Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software
My most recent experience is Shutter Stock, a completely scam company that charges ridiculous amounts of money with no easy to unsubscribe.
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.shutterstock.com
- Microsoft has used its dominant position to charge for MS Office in perpetuity, breaking features and now trying to trick people to use One Drive more (renaming files from an Office App is only a "feature" that works for files saved remotely on One Drive)
- Apple's "services" income is mostly from various apps that use predatory practices to maximise how much they can extract from users. For example, it makes sense for me, with a broken App Store search, to pay $4 for each download when I can get users to pay $5/month to use my app.
- Many other examples, with the whole industry going towards SaaS and HaaS
What has the world come to, where technology has been appropriated and we are left paying rents every month and companies are increasingly becoming user-hostile and predatory and monopolistic!
328 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 354 ms ] thread- Has a big enough moat that its immune to competition - in which case you get rent seeking behaviour; or
- It's vulnerable and could disappear / become economically unviable so you wouldn't want to have your business rely on it.
So you essentially have to choose between two unpalatable choices.
I hate recurring billing as well, and it works very poorly for occasionally used software, but for software that I use every week, I’m indifferent to whether it’s billed lumpy or smooth; the total price vs total value is what matters.
One significant advantage of SaaS over traditional download-and-run-and-pay-for-updates apps is the fact that everyone is always on the same version. In a large organisation, and across organisational boundaries, working around people using different versions of things is an incredibly inefficient use of time.
Office 365 is worth the money for that reason alone.
This is undeniably an advantage to the developer, but much less so for users. When a developer releases a terrible update that removes features or does an unnecessary re-design, in the world of non-SaaS, I could simply choose to stay on the older version. Now that choice is gone and the company is in charge of what version I am using. This is a huge step backwards.
I expect when I obtain software, it will continue to work forever, behave the same way forever, until/unless I choose to update it. That fundamental promise is going away quickly.
Ironically, a far greater pain point (in my experience) has been poor interchangeability and access to cloud storage solutions between internal and external collaborators.
Those two editions often cannot properly render documents made in the other one.
You can still buy a definitive, noncloud, without subscription of MS Office, and they still release it (there is a 2021 edition).
Some FOSS products are that great, but if you come from MS Office, LibreOffice feels a lot like an early 2000's downgrade.
The compatibility and robustness of LibreOffice is excellent, but the UI/UX and something as simple as the default design templates that come with it, it's just not up to the level of MS Office, and customers do judge by that criteria.
I wish LibreOffice was up that standard, so there would be more consumer choice. I even tried LibreOffice as my daily driver for sometime, and I just couldn't stand it.
Except 'Import CSV' wizard, it's light years ahead of MSO's one, which didn't changed for two decades. Which is understandable, nobody [from the corporate customers with tens thousands of users] cried loud enough.
Also it doesn't even look good. MSO would use ClearType (and whatever) and looks good, LO looks like I'm in 1995 looking at 640x480 14" monitor.
For example, I used to buy a non-cloud/non-subscription license through the Home Use Program. It used to be relatively cheap.
Now that option is not available, they only sell a slightly discounted cloud/subscription ($60/year vs $99/year).
It's been this way for at least a few years and I think actually near half a dozen.
However, not all aspects of subscriptions - and not all players - are shady or bad. I wrote about the different aspects of subscription businesses recently[0] if you're interested.
[0] https://trive-studio.medium.com/do-you-hate-subscriptions-th...
So to answer the question of how we came here: The same way anything in the commons sphere rots and dies. Not enough people care enough about it. They're OK giving away control one way or another and companies are more than happy to sell it as a service. What user gets in return is diminishing but once the process starts it's kind of runaway I'm afraid.
I bought MS Office (non-subscription) and honestly Google Docs/Sheets (free tier) works for most of my needs.
While Apple wants to push subscription apps, you don't need to subscribe to them. I don't. If the value is there, sure subscribe to them.
Apple is pretty in your face with selling their services. I get nagware iCloud storage limit subscription notifications that I can't dismiss. They are pushing for Arcade, TV+, Music, etc. sign -ups in their OS settings. I haven't paid for them and don't intend to.
Just because these paid subscriptions exist does not mean they are entitled to your money every month.
Now with games becoming digital, if you break their 'terms of service' they can lock and ban your account; taking your 'digital' games away or even locking the console. (Unless you paid for the physical version.)
Arguably this goes for all proprietary software. You're allowed to use software that you paid a license for, but you were never allowed to make and distribute copies of it.
