Before 2020 that was pretty easy to accomplish. My home in the Raleigh-Durham area is under $1500/month including taxes, homeowner's insurance, and HOA fees.
That's almost twice cheaper than California studio rent. No wonder why people are leaving the big cities. Thank you, I was considering moving out of California and I might if the mortgages are still like that in other states.
Highly recommend an app like truebill or something that analyzes your bank account! I found subscriptions to things I had totally forgot about etc. and saved a significant amount of money right away.
How much value does this provide vs. just checking over your account history every month? It feels like a pretty high price to pay in terms of access to your data just to have them check for things that you could probably do by exporting a CSV and searching for things.
I've found it's not worth it. What I've had be most impactful is just to look at all the transactions on my accounts every paycheck. I notice subscriptions to cancel, spending I want to change.
I don't think looking at sums is actually much more powerful than looking at items. The count carries a weight. There's also no chance of analysis paralysis, slicing and showing things a hundred ways to avoid the heart of the matter. It's just you and the transactions. It leads to less understanding but better decisions.
Can I say, just having the transaction merchant name converted to a more human readable version makes it worth it in and of itself (there are probably some free services that do this).
I took a look at Truebill, and expected to find a list of supported banks somewhere, probably prominent on the landing page, as how are they supposed to be able to analyze my bank account otherwise?
But, there is no such information. Applications that reads data from banks keeps doing this, missing to display the single most important piece of data before I signed up.
How does one forget about a subscription? Doesn't everyone periodically review charges to their credit cards and bank withdrawals to make sure they make sense, and to pay bills that are due? If not, how do you know day-to-day how much money is available in your account or discover fraud? I'd be bouncing checks left and right if I didn't keep a close eye on my balances.
I'm not living paycheck to paycheck, so I'm not in the habit of looking at every transaction. The monthly/quarterly budget and subscription reviews that truebill prompts are massively helpful.
It is a bit aggressive in classifying recurring charges as subscriptions, but that's better than the alternative.
Is it typical to spend so much on software subscriptions? I pay for Spotify and a cheap VPS if that counts but that's it. I figured the average person probably has one or two media subscriptions (Netflix, Disney, Spotify, etc) and nothing else.
I would say that's definitely on the high side. What you're describing is probably on the low side. Of course, many people spend about $100/month on a cable TV bill. It looks like he has a couple of sports subscriptions but doesn't actually seem to be paying for live TV in general.
Of course, many people spend about $100/month on a cable TV bill.
I think $100 may be low these days.
At a neighborhood party around 2017 I asked people what they were paying for their cable service, because I was thinking about switching from satellite. Not one was under $125, and most were in the $175 area. $250 with internet. The big sports fans were well over $300/month.
One guy who considers himself a "professional sports gambler" (when he's not repairing air conditioners 9 to 5) said he was paying over $600/month to feed the wall of six 60-inch TVs in his man cave.
"Hunnert bucks a screen!" he crowed proudly. I ended up keeping my existing service, which I think was in the $35/month range.
I know this has come up before, but since the gulf in cost is so stark I thought I'd mention it again. In the UK I just signed up to a £20/month VDSL2 broadband service (approx 65 Mbps, FTTC, unmetered), rolling monthly contract, and £65 up front. The contract guarantees at least around 50 Mbps or they automatically pay compensation. $100/month seems pretty crazy to me. I know the lack of competition and widespread collusion is bad in the US amongst cable companies, but you saying people typically pay 5x more for what seems like similar service to what I'm getting is really eye-opening. Apart from Virgin Media most companies share the OpenReach network that's sort of publicly funded (ish). Yet, the UK isn't exactly known for investing well in public services so I'm still surprised at the gulf in cost.
We're talking about cable TV content. Satellite (DirecTV) costs about the same. But, yes, now that I only have Internet from my cable provider, I also pay about $100/month for that.
There’s a lot of variation in the US. I’m in a 600k city and an area with some kind of COVID program that pays my $20.00 bill. I’m not paying anything for a very reliable 35 mbps.
Similar speeds, about £24/mo for the FTTC, with bundled phone (pay as you go) and one static IP. SIM only Mobile phone with same provider with unlimited calls and 7GB data for just under £10/mo.
Is £500/y really worth a difference you'll rarely notice? Streaming needs 20Mbps max, so it's only large downloads like games which will take an hour or two.
The savings pay for a high end phone every year, or a complete desktop upgrade every other year.
I do a heck of a lot more with my internet connection than just streaming – there was a night-and-day improvement when stepping up from my previous 150 Mbps coax connection. It’s not just “large game downloads”, but moving many gigs of data to remote servers daily as part of my job while both my wife and I are in video calls, while also etc etc. Fast symmetrical fiber is a godsend.
But whether or not these speeds would be meaningfully useful to you personally, the real observation here is just that GP is paying ~4.7x as much on a Megabit per second per month basis – your 20Mbps “I just stream” connection should cost hardly anything, a bad deal however you slice it.
