5 ms·

Just as consumers don't want to pay the "true" price of food or the "true" price of clothing, we don't want to pay the "true" price of software. You might grum

• paulryanrogers 1y ago
  Shrink wrapped software also often had cheaper upgrade packages, so you didn't always have to pay the full price each year. And before activation and 'licensing' you could resell it. As for FOSS going unpaid. SaaS doesn't necessarily lead to FOSS contributors getting paid more than they would if their software was going into shrink wrapped products.
  • gruez 1y ago
    >And before activation and 'licensing' you could resell it. So... nothing from this century? I'm not even sure how software without activation/licensing would work out economically. You'd either need something like a CD/dongle check (which is a hassle/expensive), or accept that one copy is going to be endlessly passed around.
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    • skydhash 1y ago
      Bought a lot of licenses for software on macOS. Some notable ones are Alfred and Things 3. I have a license for two of the Affinity (Designer and Photos) suite and a not so old version of Parallel. Most people don't really pass the license around. And it's not that much if you're a professional. But most subscriptions prices are egregious.
    • paulryanrogers 1y ago
      GOG sells plenty of software without DRM. DLC is much like the upgrades and expansions of old. SaaS is fine for what it is. It's just not a trade off that suits everyone. And crucially it denies users control over the tools they're paying for.
• mkesper 1y ago
  Sorry but I never understood how postman was a viable product in the first place.
  • mattgreenrocks 1y ago
    Agreed, it's rather insane to me. Basically seems like distribution trumps pretty much everything, sometimes even whether it's a viable business model. I was grocery shopping the other day and saw Liquid Death, which is a brand of...water, but with edgy marketing? I'm told to "make things people need," and then regularly see rent-seeking companies held in great esteem, ultra-undifferentiated offerings such as Liquid Death, an API client with a monthly fee, and other things that seem to contradict the maxim of making things that people need.
    • senordevnyc 1y ago
      The actual quote is “make something people want”, and that’s very different.
      • mattgreenrocks 1y ago
        Fair. I doubt people want rent-seeking companies inserted into their transactions, but they want what's on the other side, so they just accept it.
    • forgetfulness 1y ago
      Apparently the whole deal with Liquid Water is that it's so people don't give you crap for not drinking alcohol at parties or festivals. If they see you drinking water or soda off a normal can, people will feel self conscious and get pissy about them drinking but not you, with a flaming skull on the can, nobody bats an eye. The target audience is actually recovering alcoholics from party crowds, and the product is pure signaling.
      • mattgreenrocks 1y ago
        Thanks for the insight. Actually a great approach for a rather commodity product.
• Nextgrid 1y ago
  Counterpoint: what if version 4 is just fine? > Software is economically expensive to produce Maybe we just produce too much of it in an effort to justify our salaries and stock prices? For all the software that's been produced over the last 2 decades, I'm not aware of any significant breakthroughs to show for all that effort (LLMs might be the closest, but they are down to sheer processing power rather than software itself). My computer in 2010 was achieving basically the same tasks it achieves now - I can browser the web, buy goods online, watch videos, chat with people, play video games, and so on. My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable.
  • pjmlp 1y ago
    Eventually the company won't sell enough version 5 to keep everyone employed.
    • ceejayoz 1y ago
      Maybe that means we don’t need version 5? Companies aren’t supposed to be immortal.
      • ixsploit 1y ago
        And if a critical security flaw is discovered in version 4, nobody is going to fix it, and you need to buy a new product from a different vendor.
        • Nextgrid 1y ago
          If it's so critical, then you will buy it. Market supply/demand and all that. But there's many "security flaws" that are nowhere near critical or just don't apply to your use-case for the software.
          • eMPee584 1y ago
            .. after being pwned, and even then only maybe. Unless.. pushy ads for bugfixes?
• SirFatty 1y ago
  What's the true price then?
  • pjmlp 1y ago
    The total cost is based on monthly salary of everyone involved, plus infrastructure price and office costs. Now a price per box has to be figured out, so that enough boxes can be sold per month to cover those costs.
• unworkableideas 1y ago
  There are definitely advantages to the SaaS model. I was an excited and early believer and I absolutely recognize the amount of work and risk that goes into development of software. I also appreciate the business model — the new version cycle was exhausting in a different way. But working as a reseller for some big SaaS vendors there is just a ton to dislike about the model and the bundling of the services. At certain point, it really stops being about the users and it becomes a game of maximizing revenue. I guess I really can’t blame them, but it adds so many levels of complexity in the name of maximizing revenue instead of empowering users with capabilities.
• fishmicrowaver 1y ago
  Yeah sure, but I was probably fine with version 4, and it is now a massive hog of an app that contains all sorts of bloatware to justify its cost that I don't need or want.
• stavros 1y ago
  The problem with Postman isn't that we couldn't pay the developer a living, it's that it had to grow and grow and grow until it could extract the maximal amount of money from whatever corporate user it could get, in the process losing what made it good in the first place (simplicity). It's not an accident that my company migrated to three clients in the space as they all met Postman's fate, and we're probably going to migrate to a fourth one soon. I'm surprised Postman is still around, but I'd be even more surprised if it's doing well.