For most practical purposes, licensed software that runs on your computer feels like ownership. After all, we're not allowed to make and distribute copies of published books but we're pretty comfortable saying that we own a book that we've bought. But those copyright limitations are still there. You can own a physical copy of the book, but there are some things you're not allowed to do with it.
Owning a subscription to online software as a service points to the limitations of what we mean by ownership.
In last 30 days, I transferred over 280 GB of translation data from my service to end-users around the word. Should I tell DeepL, Google and AWS that they should offer me their services for free or what?
EDIT:
I apologize if this sounds too passive-aggressive, but I'm tired of hearing that subscriptions are bad. Thanks to subscription model, we can have many smaller service providers who simply have fun from working on something (like me). If you think that giving someone $5/mo for a cool app is too much, then okay. You don't have to do it, no deal. ¯\_(ツ)\_/¯
PS Great example of solo-developer is the InkDrop creator. He is working on this note-taking app since ~2016. https://www.inkdrop.app
(Full disclosure: I know the guy that makes that service, but am not involved with that project)
Or start charging in Euro :D
Use tokens instead of subscriptions.
Even if I end up paying the same on average this feels a whole lot better.
There are just too many services out there that wants me to subscribe, and everytime it feels like they are trying to fleece me.
I am old enough to understand that not everything can be free (even if many of my most used tools are), but in way to many cases the thinking seems to be to get me to try a subscription and hope that I forget it.
(I've never ever had anyone pop a notification to tell me that I haven't used my subscription lately, maybe I'd like to puse it? If that was the norm I'd maybe be less annoyed at subscriptions.)
Almost every time I’ve seen someone try that pricing model customers end up hating it and want a flat fee subscription.
I do think making it easy to pause and restart subscriptions is an underused model but would also bet lots of price smart SaaS companies have looked at that.
It just happens to be abused badly, from subscriptions for things that never need to update (I'd almost bet a dollar there is or has been a flashlight app with a subscription somewhere), to subscriptions for things you use a week and then are finished with to a certain alarm clock app that both charges multiple dollars a month and then has the guts to try to track me on top of that.
To my mind, paying for an ongoing service (e.g. translation, or video streaming, or Strava, or whatever) is a reasonable use case for a subscription – if that’s something that suits your end user. (it could also be paid for by individual small payments – or tokens – as suggested elsewhere.)
I think the frustration is predominately in companies shifting payment for a piece of software from a single payment to a subscription, which over the previous typical lifespan of a single software purchase then costs significantly more. Sure, they bolt on superfluous ‘cloud solutions’, but fundamentally it just feels like an MBA somewhere figured out that they can make more money with a repeating subscription than a single one-off payment – and now they’ve all jumped into it.
Of course, it also has the benefit of protecting better against piracy – though I suspect this isn’t the primary driver for the change.
Bookmarking for a future project!
What confuses me is seeing this kind of question on the same forum where people often gripe about not being paid the 6 digit salary they expect to produce the software we use. How do you achieve super cheap products made by people making super high pay? Money doesn’t just materialize out of thin air to make that work.
PS: my comment comes off as advocating for the subscription model. I personally hate it with a passion: I’d rather pay for upgrades/updates to code, and pay for resources metered by my usage. My comment should be interpreted as understanding where the model comes from, not necessarily liking it.
I of course understand your point that software developers need to pay rent, but i'm interested in exploring other possibilities, such as non-profits gathering donations to pay for development/UX (like framasoft does).
Now, the same problem applies to all kinds of workers, from bakers to carpenters. If we take a look at the wider picture, why would anyone have to pay for rent and food? Wouldn't we all be better off if we did what we loved and shared unappreciated tasks more equally so that money doesn't get involved?
It seems like we have a "these people are not getting paid enough to pay for basic survival while doing their critical job" discussion every other week.
Since the 1950s and 1960s. IBM, for example, provided source code for their products until 1983.[1] The full Apple II source code was included in the Apple II Reference Manual;[2] similarly for the Atari 400/800 Technical Reference Notes.[3]
1. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hSBrPSYgjI4C&redir_esc=y (page 59)
2. https://archive.org/details/applerefjan78/page/n78/mode/2up
3. https://archive.org/details/CO16555AtariHomeComputerTechnica...
To take IntelliJ as an example, I can't think of an improvement since 2018 that I really would pay for. Largely enabling that is why they moved to the subscription process because people like me would use IntelliJ 18 for five or so years then update for OS support or whatever. €100/yr is way more than I used to pay for intelliJ, €240/yr is way more than I used to pay for Photoshop, etc. because SaaS conversions generally involved splitting the old upfront price as if customers were on a 2 year upgrade cycle rather than 5.