(As an aside: yearly phone replacement?? I buy hardware to last on a much longer timeframe, so it more than balances out)
edit: back of the envelope network stat math – the 7.5TB I moved last month (up+down) would have completely saturated a 20Mbps connection for more than the month (34 consecutive days), assuming it was symmetrical (which a connection like that probably isn’t).
> would have completely saturated a 20Mbps connection
The GP was talking about a 50Mbps connection.
Also, I pay the same for a 150Mbps symmetric FTTP (well its fibre to the building and copper Ethernet to the demarc in my flat), with the option to upgrade to 1Gbps symmetric for £43pm. I dont use my home as a backup or major content creation store so for me its not worth the extra.
Either way, it sounds like Canada doesn’t suffer from the same problems as the USA as far as broadband goes.
Yes, when you have a 15x faster Internet connection, it feels like all your Internet-interfacing software has been upgraded. Lots of small interactions go from having delays built in to feeling snappy, if not effectively instant. Small downloads become nothing, medium become small…it’s nice if you do much with computers or phones.
US is a big place. I'm paying $75 for unlimited 1G fiber where I live, and it is not a cheap place in general. I have family living in cheaper places paying <$30 for 50-100Mbps cable broadband. I have other family in the suburbs paying like $300 for decent internet and cable TV, getting ripped off, but essentially not caring because they don't want to deal with changing anything.
Internet sucks in London, UK, yet to get 6.5mb/s or so called ‘Fibre’ internet. It’s 2022 and you can’t get a 200-500mbit plan in Zone 1 of London without going for a business fibre plan and pay a lots of money for digging if you don’t live in some apartment building. Even g.network and Hyperoptic have been digging around my house but my Mews house won’t get connected even while everyone in the Mews indicated interest
The person you're responding to isn't talking about internet service, they're talking about premium sports video packages like NFL Sunday Ticket.
> I know this has come up before, but since the gulf in cost is so stark I thought I'd mention it again.
I think you might be remembering conversations about mobile service or something. I live in the US and my gigabit fiber (to my house) is fifty bucks a month. The US is a big place.
The problem in the US is that there is now a $30 federal subsidy for internet. This is ostensibly to support low income people but the effect is that it sets a minimum price anchor. Very few ISPs offer a cheap, low bitrate plan despite few people really needing to have multi-100Mbit service.
Wow I haven’t used cable in over ten years! I have a $30 per month Comcast internet subscription and I get all my stuff through there. I don’t pay for any streaming service except nebula.
I only have cable for internet. But then a couple things like disney plus. Amazon Prime is there as a side effect :-) Since I need to update my mobile phone I'm thinking about using it as a hotspot at home as skipping cable entirely. Not sure how viable that is.
If you use 'serious software' (Adobe, Autodesk, Unity, etc) the bill can add up fairly quickly. But that's for professionals and serious hobbyists, and that's powerful software that offers a lot of value to serious users.
And any tech hobbyist can quickly end up with a number of smaller subscriptions (e.g. hosting, backups, AV, password management)
But I've not yet found any mobile-only 'apps' that can justify the usually-overpriced subscriptions.
The upside is that I don't spend too many hours on mobile devices, as so many games/apps have such obnoxious monetisation (see Diablo Immortal, or any 'hypercasual' game with more real-money-gambling ads than actual gameplay), and the 'mobile web' isn't as good as it should be (endless app nags, poor ad-blocking compared to a real computer)
Or you could download a system-level adblocker and swerve the whole cryptocurrency/BAT thing altogether. There's a lot better solutions for fighting ads than downloading $SOME_GUY's Chromium fork/pet ponzi scheme.
There's something like a reverse ad hominem I don't have a term for.
"Person made x, so why would you doubt them on y?"
Lots of people latch on to high school achievements as their life passes them by until they realize they haven't done much in a long time and have a mid-life crisis. Some people buy an expensive car. Others start a Chrome fork and crypto scheme.
I'm not saying you shouldn't doubt them, I'm not sure where you got that from. The point is that this is not just "some random person" fork's, it's by someone who has established himself in the industry, so like it or not there IS a reputation behind this brand and piece of (open source) software. If the browser is good or not that's another discussion (which I'm happy to have), but the comment I was answering simply dismissed the idea of using the fork because it's by some random person, and so I pointed out that's not really fair.
It's called "appeal to authority", and it's a fallacy only in case where the authority is not relevant to the area in question. So, if a Nobel prize winner in literature gives advice on economics or quantum physicists or medicine, then their credentials are irrelevant, and appeal to their authority is a fallacy. If, however, a prominent physicist talks about physics, then it doesn't mean they are necessarily right, but at least the likelihood of them being right is much higher than for a random person from the street. As such, having created successful technical products in the past suggests that it's likely next product may be worth something too. It's not a guarantee, but it's a relevant data point.
> haven't done much in a long time
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
> All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
I think you're giving him too much credit. This is the guy who cursed us with JavaScript and set back Web development by a solid decade, then went on to say "fuck you" to same-sex marriage before getting fired from his newly-attained CEO chair of Mozilla. His contributions to the world at large are more akin to the French: he added a lot of fancy, useless things to the world and then cowered and backpedaled when he was questioned for his beliefs.
