’t going to put you in the Fortune 500, but is enough to run a profitable business.
  - account42 1y ago
    The problem is that there is also tons of services that promised not to enshittify but then changed their minds when they thought that fucking over their users would be more profitable. That includes even Google, look up their early views on ads. Because of this those promises are often (IMO rightfully) ignored as hot air. The only way to ensure that your software doesn't get enshittified is to legally guarantee that you are not dependent on a single vendor for future development - the most effective way to do that is insist on open source software.
    - bitmasher9 1y ago
      Yeah I love open source. Daily Linux desktop user and open source code contributor here. Open source doesn’t solve the problem “I need to be able to search the entire internet for a document.” Even “I want to safely receive email” is a challenge to do with open source software. At some point I need to use software as a service, and at that point I’d prefer to give money to the service directly than having the service target advertising at me.

SlowTao 1y ago

When the Apple App store came along it was wild seeing how quickly software went from $10 down to 0.99c in the space of less than a year. And then it was only a matter of time before it dropped to zero. Once it hit zero, the tolerance for payment of any kind went to zero as well for a very large portion of people. Apps and the internet in general, for most people, is considered almost weightless and zero cost. In the race for market dominance meant dropping the price as low as possible to drive out competition.

jama211 1y ago
Many good apps use subscription models still to great effect, if their user base is of the right type. E.g. overcast the podcast app. It makes excellent money because of the type of user who pays for it is looking for a premium experience. The $0 app thing is for race to the bottom style app markets, which, let’s be honest, has always been that way.
DecentShoes 1y ago
True. Yet, if you don't charge for the software itself, but instead you make that purchase only unlock a skin or some fake currency in that software, and worse, only have a small chance of being the one that user wants, suddenly people will pay 10, 20, or 100 dollars for your software, over and over again.
- bapak 1y ago
  It's almost as if people are made of inconsistent meat
- mschuster91 1y ago
  It's gambling at the core that's the issue here. We used to have robust regulation of it for decades (and it was recognized millennia ago that gambling is bad for societies anyway), the problem is that the global gambling industry moved far too fast for regulations to catch up - and now we're at a point where children, even toddlers are getting lured into gambling mechanisms. It's all lootboxes nowadays. Personal take on it: that's all just preparing children for the inevitable fact that everything from education over employment and housing to dating is mostly depending on luck...

farzd 1y ago

Consumer stance on paying for software has changed drastically now because of AI. Even outside of utility software like Chat GPT, people are paying for image generators etc.

mr_toad 1y ago
I that paying for software or paying for a service? When I pay Netflix it’s not because of their app.
- farzd 1y ago
  Theres hundreds of apps utilising AI for simple consumer apps. And yes people are paying https://app.sensortower.com/overview/6449750416?country=US https://app.sensortower.com/overview/6449750416?country=US

obblekk 1y ago

A lot of normal consumers pay $20 a month for ChatGPT. I think most software gets bid down in price bc the marginal costs are zero. Where it’s not (llm token generation) prices don’t plummet and consumers build a different expectation.

prmoustache 1y ago
Please define "a lot". In term of percentage of users connected to the internet worldwide, I don't even think it reaches a percent.

camillomiller 1y ago

Sounds like my memories of being the computer guy in Italy.

account42 1y ago

I don't think you can make the conclusion you make. In this case the service started as free (and thereby training people that it costs nothing) and and only later tried to pull the rug out under people after locking them in via network effects. It's perfectly reasonable to refuse to financially reward such tactics. It's also that people already pay ridiculous amounts of money for their own internet connection. There is no reason why with A paying for internet and B paying for internet that A and B should pay again just to be able to talk to each other. Of course the technical reality is different but that's at least partially due to how WhatsApp designed their system.

fock 1y ago

all my family paid happily for Whatsapp. Then we got refunded because Facebook bought them. Now we get ads. Yay :)