As for security updates, these feel like general hygiene, e.g. if someone's selling a physical electronic product here they need to keep it from manufacturer defects for two years. If my headphones have a bug where they catch fire the manufacturer needs to eat the cost and recall and fix/replace/refund them. Even if it does wipe out their margin from the upfront €100 cost. Similarly if commercial software lets someone own my computer with log message, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect recent software to be fixed.
100€/year for tools I use professionally every day and that improve my business is a no-brainer to me. Also I really like the way the prices go down if you use it for more than a year.
Nah you are missing the forest for the trees. Office at the moment is a gateway drug for Microsoft to get you on their cloud services. Office is not an end product anymore, it is a hook to capture market into their cloud services. They could sell office at a loss and still make money from all the Corporate/government contracts they got hooked on Azure.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
> Even if it does wipe out their margin from the upfront €100 cost.
That assumes what the initial price wasn't at least x20, though.
> splitting the old upfront price as if customers were on a 2 year upgrade cycle rather than 5.
It is also about perceived cost and maintenance costs: you can charge $10/y but ~$3 from this sum would go to fees and taxes, and you still need a profit margin and sustainability margin for the future growth (and recession) and to be able to give out refunds.
Yes, I assume this is true because these companies were profitable businesses charging 2x annual, not 20x, before the move to subscription models. Requiring 20 years of subscription to profit sounds highly risky and not all the kind of thing investors would support.
Doesn't change the fact that the world keeps going whether you're paying attention or not
though, the odds are quite good that version updates are improvements (security, platform support, features, etc)
As for the second part, that's not been my experience with commercial software at that point in its life at all. Maybe yours has differed.
You can keep running old version(s) as long as you want - but when a major rev releases, they have an upgrade option
The updates aren't "indefinite" - but they're pretty long-lasting
Before the App Store, it wasn’t easy to update software, so it was straightforward to lock updates behind paid upgrades.
if there's a security vulnerability, i'm sure you'd expect the update to be free.
I think software sellers is doing a courtesy when they provide security updates for free. They are not legally obligated to do it. The users are entitled to switch to a competitor however - by not having their data held hostage (which, i think modern laws don't properly address).
There are no locks that can't be picked. If it unlocks itself all the time you bet your ass that I'll get to exchange it for a new one. Maybe you should be more careful when making analogies.
https://www.cycleryusa.com/articles/kryptonite-locks-recall-...
I don’t know if I can explain why. Maybe security wasn’t as big of a deal.
Every single comment thread on Parallels releasing update is crying "money grab" over and over.
Not to mention the anti competitive nature of these two parties. They can just bundle an additional app in their subscription at not additional cost, and this way drive a competitor out of business.
Forced updates that remove or disable features people use.
Adobe created and added XD (Sketch competitor) and put it into its CC.
Sketch's still doing great but I honestly don't know how long it will be the case as XD becomes more mature.
https://www.google.com/search?q=frustrating&tbm=isch
Blame the victim?
We din't get any impression, as we don't set the prices. The companies set those prices.
For example Adobe customers never got or set any impression that "software should be free/low price". They paid 100s to 1000s of dollars for each update or package respectively, and they still got the mandatory subscription (and were some of the first users to be hit with one).
>How do you achieve super cheap products made by people making super high pay? Money doesn’t just materialize out of thin air to make that work.
We don't want "super cheap products", we want reasonably priced products we own after we buy.
Subscriptions may make more sense as B2B software where the needs change over time, businesses tend to like having a two-way conversation more and a well-defined bill at the end of each year isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a private consumer though, selling a subscription is a surefire way to make me say no -- I'm not doing it.
The production cost is subsidized as a Hobbie not as a profession, so it's hard to expect a 'consumer product'. When you put external money and corporate interest in your hobbies, something breaks.
Not saying open products don't have to exist, we all love them. They cover different creative needs, and usually are a gift for the community.
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211229 - The Gift of It's your problem now
[0]: https://everymac.com/systems/mac-clones/index-mac-clones.htm...
Now that the internet has removed any friction between business and customer, business is reaching its ideal state: one where the customer pays as long as the business has recurring expenses, where production never stops, and where productivity of labor approaches infinity.
For software the initial costs are big, but after that it can be pretty low maintenance or at least costing much less to develop new features when the foundation is set.
When you start to think about recurring expenses that's when you have to find a way to justify those expenses. And that is usually by adding bloat and unnecessary features that those that already bought it might not even want.
So now you have to pay for features that you don't want to keep using the features that you've already bought? Tough sell...
The answer is that it makes it harder to justify perpetual revenue streams then.
I’m happy to pay for a new version if my current version stops working. OS or browser update broke the app? I’ll pay for the new version.