I think we call this an argument from Ethos. i.e. it leans on what someone is, rather than their persuasiveness (pathos) or how well their argumentation is structured (logos). It is not a particularly strong way to make a case, but it is a way to make a case. If you have a problem with it, you are free to speak of what you feel should be considered instead. I personally think "it's a cryptocurrency and therefore a scam" argumentation is lazy and not very compelling, but perhaps your target audience does not.
I'm not even a terribly serious hoobyist but I still pay for Adobe's photography (Lightroom + Photoshop) plan. I still haven't had much luck finding another option that works well for organising a photo library.
Especially among people who don't really pay attention to their budget, I'd expect this to be common. Maybe not as extreme as some of the apps are more aimed at professionals, but having seen the amount of money people who really can't afford it drop on useless subscriptions (e.g. antivirus for iOS) despite being told it's useless...
Yeah, I have an Amazon Prime subscription and a VPS for a personal blog, but that's it. I figure most people have like Prime and Netflix, or Disney+ and Spotify. Not all of the above, plus weather app subscriptions, and dozens of other things.
But looking at some of these comments, we appear to be the odd ones out.
>Grammarly is $150/year!! How is that not egregious?
I don't personally find Grammarly useful. But I know people who swear by it and, if it's an application that helps you write maybe every day, $150/year is nothing.
I pay more than that for Lightroom which I also use a lot.
More than that for The New York Times which I read daily.
Etc.
There's definitely a subscription version of "Does it bring you joy?" But there seems to be almost a moralistic pushback on paying for software/services things that you find useful.
I paid three month for grammaly when I was writing my MS thesis. It was useful for the extensive usage. But I canceled afterwards because it is not worth keeping.
150/yr doesn't sound to egregious for an app you actually use. Of course, it depends on your income, for some people it could be insane, but there are many people earning high 6 figures in tech (no, not me, not yet at least :) or even 7 figures - for them $150/year is like rounding error in their paystub, why would it be egregious? Of course, provided it is really useful for you, otherwise there's no point even for $15/year or 1.5$.
TFA literally ends with them saying they canceled Grammarly! I feel like half of y'all are out here flagellating the author for decisions where the whole point of the article is that they made some bad decisions and fixed them.
Probably well above median and well below average.
Median skewed by the fact that even people with little disposable income have phones with access to the App Store but aren’t dropping $408/year for premium Apple experience.
But the mean is skewed by money is no object users who don’t miss a thousand dollars a month.
I don't think so, I feel like mine are pretty aligned with what my friends have. I pay the AppleCare monthly, a couple smaller things like Peloton and Apple Music. Doesn't add up to that much overall. I do donate $20/mo to Signal, which is my largest software-only app thing, and I see the OP seems to donate to Twitter in a couple ways, so I guess to each their own.
Define "very wealthy" for me on this? Because I'm looking at some of these and going "so that's 50 cents per day. Seems ok for something I use daily". Sure, if I was making 30k/year I'd be reconsidering things, but if you're software engineer in the US, 2000/year isn't an insane amount of money to spend on essentially a full ecosystem of products and services for their phone, desktop, and work computer for them and their family.
Not to mention that the point of the entire article is that they found out they weren't getting satisfactory value from all of them and cut back some! I feel like half of y'all read the post and thought it was a brag about how rich they were instead of a mea culpa about how they realized they were spending too much.
I think it’s more of a personality, principle and preference thing. I’m also very hesitant adding and/or keeping subscription services just because I don’t like the idea of the gradual increase in fixed spend of any kind, but I have lots of friends who are fine with subscribing to lots of things. Each to their own I guess (unless you can’t/shouldn’t afford it and then it’s a different matter of course).
I agree, create a budget and stick to it. It's a good idea to audit every month so you know where your money is going and what you're doing with your money.
Spotify, Netflix, Disney, prime, Adobe, jetide, reface (occasionally) toon faces (occasionally), peak,Duolingo. These are the ones I'm consciously aware of.
Various educational services from Monthly to coursera to music ones such as pianote and ultimate guitar and songsterr. Previously stuff like code academy or oreilly etc. YouTube subscription. Half a dozen patron accounts I support (I am well-off enough, and as ex-programmer and ex-photographer sufficiently of content-producing/livelihood mentality , to have the luxury and intent to support the content I consume).
Then there are the ones I only notice when I really think about it or look at yearly transactions - Microsoft office, Google drive, apple Icloud, backup (originally sync.com then back laze and now I Backup or something). 1password. Sometimes nzbmatrix and whatnot. Apple arcade. Geforce now. And it keeps going.
This empathically does not include traditional subscriptions. My father in law lives with us and I am embarrassed at size of our cable bill as that's what he watches all day long.
Mostly I wanted to indicate you don't have to have extraordinary needs to accumulate subs.
We've gone from cable model to Netflix monopoly (how I miss it) back to myriad subs to get content for broad family.
similarly for software, if you like to fool around with utilities computers, it's not hard to rack up the subs. A file comparison utility wants me to pay yearly fee. Image browsing program wants to be a subscription. Everything wants me to keep paying.