• wmwragg 1y ago
  My issue isn't specifically the subscription model, though it gets annoying and I prefer a one time fee, or the cost, I'm happy to pay, my issue is the lock-in accompanied with the SaaS subscription model. You stop paying you loose access to your work, esp. as most SaaS models aim for proprietary data formats and no, or deliberately really annoying and cumbersome, export abilities often only allowing exporting in their own proprietary formats "for backup", which are useless once you stop paying
  • shagie 1y ago
    This is part of why I'm completely ok with Jetbrains subscriptions - they have a perpetual fallback license. When they transitioned from the "buy a version, use it forever" licensing approach to a subscription model they added the perpetual fallback license (likely after some spicy feedback from customers). You can use whatever version you've had for a year forever. So if you cancel your subscription, the old version still works (and is probably fairly functional). --- The problem that Jetbrains had before the subscription model change is that major upgrade versions (that you paid for) were driven by accounting needs rather than engineering. "Need more money?" - release the version that is currently getting built, even if it doesn't offer compelling value. "Got some neat things for the next version?" - hold off on releasing it to customers until the company needs more money. The subscription model made it so that accounting had a stable and predictable revenue stream and engineering could release things as features were developed.
    • skydhash 1y ago
      This model makes the most sense for professional tools (IDEs, CAD, Office Suites,...). Like insurance or support contract. You don't lose everything the moment you want to shrink your spending budget. But for utilities (pdf readers, task managers,...), subscriptions feel like extortion.
    • pseudalopex 1y ago
      The problem was real. And update subscriptions are a good solution. But other update subscriptions allow perpetual use of the version at the end of the subscription. JetBrains products require downgrading to the year old version. And downgrading was not supported when I looked. This is a lock in tactic.
• danaris 1y ago
  The thing is, while this is, to some extent, true, it has to coexist alongside the fact that many SaaSes, in practice, are predatory and overpriced. Once you're providing your product as SaaS, the incentives for you to gatekeep features behind higher tiers of subscription become very strong. Similarly, the incentives to create lock-in become much more prominent than they are if you only get paid again if they liked your product enough to buy the next version, too. And, in all likelihood, the extra money—the difference between "how much we need to continue to provide a high-quality product (including dev salaries)" and "how much we're charging you"—is going to pad the execs' bonuses and fund stock buybacks. I would love to see there be a middle ground—where any piece of software that makes sense to have as SaaS can be provided as such, for what it costs to make it plus reasonable profit, at a high quality, and the dark patterns are disincentivized through regulation and/or through voting with our wallets. Unfortunately, given the political climate we live in, that's not going to happen any time soon. So for me, personally, by far the best choice is always going to be to pick software I can buy once and own forever, and if I want the next version I can buy that.
• matheusmoreira 1y ago
  > we don't do enough to recognise that, in part because of how much free work is contributed by open source contributors and how little we recognise how much work they really do Well then let's start recognizing it right now. https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.com/essays/why_i_gpl.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co... > Why I (A/L)GPL > Open source to open source, corporation to corporation. > If you do open source, you’re my hero and I support you. > If you’re a corporation, let’s talk business. > I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made. > Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars. https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ > To the Beggar Baron, open source's value is its free donation. > You would never stand on the street and offer to buy the wallets off people who are about to donate a few dollars to you. That'd be stupid. > They're giving you their money for free. Take it and run. Always slap AGPLv3 onto everything you make. Always choose the most copyleft license imaginable. Permissive licenses yield zero leverage. It's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved.
• croes 1y ago
  >SaaS solves that problem by keeping everyone on the latest version. You mean creates the problem not know which version you have tomorrow. Great if all your tutorials are obsolete because of a sudden UI change
• throwaway894345 1y ago
  Yeah, I say this as someone who likes the idea of self-hosting, especially for the privacy implications, but the economics of software just benefit SaaS for the time being. There are just too many efficiencies to keeping the backend in the control of the software developers. Schema changes are far, far easier (if you're not sure whether a schema change is going to stomp on real user data, you can pretty easily find out). Similarly, when all of the data is colocated with the backend service, multiple stacked roundtrip latencies are often fine. And when you release a new feature, it benefits new users right away and you get paid for those features right away. You don't have to wait for a new version to ship. And consequently, you get feedback right away, which means you don't stack bugs on bugs only to find out at release time (this is basically agile vs waterfall). Subscriptions are essentially the only sensible pricing model for anything with regular, frequent upgrades, and until we can make self-hosted software as easy and reliable as SaaS software (for the same cost) then we aren't going to see very much software distributed to end users (lots of software has gone the other direction though--e.g., office suites).
• franga2000 1y ago
  Postman has over 600 employees and has raised several hundred million dollars in venture captial. The reason Postman is this expensive isn't because it's very expensive to develop and maintain, it's because you're paying off the VCs. If they took a reasonable investment and kept a reasonably sized team, they wouldn't have to charge for a curl GUI what Adobe charges for their entire suite of industry-leading creative tools.
  • Ekaros 1y ago
    I think VC money and expectations it brings has destroyed so much. To me Postman sounds like product that should be reasonably run with team at most in low dozens. And that includes all roles including customer support. 600 people sounds like world has just gone wrong.
• ForHackernews 1y ago
  Software is not economically expensive to produce. It's cheaper than almost any physical good. On the contrary, because software is so cheap to produce, it's extraordinarily profitable, and SaaS is even more profitable because customers keep paying over and over again for something that only needs to be produced once.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  "Just as consumers don't want to pay the "true" price of food or the "true" price of clothing, we don't want to pay the "true" price of software" But software is nothing like food I lived without software for many years As a consumer, the best software I use is not new. It's old Today's software is literally forced on consumers It's true they dont want to pay for it It's given away for free as a Trojan Horse to collect data, enable surveillance and online advertising services. It also allows remote installation of further software on the consumer's computer Or it's not delivered at all but sold as a "service" None of this is essential like food Consumers will pay for food, water, shelter
• CatWChainsaw 1y ago
  So do you support media-streaming services being able to modify or deny you content because that's part of the true price?
• GaryBluto 1y ago
  > SaaS solves that problem by keeping everyone on the latest version. Mandatory upgrades are far from a solution to anything.
• throw-10-13 1y ago
  Postman is one if the worst examples I can think of. Bloated product backed by VC’s scrambling for any return on their investment.