But they are trying to force me to pay every month, therefore they remove my ability to use the app at all unless I pay for their cloud storage which I neither need nor want.
You don't only get compatibility with X with the new version but all that as well.
They should not pay them, they should use one of the numerous alternatives.
Side note: Daring Fireball has had some discussion recently about 1Password moving to enterprise for employee password management and adopting the SaaS model in order to make this transition, alienating current client base in the process. A ballsy move!
Note: I'm not defending the practice (if you dig in my comment history, you'll see pretty incendiary stuff against SaaS abuse very recently), I'm just saying that it's what business naturally tends like - in the same way it naturally tends towards paying people as little as possible, exploiting them, etc etc. This is what the market becomes when left to its own devices. If we don't like it, we need to proactively intervene in law.
Written by someone who - probably - doesn't understand how complex software is to write/update/expand/maintain
And the case have previously been that such development is largely paid for by new users.
Well, that's on the software maker.
Why pay salaries in perpetuity for something made and sold once?
Incorrect.
>Anything sold on Apple platforms, for example, nowadays has to be updated at least once a year just to keep up.
Factually wrong.
I think the need to update software constantly is sometimes a self fulfilling prophecy with SaaS. Features that need constant maintenance get added because: "Why not? We have a continuous income stream."
Edit:
Another example: I use Transmit on iOS. It hasn't been updated since 2017[1] because of lack of sales. Still works great on the latest iOS/iPhone.
[1] https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-transmit-ios/
If the software companies (in mobile in particular) had a race to the bottom, it's on them - and on those (hobbyists etc) that undercutted them (though, if hobbyists can undercut your prices, is your product really worth that much, or could it just as well be replaced with a hobbyist-made app?).
Users have since forever paid top dollar for shrink wrapped and then downloaded software like MS Office or Abobe Creative Suite and co, that now is nonetheless "subscription based".
Professionals who make their living using Photoshop usually don't have much trouble with the cost, whether paid monthly, or occasionally when a new version has a feature they care about.
Being able to bring in some more casual customers with a lower initial cost is just a bonus.
But they would then have to answer why would non-business buyers, that is, users who did "leave the update treadmill" and bought new updates (or skipped them) at their convenience, suffer the subscription model too?
There is nothing stopping Joe-who-only-pays-full-licences to continue using his MS 2007 Office suite, is there?
Products get deprecated/go out of support all the bloody time - there is nothing wrong with that: should Ford have to "support" the Edsel or Model T today "for free"? Why?
Or you can sidestep the whole thing entirely and use/fund/ promote Free Software. Your "small monthly amount" will go a long way and you will be free to pick and choose as you want.
So you could skip 90% of the BS updates you don't care for and get the 10% you do, as opposed to pay the full update price or maintain a subscription...
In other words, you could get a base product, they keep maintaining, and even release new versions you can update to for free/cheap, but with features you haven't paid for locked. Then, if you paid for a feature, you get to enjoy it for all free/cheap updates of the program.
That sounds like an extension of "you wouldn't download a car".
One way to increase recurring revenue when you have a captive audience (i.e. they can't refuse an update) is by adding adware to your software. I think SaaS is the driving force behind the ad-tech surveillance state, not the thing that will save us from it.
I am afraid the ‘we’ here isn’t nearly as large a demographic as you think it is. If it was, we wouldn’t see the mass of advertising supported products we see.
Mainstream consumers do want free / cheap products, despite the many caveats associated with them and the market has adjusted to give them that.
The other follow up is, as a consumer, how do you determine what is a reasonable price for something. You have no visibility into the COGS other than your own experiences which may or may not apply.
Similar to the OP, I am not advocating for high subscriptions with no value or horrible dark patterns around unsubscribing…
Companies prefer subscriptions because it maximizes revenue. It's as simple as that. Zero sum game between company and consumer.
If that was true, financing wouldn't exist for consumer products. In practice, people pay extra to turn a one-time payment into a subscription.
Also, the vast majority of people would prefer to live in a home they own than burn money renting.
I am not a fan of products that make it difficult to unsubscribe, but I do like the variable cost aspect of SaaS. Generally quick to start using and quick to stop.
I have not seen it commented on, but my sense is security is easier with a SaaS model. How many pirated versions of software have you come across in your career pre-Saas?
That's patently false
I, for one, happen to like being able to push costs from capex to opex (and yes, that's true for my own personal use like it is for business use) *for most things) - a subscription price gives me a closer approximation of a given tool's/service's value proposition than does a one-off purchase (most of the time)
Everything from car leases (albeit I typically purchase my cars, leases most definitely have their place for a significant portion of vehicle operators) to Netflix fees come in the form of a "subscription" - follow the terms of the subscription, and you get to use whatever it is as long as you want
I should say your choice to subscribe should not be taken away. I don't think my choice to own should be taken away.