Depends. I used to have close to zero software subscriptions, but now I earn a little more and I can afford to pay for some software even if I technically could do without paid version - e.g. Duolingo, Evernote, Feedly, etc. I do it as a conscious effort to support apps I use - in part so that people that can't afford it still could use the free versions, and so that they continue to exist in general. From pure financial optimization angle, I am likely wasting my money. But I think it makes more likely the apps that I use survive and stay alive, which IMHO is worth a small investment even if I do not use too much of the paid features.
I feel like I’m not a big subscriber to stuff, but I have, off the top of my head:
- YouTube $10/mo and super worth it
- Netflix $15/mo and lately meh
- AppleTV $10/mo and meaning to cancel again
- AMC $10/mo ditto
- Apple Music $10/mo and want to cancel but need to figure out migration
- Adobe $10/mo for PS+LR and pretty happy with it
- DropBox $10/mo and I guess, whatever
- 1Password I forget how much…
- Old-School web hosting about $10/mo
- GitHub $5/mo, tribal membership fee
- Digital newspapers and magazines, probably around $50/mo or maybe double that?
…plus a few obscure software subs that are sort of “pro” and Amazon Prime which is for fast delivery to rural America a few times a year, plus a bunch of domains, plus Patreon including at least one software person. Plus whatever I’m forgetting.
My goal for media is to have one streaming movie/TV service at any one time, and go back to paying for music one album at a time. But who knows if I’ll get there. My monthly software cost will definitely increase soon.
And despite all this, I think I’m pretty conservative and don’t have too many subs. Someone with a good income who subscribes on a whim, probably spends at least double this much.
Sure, but it's a sliding scale. $1 is a substantial amount to many people, but it's unhealthy for me to feel guilty spending a dollar of groceries. It's only really healthy to consider things in relation to what you can afford in terms of money, time, and physical ability.
I understand (and understood) what you are getting at. But if you don't stop and think about what that same (substantial) money might mean to a person in a different position in society, that is pretty solipsistic.
It’s substantial enough, I could surely think of something costing $850 that I’d rather have than half these, if we take the other half to be “essential.”
My point is that it’s super easy to end up with this kind of expense, or much more, without subscribing to “much.”
Oh sure, and that's the entire point of the article. But even if I look at their MLB subscription and go "I can come up with 10 things I'd rather spend that money on" that's a personal thing of what I like vs. what they like. Who knows what things the author isn't spending money on that you or I are spending money on that they'd think is wasteful of us?
In general, I find it silly to look at anyone else's situation, and outside of extreme situations, try to take a "you're wrong and I know better than you about how your life would be better if you spent your money differently." position.
> It’s substantial enough, I could surely think of something costing $850 that I’d rather have than half these, if we take the other half to be “essential.”
You're look at it as a zero sum game though. The GP may be able to afford all of these and spend $850 on the latest widget too, all without blinking.
I'm surprised too and a lot of their subscriptions seem to fall under the category of leisure/entertainment. Are people really that bored to spend that much on these services. It's even cheaper to start a new hobby.
nah i got 0 subscriptions and will keep it that way. most of my friends got 2-4 (spotify and netflix for most, apple music and disney+ for some or maybe 1 other.)
Funny, it's my only subscription. Wife is gonna buy loads from them anyway, and this way I also get some digital content (which happens to be more than I can watch)
Presumably this is why the writer of the article is paying for everything they're paying for as well, but per the OP, they're "egregious" for doing so.
Not really, shops around me don’t have the niche things I want. I have a Amazon credit card that gives me 5% back on each purchase and a lot of things are one day deliveries.
I always find these discussions interesting. The risks that the article outlines around losing track of how much you're spending are certainly real, but there's two things that strike me around all of this:
1. I somewhat object to them including things like Disney+ or MLB in this calculation. Sure, it's an app subscription, but you're primarily not paying for an app with its features and development, you're buying access to content that you happen to be receiving and paying for via an app. You wouldn't include subscriptions to products on Amazon as an "app subscription" even if you bought it through the Amazon app.
2. I'm curious to balance the rise of the subscription model with what I see as a generally increased quality and upkeep of many of the apps that are on it. There's obviously exceptions, but apps like Carrot Weather, Craft, and Flighty I find to be a generally superior experience to the $3 single-purchase apps that they generally replaced. Many of them are on the cutting edge of using new OS features well, for instance Carrot's widget support is amazing. I've totally forgotten the dread of an OS update where half of your programs just stop working for weeks or months, or even forever.
Yeah, while he did categorize the subscriptions, I do think it would be useful to break things down as content, applications, and infrastructure. There's some overlap as with Apple One (which includes both storage and News+ for example), but it probably makes sense to separate out a Disney+ from a Grammarly.
I even see Grammarly as being in an odd category since it's also presumably something they use on a computer and not just an app.
I'd split it up as Content, Services, and Applications. Something like Apple News, The New York Times, or MLB you're buying access via an app to content you could potentially get/consume via non-app means, though likely still paid. Services like a Grammerly or a VPN are an ongoing cost for usage. Applications like a Bear or Carrot Weather are purely optional. You could use Notes and Apple Weather if you wanted, but you're paying an extra X per month to fund the development and upkeep of a tool you find use out of.
The split I think helps you identify what you may want to stop paying for because each of those are slightly different calculations. You could maybe replace Netflix with a local library card, or just buying theater tickets and DVDs. You could go back to using Notes or some other app instead of using Bear. There's no real alternative to paying for a VPN, so that becomes harder to decide you no longer need once you've decided you need it.
With content in particular, there's far more of it out there both streaming and otherwise than anyone has time to watch. Indeed, it probably makes sense, if one were to budget, to have something entertainment as a category of which streaming is just a subcategory. It's certainly an area where you can end up subscribing for some show and then you really don't get your money's worth. I don't watch a huge amount of video and I'm always leaning in that direction.
> apps like Carrot Weather, Craft, and Flighty I find to be a generally superior experience to the $3 single-purchase apps that they generally replaced
Not sure about the last 2 but a weather app is a simple problem that needs to be solved once and then never messed with again - I would personally prefer my weather app not to be constantly updated. The last thing I want is the UI on my weather app to change all the time.
I don't go buy a new screwdriver or hammer despite newer and slightly better models being available unless the existing one breaks or stops being compatible (let's say a new kind of screw/nail became mainstream). I want the same from my utility apps.
The collection of weather data itself is a different task but that's something that's already often done by governments and given away for free (as we pay for it indirectly via taxes).
But they're not changing the UI regularly for the most part, they're offering new and more convenient optional UI elements that are useful. Or providing good Day-1 support for new OS notification features or new options on Apple Watch.
It also helps pay for their use of those weather data and forecasting APIs, some of the more effective of which are private and paid APIs.
And that's totally ignoring that almost nothing, especially in mobile apps can just be "written once and never updated". APIs change, new sizes of device come out...
What you pay for isn’t generally updates to the app, but the service of sourcing, processing and consolidating the weather data for the way it is presented by the app. I use three different weather apps (only one of them with a subscription, $1 per year) because each has unique aspects of its data and presentation that are useful depending on the use case. One of them has diagrams combining forecasts from 20 different data sources for the next week (which gives a nice overview of the spread of forecasts for each day), sources which I don’t think are all free.
It's obviously not every app, but I pay for Carrot, Overcast, and Parcel, and would consider Flighty if I flew more than I do currently. I can earnestly say that all three have been best-in-class apps for what they do, and for 20, 10, and 5 dollars per year, I don't mind funding their development.
I go a bit the other way. I can't stand the constant turmoil in an app's UI in the name of whatever new UX thing is being experimented with. I'd much rather have big updates in one go that I can evaluate on their own merit. That doesn't totally preclude a subscription model, but it is how most subscription services work. Lately, I've been forced to update mobile apps just to connect to whatever backing service. It's obnoxious because even with auto-updates enabled, it may not have updated yet. And now I need to wait for the update or just not use it if in an area with limited cellular coverage.
I appreciate recurring revenue helps businesses, but that's true of all businesses. Software just has the lock-in, generally, to enforce it. If this is the only way to pay for stuff, though, I think JetBrains has the best model I've seen. I pay a subscription and can update software on my own schedule. If I decide to stop, I have a fallback perpetual use license.
I think that really depends on the app in question. Often these apps have a free version where you can evaluate if you think they'll cause UX Turmoil, and then support the ones that are reasonable.
If anything, I find my subscription money helps to support smaller developers and developer teams that tend to be better about not being all about meteoric growth and trend-chasing and focus more on just delivering a quality product.
On the “subscriptions or not” part, the useful distinction is what’s left when you cancel.
Amazon products, even if you paid monthly to get them would still be in your hand, and potentially of value if you canceled your subscription. Same goes for “build this ship one piece a month” kind of irl subscriptions: arguably nobody would buy your half built ship, but it’s still in your hand when you stop paying, and it makes a decent paperweight.
Disney+ or MLB leave nothing if you unsubscribe, in that respect looking at it the same way as Adobe CS if fair imo.
I'm not sure if that's true though - If I subscribe to Disney+ for a month and watch hours of movies and TV shows that I enjoy, someone from Disney doesn't come by my house and mind-wipe me when unsubscribe.
What's left when I cancel a media subscription is all the enjoyment I had in the past while engaging with the media it provided, and maybe the conversations I had with friends or family about the Baseball game we all watched. They don't "leave nothing" any more than going to spend time with a friend leaves you with nothing when you come home after.
That seems meaningfully different than something like Adobe CS or a VPN - When I cancel my VPN subscription, I no longer have a VPN. I don't subscribe to Adobe CS because I inherently enjoy my time using Adobe CS, I do it because it's helpful for a hobby or job I have.
I use virtual cards via privacy.com to pay for subscriptions. I generate a virtual card with a monthly or annual limit on it for each individual subscription service. Each card is backed by my real credit card. When a virtual card is charged, my credit card is charged. If it's charged over card limit, the transaction doesn't go through. The nice thing about this is i can login to my privacy.com account and look at all of my subscription spend. If I ever needed to cancel any subscription I can also burn the virtual card so I don't get over charged.