Cars are typically usable for well over a decade :)
It looks like Adobe does sell one-time purchases of Acrobat Pro 2020 for $450. I'll cease my cloud-yelling.
Whoa whoa wait! How did we get to this point? Maybe I’m living in the past, but software should work essentially forever. There are no moving parts. No wear/maintenance items. It doesn't distort like a photocopy when loaded to and from media.
The only thing that should cause working software to fail is some underlying change to its foundation: an incompatible OS or browser change or deprecated API, and so on, and we should hold platform vendors accountable for regressions and breakage. I wish platforms took backward compatibility seriously.
Apart from a cosmic ray flipping a bit somewhere, there is no physics reason software should “wear out.” How did this become a fringe point of view?
Really? You're still running operating systems that are a decade old on hardware even older?
Why?
The really old programs run in emulators. This is how I play 1980s video games. I highly recommend Mario Brothers (not "Super") from 1983. Still works.
The point is that software should remain usable, but in your example that hasn’t been the case.
Apple did Rosetta in 2006. That proves this approach has been _commercially_ viable on top-end machines for at least 15 years. Not 39 years!
10 years is not that long ago. In computers and software the difference between 2022 and 2012 is not as big as it was between 1992 and 2002.
It's still an immense period of technology time - OS and hardware vendors don't support their products "forever": it's not sane to do so
Run 10-year-old hardware/OS if you want ... but you should expect increasing issues over time
But you can run software you bought with capex as long as you want and it doesn’t cost more forever. And you don’t have to agree to new terms and conditions.
...only if you still have hardware and operating systems that support it (or that it supports, depending on your point of view)
1. They have no idea it can be different
2. They wouldn't know what it would look like if it were different
3. They don't understand, or they resign to accept, the ethical implications of the status quo
I don't think it makes sense to call anyone making an informed decision to overpay for a service a victim. If you don't think the deal is reasonable, then don't accept the deal and use something else.
The exception being profiteering in the case of a shortage, but I don't think this is the case. There is no software shortage being taken advantage of.
No, those I'm calling victims are people like me, who would like to buy the update and own it, but are instead forced in a subscription - which if they ever have to stop paying for whatever reason (e.g. out of a job, medical bills, etc) they lose their access to the programs they've been paying for month over month for years.
A music program called Reason is a good example of the scumbuggery involved. It used to have $129 annual updates - which were already overpriced, as they had minimal changes, and more professional competitors like Steinberg with much bigger update deltas (new features, work involved, etc) charged much less for their annual updates.
Now, they switched to subscription, for $20/month ($240/year) where they give access to some extra plugins to entice you. But to force the user's hands (since they still offer the paid annual updates), they also bumped the annual update price to $200/year (without the extra plugins, the regular, already-overpriced-at-129 update).
Which gets incompatible and can't run with changes to OS, plugin SDKs, and so on.
Victim here doesn't mean "they put a gun on your head".
It means they removed a specific update model and replaced with a shitty one, while doubling the prices, and fucking you over if you want to continue using the platform.
I'd fully expect someone to provide this if there is a market for it.
Kinda like how the money and safety provided by monopolies can’t be corrected by market forces either.
There are two markets: the market of customers who might buy your product and the market of VCs who might want to fund your startup. Lately the latter has been making most of the decisions. It's nearly impossible for a bootstrapped startup to compete against products sold at a loss with VC backing.
That has [effectively] never been the case
You don't "own" software once you buy it
You own a license to use it (with some level of constraints around how/when/where you use it)
Even if that license happens to let you use it as much as you want anywhere you want, that doesn't mean it will continue to work "forever"
So many people don't understand that digital products are nothing at all like physical ones (except that you pay for both) - you own a paper book (albeit with restrictions on what you can do with it (can't make infinite/excessive copies of parts or all of it, etc), you have a license to an ebook; you don't own a copy of Microsoft Office - you have purchased permission to use it on X-many devices running Y operating system(s)
Even if you "own" some copy of a public domain or freeware tool, it's still constrained by the system(s) it will run on
That's neither here, nor there. I didn't argue we buy and then own software like a shoe or a tire. People bought software before and we know the semantic and legal differences between it and buying physical products.
But that's irrelevant, the discussion is about software-bought (with the license and all it entails) vs software subscription -- not about the semantics of bought software vs bought physical stuff.
My scribble on the HN wall that you're reading right now involved thinking about something more than I thought it deserved.
Well, you might not care or what to think about the market, but the market cares and thinks about you.
And if you don't pay attention, you can easily get taken for a sucker, overcharged, forced in abusive rent-seeking relationships and so on...
When and how did that happen? SAAS has been the wet dream of the big software houses for a long time, it was just not really acceptable for people for quite a while.
It's also sounds like this is about poor software developers making a living, but the reality is that software developers are amongst the highest paid professions and software companies are ruling the world and typically have the highest profits. In fact I would argue this really started to take over when investors realised that they could get insane ROI from very little investments for software companies and started to expect these kind of returns.
The other thing that is driving this push is that the FANGS want to commoditize everything except for "owning" large amount of data, because that's their value add and everything else is just a cost centre for them.
This sounds true, but isn't. Some software grow new features and should sell new versions to users who want those features. But many applications continue to be rented while they reached peak features a long time ago.
Office 97 was fine. Office 2003 was more than fine. You buy it once, you should not need to buy it again, or "rent" it, for no benefit at all. Same for Windows NT / 7. Every Windows version since 7 is worse than the previous one!
Developers need to be paid only if they build something users want. Many times, the opposite seems to be the case: they build things users would really prefer not to have, yet are difficult to avoid.
But that's still work! So your only chance is to abandon the software and reap the insults coming from clients who upgraded to a new Windows installation and can no longer run your software.
If there was some realistic ways to bundle software in a fashion that it will continue to run forever even if environment changes, then sure–but your software better not be networked. (This is also where docker and the likes come into play).
There is one case I can think of where this makes sense from both the provider and consumer side: niche software that has a high development cost and a small market. In this case, the one-time acquisition cost might be too high for many customers, so moving to a subscription model allows them to use something they couldn't otherwise afford.
Of course, that's not to say that updates shouldn't be expected.
The marginal cost of another sale approaches zero. So if you make a popular enough product, you can sell many units rather than relying on rent seeking from your existing user base by forcing them into a SaaS subscription. Yes, the onus is now on the company to make good products that people want, and to continue to innovate such that people want to pay for the next upgrade. It’s easier to rent seek.
This didn't happen by accident. Apple still refuses to add a paid version upgrades feature to the App Store. And by providing software like Numbers/Pages at a loss (for free) they normalized a zero or near zero cost of software in their ecosystem. At this point I'm pretty sure this is an intentional strategy of "Commoditizing their Complement"[1] on Apple's part.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
I also agree with you about Apples’s position re upgrades, which - until now - I found quite baffling. I guess that the subscription model is intended by Apple to create both a lower barrier to entry (cheaper in the short term) which reduces the entry cost for complements, and long term recurring revenue which potentially creates a lock-in effect - quitting the ecosystem means losing access to the investment in apps on the platform. It’s win-win from Apple’s perspective.
On the other hand I have always argued that when you write an app for iOS, you’re creating an accessory for their devices, and so you do so on Apple’s terms. (That’s fine IMO, as long as you understand that this is what you’re doing).
By economy of scale. If you have 50,000 paying users, $10 each, that should cover either 5 man-years of average software development, or 2 man-years of one senior/principal level developer.
Most products in question have users in the millions, paying 10 to 100 times as much. Do the math.
The bad part about these models is that they reflect the power of stakeholders in a company, not so much the worker/programmers. It reflects a mode of production keen on generating capital, not the interests of the workers on getting their salary, whatever many figures it may have.
The finger must be pointed at stakeholders doing what they do best; finding ways to generate capital. There is no animosity generated between work done and one paying for it at a market value, but there is between work and capital generation.
Except when money does materialize out of thin air with fractional reserve banking. That's not for us, though. Obviously, we all know that burnin'-money for us tech folks grows on VC trees these days.
And yes, it is mostly the cost of convenience. For example, I manage my own server not because it's cheaper (which it is), but because I don't need to pay extra $50 a month to get a "managed" experience.
Same goes for very mundane tasks like image compression. You can pay some company to do it on your behalf, or you can go to GitHub and grab a fully functional library to compress 1,000 photos in an instant.
If you have had 1,000s of bloggers write about your free product, advertising it on your behalf for years. Why not take that success and squeeze the living soul out of it?
I mean, it's not like people are going to go back to their reviews or old blog posts to correct something. All the "juice" is still being passed to you, and search engines like Google are none the wiser.
That being said I believe the SaaS loophole plays a big part in this, a lot of code that is out there today would have to be re-written to be sold in a traditional model and still be compliant with copyleft software licenses and usually this is not mentioned in these discussions.