> didn't think my list was particularly egregious. There's Apple One, a markdown app, a weather app, a few streaming services, a VPN, a password manager, and a few more
At this point I thought I was reading satire, but reading to the end it is clearly earnest. How is an annual subscription to a weather app not egregious?
Commercial VPNs are mostly scams preying on people's irrational privacy fears. I personally wouldn't pay an ongoing fee for a password manager. And paying $400 / year for cloud storage seems pretty steep, but we can't know whether the author really needs 2TB.
Apple One is a bundle. If you use the majority of the services at a given tier, it can make sense to just buy the bundle rather than a la carte.
Some of those definitely seem high for what they are. Certainly he has more than I do although I do subscribe to The Economist and The New York Times which are relatively high ticket and also have an Adobe subscription--in addition to various streaming content.
I didn’t realize Apple One Premier was that expensive.
I…guess it could make financial sense? If you do use Apple Music for streaming, and you do watch shows on Apple TV, and if you have a family that could plausibly use 2TB of backup storage. But yikes that seems costly—I have the 200GB iCloud Storage plan, and I still have over 100GB available.
I have it. I use it with 6 people and we all use Apple Music, watch stuff on Apple TV and use about 1.2TB of storage for backing up 5 macs and 12 iOS devices. Two of us use Apple Fitness. Oh plus hosting 3 email domains. Works out fairly cheap if you use it all.
Same for us, with a “family” account. The teens didn’t care about switching from Spotify to apple and this way I know all their stuff is backed up. iCloud…can’t say it’s as good as Dropbox but in the bundle it’s cheaper than paying for Dropbox. Etc.
An unexpected feature is their News app. I pay for some subs to read news in my RSS app, but sometimes i come across a paywalled article that is free with the bundled apple news sub, so I read it there. I wouldn’t pay for that benefit but when the marginal cost is $0 I’m glad it’s there.
It’s a good deal for this use case. I’d actually think there are a lot of people in that category.
While commercial VPNs are scams from a security perspective with misleading marketing, they're pretty useful for location spoofing and accessing blocked content (if the content service hasn't blocked a VPN already). Especially if you travel a fair amount and want to access things from the perspective of your home country, they do the job
I'd also say my password manager (1Password) is by far my most used and most bang for the buck subscription I currently have. I literally use it almost every hour of every day and paying a few dollars a year is not a big deal
Browser password managers are probably fine for most users, but 1password is really good for specific use cases 1password works across multiple OSes, works in other browsers, allows saving much more than just passwords (ssh key management, API credentials). The ability to securely share passwords with time limited links is a big draw for me to use the subscription model. 1p cli is also seriously useful.
Also for those who are not aware, if your company uses 1p business, you get one FREE personal family account for every business user.
Or shielding content from intrusive ISPs. Comcast and AT&T will both shake down people over torrenting media, especially if that media is copyrighted by one particular mouse-related company.
It's also a good way to obstruct mass data gathering by governments, provided your chosen VPN lives outside the 5/9/14 eyes.
> Comcast and AT&T will both shake down people over torrenting media
Same with every single ISP in Germany. Law firms representing rights holders basically scrape peer swarms on content they "protect", and use the ISP to arrange to send letters demanding a fee be paid or else they take you to court.
If you torrent in Germany, a seedbox or VPN is essential.
I thought 1Password was too expensive, and the interface doesn't always work perfectly. So I canceled the subscription and went to a home-rolled solution of spreadsheets and Apple's built-in manager.
My home-rolled solution worked OK on desktops but using it on tablets and phones was no fun at all. After several months I went back to 1Password and am now happy to pay for it.
If you want to replace 1password by a free (or cheaper) alternative, look at Bitwarden rather. The UX isn't as polished but otherwise it provides the same main features.
> I personally wouldn't pay an ongoing fee for a password manager.
I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app.
You use it daily on many platforms. If you don’t, either you repeat your passwords or are using some other bad practices.
Proper password manager saves your time and probably keeps all of your services more secure.
I also don't understand paying for this when both Apple and Chrome have one, and you can even use the chrome one instead of apple for most things on the iPhone
I’ve had this thought a few times, but am pretty entrenched in 1Password with hundreds of logins. I’m curious if you know about a good migration tool to get these into the Apple password manager?
> I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app.
I agree but I think the point being made is that there are free password managers that do the job just as well. I use keepassxc on the desktop, it has autofill, it's backed up in my Google Drive, I have an Android app that works pretty well too.
I've never really felt a need to pay for a password manager, my current solution works well enough.
I've used Bitwarden at Lastpass and Keypass in the past and found all of them much worse at their sync and ability to integrate with websites or OS to paste my passwords, not to mention how many of them required either a subscription to them or to Dropbox or the like to keep your passwords synced across devices.