[1] https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/the-saas-...
[2] https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11467/can-i-u...
Some services will block & close your account, but some will continue to accumulate the debt to a point where it's high enough to sell to debt collectors.
At this point it seems like the capital markets have long past moved from symbiosis with the productive economy into parasitism and are now accelerating their killing of the host.
The real world today is increasingly run by subscription humans, or “employees.” They are lazy, business-hostile, and rent extracting.
My most recent experience is John and Amy and Sam, completely do-nothing, scam people who command ridiculous amounts of salary with no easy way to fire them or unsubscribe.
What has the world come to, where labor has been appropriated and we are left paying rents every month to these business-hostile humans!
Why can we not force them to create software for us, for free?
/s
;)
One-time fees for software were common less than a decade ago. How did those companies manage to make payroll each month?
> now trying to trick people to use One Drive more
A lot of software are now deliberately blurring the line between local storage and cloud storage, not just Office. When I choose to save a file, I expect to save it locally to my hard disk, in a file that I can find and manipulate, and keep secure. More and more, software is nudging users to save their files in “the cloud.” Non-techie users don’t understand the implication of this: they are uploading their private data to the Internet!
Whenever I read an article about a creeper hacking so-and-so’s cloud storage to download their nude images, I wonder if the victim had any idea they were inadvertently posting their private files to the Internet.
iCloud is one of the worst offenders because it is so seamless and invisible. Apple urges iCloud usage constantly, and once you turn it on, the mechanism to de-iCloud yourself is buried in settings.
Software more and more are hiding the fact that they are either saving your files on the Internet or mirroring copies on the Internet, and this is a terrible trend for user privacy and keeping control of their data.
I know many people are annoyed by the dialogues that popup these days where they ask your something they want ("do you allow xyz?") and the only two choices you have is "yes" and "not now" and they proceed to ask you again and again.
Same with with cookie dialogues. The vast majority of cookie dialogues employ dark patterns that make you give up the maximum amount of privacy if you click the most visually enticing option.
Enterprise printers still have traditional driver suites that you can download from HP's website. But if you don't know that, you end up with HP Smart and their document cloud.
More broadly files in the traditional sense (OS desktop metaphor) are irrelevant in a SaaS context, even if some UX show "files" (like Google Doc) for convenience or familiarity it's not really files but entries in a database.
Personally (and as a huge fan of classic MacOS Spatial Finder) it pains me, but I'm not sure if I'm clinging to nostalgia or if we are heading the wrong way. Maybe we could have a middle ground where files don't exist anymore but it's very clear for the user where data is stored.
Is that the expectation of younger generations? Do they want their only copy of a file on something that can fall in the toilet? Is the home network router and device OS more secure and more monitored than the cloud hosted firewalls?
I use cloud sync only for my contact list now where practicalities override privacy concern. Just recently, after years of usage (with lots of problems, merging various devices the wrong way, ending up in duplications, ghost contacts, inflated list with garbage) I turned off the sync on a computer getting retired with offering the option 'keep contact list locally' but it did not work. Selecting this option still erased ALL contacts from my local computer. Which actually was an intended way eventually, so no harm is done this specific time, but shown how unreliable and dangerous is using iCloud on top of the privacy concerns. I will remain using it for contacts - with the aforementioned problems - but will need extra care on making changes to it.
It is 'ironic' when there is an intended conveninece functionality that eventually makes your life more complex and miserable than before, without that.
However, I strongly believe selling software with a one-time fee was the problem in the first place. An ongoing service requires ongoing efforts to keep it stable, secure and modern. Just like you pay for housing on a monthly, recurring basis. It's the same with software.
btw: the oldest subscription models are insurances. No one is complaining about them.
If nothing bad happens or if whatever happens is not covered, the insurance company gets to keep the money. It's a risk management business. It's quite different from a SaaS, imho.
Patches used to be a thing, right?
It's like people complaining about 1000+ dollar phones, you don't need to buy that, and the company isn't going to listen to complaints.
Most companies listen to the market only.
If you use a tool for one month, you pay a small amount, if you use it every month for years you pay more. In the old world, if you wanted to use purchase-once software just once, then you had to pay far more upfront.
It aligns incentives too: developers are strongly incentivized to keep existing users happy, rather than ignoring them and constantly chasing the next new sale.
I do think there's a financial/UX problem with subscriptions though, and a lot of shady players trying to abuse that. Really, imo banks need to provide subscription management services as a standard feature. They already know what continual billing is currently linked to your card - they should let you block renewing charges by vendor from your account directly. That'd give you complete control and visibility into all your subscriptions in one place, whether the vendor likes it or not.