I agree that everyone should use a password manager. But that doesn't mean you need to subscribe to one, rather than buy one outright or use the (rather capable ones) that platforms already ship with. 1Password could have run a good stable company. Instead they took $1B in venture capital, and now need to desperately grow an monetize their user base to justify their $7B valuation.
It's easy to see why some things need to be subscription-based; e.g. the value is actually in some kind of constantly updated content; or providing ongoing service actually has a significant cost to the supplier, e.g. in bandwidth, compute resources, operations. Neither of those is the case for password managers. (Or at least, should not be the case.)
> 1Password could have run a good stable company. Instead they took $1B in venture capital, and now need to desperately grow an monetize their user base to justify their $7B valuation.
That is their greedy business decision, and it should not reflect to every one of the password managers. If it costs too much, change service.
However, there is a reason why you would pay for the password manager. They have the highest security requirement from the every app.
Their auto-fill properties should not fill to scam websites.
They should support every possible machine, like BitWarden for example does, even CLI is there.
They should be accessible at any time.
Their data can’t be leaked with bad memory managment.
Their UX should be designed in a way that everyone graps the idea of good password, and can keep using them.
Too often people stop using them, because they are too difficult or clumsy to use.
> I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app.
My bed is the best investment in the sense that I spend 1/3 of my life there. That doesn't mean it would be a good idea to pay 1/3 of my income towards a bed and mattress subscription.
Healthy competition from many suppliers means that I can buy a bed for a one-time, materials cost + profit margin price instead of purely value-based pricing, and spend the surplus elsewhere.
The bed is a great example.
Saying that investment should go linear with a time spent is a bit of a harsh generalization.
Instead, you certainly want to get a good enough bed.
However, at some point, you get diminishing gains when investing more into it, and it does not matter anymore.
Usually, good enough is the point to which healthy competition leads—an affordable price and with a not too high-profit margin.
Similarly, with password managers, are free alternatives good enough?
The initial comment implied that it is not worth paying at all, but I think the good enough is not met with current free alternatives, at least for non-tech people.
To be honest, free version of BitWarden might be the best you can get at the moment and it is enough for the majority.
But you have to pay for better two-factor security.
Like the author, I pay for Carrot Weather. I do so because I find the features it provides to be helpful and of high-quality, and I find it a joy to use. I could probably just use the free version, or any other app that didn't charge, but I also find it feels good to give a clearly talented and passionate developer a job making an app they seem proud of. I don't find it any different than buying a nice piece of art, or eating out at a nice restaurant.
I need a whether app fairly often and luckily the federal whether agency of our country offers a pretty great one for a one time flat fee of 3€ that has become an invaluable part of my (hobby Pilot) flight preparation routine.
To get a different / global perspective I also pay for windy premium.
I use the free Carrot Weather myself. I love the app and would actually love to pay for it, but they only offer subscription options-- and oh my, what options!
These payment options vary from $1/month to $30/month. For a weather app.
They seem to be intentionally obtuse. It's extremely difficult to parse out which one you might want. I believe you need "Premium Ultra" to get weather notifications, to let you know it's about to rain, and that's $8/month. The listings in the Apple store are different from the documentation on their support website, so that's no help.
Seriously, check out the in-app purchases at the bottom of the Apple app store. How could anything be more anti-consumer? And I like this app. If they sold a new version every year for, say, $10 I'd buy it.
At the same time, I mostly understand their levels. The higher levels are mostly intuitively as a developer, things that cost more money to provide in terms of infrastructure and access to paid APIs.
Also, I'm not sure what you're looking at, but looking in the app, Premium Ultra, which seems to only give you notifications for lightning and storm cells, as well as tidal data and the ability to hook up to your own weather data source, is $29.99/year.
I'm literally not seeing anything that costs $30/month on either of your links, or in the app.
They even do a decent job on your link of explaining why they charge money:
"The subscription is necessary because weather data is very expensive. Without charging extra for the subscription, in just one year it would cost CARROT more to supply weather data than a $4.99 upfront payment for the app. So CARROT's Maker either had to offer a subscription or not add these awesome features at all."
What's anti-consumer is how the app store obfuscates things in their UI. If you open the app itself and look at their options for purchasing a subscription, it gives you plenty of information that's clear and explains the levels. If you think this is your height of anti-consumer behavior, you're blessed in who you're shopping with.
Sure, and I could eat rice and beans with water every day and save thousands of dollars per year. It's confusing to me how many people on here seem to think paying money for non-essential things that provide enjoyment or convenience is some sort of moral failing.
I'm all for spending money on convenience (that doesn't mean a "fundamental laziness") and enjoyment
NordVPN and CleanMyMac or the oversubscribed options like Apple+ are not enjoyable nor convenient to me
"fundamental lazyness" - things like relying only on your phone to unlock your car then running out of signal/battery/etc and getting stranded somewhere and looking like a dunce because you were more lazy than you should have been. Or getting takeaway coffee as first thing in the morning when a coffee machine would pay for itself in a month of usage.
Sure, I'm not defending every choice they're making specifically. I don't subscribe to almost anything they do, although I probably subscribe to plenty of other things you think are "not enjoyable not convenient". But I can think of reasons why most of these things could be a reasonable purchase for someone.