A couple of months ago I blocked allcky cards via App (so that only when you unblock it payments go through).
At the end of the month all my subscription services whined that they couldn't charge me they sent an email saying that my subscription was at risk.
Tidal, YouTube, Google Storage, AWS, among others.
AWS and Google Drive did the right thing: it provided me a page where I could manually run the payment (after temporarily unlocking the card).
YT and Tidal were terrible: after contacting their support (For YT I had to go to twitter... what a joke), they told me they had no way for me to pay manually. The only way was to wait for their automatic billing.
Tidal was the worst: After two days they cancelled my plan (OK) and THEN I was able to repurchase the plan to ge charged there... and immediately after I paid , THEY BLOCKED MY IP!!
Automated billing should be prohibited. Or at least companies should be forced to provide manual renewal option.
Alternately it incentivizes vendor lock-in. If you can't keep users happy, why not keep their data hostage instead?
I mean, the best case I can think of is Quantrix. It's an innovative spreadsheet progrem that tries to bring back the standards of Lotus Improv. I don't know of any equivalent in OSS. It used to have a perpetual license with small upgrades and while it was quite expensive, it means it could be bought to learn and experiment and if you needed to convince your boss to try it it's not that much of a layout.
Then the company that makes it was bought by a financial services company who re-targeted at that market. They do not list the pricing on their site any more. Want to know what it is? $2000 a year, immediate and total loss on lapse. So basically individuals can't access it anymore, nobody can learn it, and there's very little chance of any company that doesn't already know it or doesn't have money to burn taking it up. Which is a kick in the teeth, because I think many people agree that the standard spreadsheet is a crock, and what was showing signs of being interesting or innovative in that area is now a locked-down rich club. I guess you could write an OSS version if you were up for being sued over spurious software patents by a company whose backers can just manufacture money at will. Yea.
Or how about TheBrain? Their model had the potential for a ton of innovation based on evolving semantic technologies. What was their business model instead? Patent the Plex model to lock out competitors, push everyone's Brains into the cloud, go subscription, and then just sit. The upgrades have become smaller and smaller since the subscription came in.
At least, that's how I perceive it.
In my case, I pay subscriptions for things like Strava or Duolingo – software that realistically needs to have a service component and where I want the extra features. I don't really mind this model – the service component is key to their operation and there are offline-only alternatives available. Paying a regular fee is reasonable for software that has an ongoing cost for the seller.
Similarly, there are a bunch of mostly-offline apps that I'm happy to pay a one-off fee for – things like Sublime Text, Dash or BetterTouchTool in my case. Games too, for the most part. I like the model that offers maybe a limited number of future updates free-of-charge, after which another license or an upgrade is needed.
I think the frustration you feel is for software that tries to straddle these categories unnecessarily. Like 1Password – a totally fine software package that worked great for me offline, but which I would now need to subscribe to if I want to continue using it, despite having zero interest in connected features.
Adobe is the worst at this though – I have literally negative interest in any of the "cloud connectivity" features or whatever. They actively make the product worse for me, but they will refuse to take my money in exchange for a one-off license to use software they sell. So now I have the stupid-ass spyware running on my machine in order to bombard me with shitty ads for other things they sell. I hate it.
There is little more annoying that wanting to buy something—and I'm not talking about cheaping out on it either—and having the seller actively refuse to sell it to you. And I think that's where the feeling of frustration comes from – the constant feeling of something trying to trick and manipulate you into becoming a more profitable customer for them by making your experience worse.
- Cronyism. The only way to get a big B2B customer for you SaaS product is if you are friends with an executive at a big tech corporation. Otherwise your chances are nil - No matter how good your product is.
- Regulatory capture. Big corporations have an advantage because they can use their connections to politicians to change the regulatory environment in their favor.
- Monetary capture. The monetary system reinforces the dominance of big corporations because they and their customers (from which their revenue is derived) have access to easy money from huge government contracts and banks (since they can borrow at lower interest rates than others).
- Limited liability. Corporations are legal constructs which are not liable for crimes (especially negligence) in the same was as people are. Corporations don't go to jail for example; they can always replace executives who have been committing crimes on their behalf, pay a small fine and keep going as if nothing happened. This creates an incentive for executives to commit crimes on behalf of corporate shareholders and then shareholders have an incentive to use their aggregate political connections to shield executives as much as possible from personal liability... They will throw them under the bus in extreme cases but then repeat and keep trying to normalize misconduct.
So with vendor lock-in, there are 5 factors which rig the markets - Each one is very powerful on its own but apparently still insufficient to keep the economy running as it is...