I'm not seeing any of these that are "fundamental lazyness" unless you're trying to claim that entertainment is a bad value proposition.
Commercial VPNs prey on ignorance as well. They frequently talk about “keeping you safe from hackers”. When is the last time sensitive data was intercepted due to lack of TLS? Twenty years ago?
VPNs do nothing to protect from the most common and serious threats - data breaches, spear phishing, any/all of the other myriads of ways users are tracked online, etc.
I’m also of the belief that security services take a closer look at VPN traffic (like some Tor exit nodes) that also happens to make their jobs easier by concentrating the data for them.
Commercial VPN services certainly have some valid use cases but for the vast majority of the population they effectively do nothing or worse.
If there’s any benefit to their proliferation it’s in the security service case. Now that all of your non-technical friends have signed up for ExpressVPN because they heard about it on a podcast there’s just that much more data to sift through. Not that security services can’t handle vast amounts of data… I’m just certain that from a classification standpoint intercepted data coming out of a VPN (and certainly Tor exit) is likely classified higher for analysis, potential manual review, etc. Much bigger haystack in the VPN/Tor case.
Two decent use cases are out-of-region TV and hiding your unencrypted traffic (URLs) from your ISP (as you say you don’t hide it from your VPN provider, but they don’t know your address). Also sites you visit don’t get your location.
Personally, given the kinds of friends I have, a VPN hides my traffic from them when I’m on their WiFi. But I don’t need a commercial VPN for this.
The out of region TV is a use case but I wonder how long before this turns into a cat/mouse game between VPN providers and streaming services/content providers. I am pleased to see (when I have to sit through these ads on podcasts) that providers have seemed to start emphasizing this use case instead of their dubious security related benefits.
This is kind of my point - now if a law enforcement or security service wants to get access to a treasure trove of traffic and analytics that is likely significantly more interesting to them than general ISP traffic they send an NSL or equivalent to a VPN provider and have it all nice a collected for them. That said, DoH appears to finally be gaining some traction (default on Firefox, IIRC).
Hah, I’m a little curious about what kinds of friends you have for this to be of concern :).
> The out of region TV is a use case but I wonder how long before this turns into a cat/mouse game between VPN providers and streaming services/content providers.
This cat and mouse game has been going on for a while. I actually subscribed to Expressvpn for my kid, who likes to watch tv in the languages he grew up with: he says their customer support is really good for this use case. (This reminds me he’s now old enough to pay for this himself).
After Tom Scott made a video about VPNs[1], apparently a lot of VPN company executives got together to rethink how they market their product. He mentions that the reason there are so many VPN ads is probably because they are VC-funded, so perhaps the gravy train will run out for these companies some day.
It's odd to me that they have pivoted to marketing VPNs for out-of-region TV, because that's against the terms of service of pretty much every streaming provider. I guess if the ads don't mention a name, they can say "oh we expected you to find a streaming service where that's not illegal, not use Netflix."
No one is going to admit it upfront but I imagine that there is a huge number of people who use a VPN as their defacto means to torrent.
Additionally unfortunately at least in the United States a lot of ISPs snoop on your traffic, so you can avoid throttling and achieve some semblance of net neutrality by running everything through VPN (assuming of course that VPN doesn't do any throttling).
Obviously your IP records may be available, depending on whether or not the VPN keeps logs, but in general most cease-and-desist requests for torrenting go after the low hanging fruit e.g. people who don't obfuscate their IP address at all.
Hetzner storage is not VPS, for what it's worth; it's a restricted ssh environment that won't do much beyond storage. About the same category of offering as rsync.net, I'd say?
As someone who is unlucky enough to live in Russia, VPN is now more or less a necessity to access information around Putin's internet censorship.
However, while using it I've found some unlikely virtues of using VPN:
- I'm never offered ads based on my location
- Services like Google are not suspicious of your logins and don't bother you with additional 2fa measures. Previously it could be a real pain if you are abroad without your regular phone service and Google really wants you to enter that code it sent you over SMS.
My ISP sees me connect to one server and one port only. I think it's great. It's irrational not to want my ISP to record my activity on the internet all day every day, and associate it with my real life identity?
I haven't even heard of 90% of these things. It seems hard to believe that people could have so many things in their life that need paid software solutions. I get the feeling that most of these are solutions trying to invent problems instead.
The more charitable read is that there's a lot of free 80% solutions that a lot of people are totally ok with, and some number of 90-100% solutions that a dedicated set of developers provide to people who actually care. I don't NEED almost any of the software I pay for, but I can justify spending $20/365 on an application I use a few times per day to make it better for me to use than the free version.
I would be embarrassed to post a list like that. This "consooming" just for the sake of it. Like part of their identity is paying for subscription services. I wish I had the writing skills to fully elaborate on why this irks me so much.
That seems like a profoundly ungenerous take to have on someone making a fairly honest post about them realizing they'd let their finances get away from them. It's not as if they're bragging about how much they spend. Presumably these are all things they started paying for because they found enjoyment or value in them at the time - no different than why anyone else pays for anything.
While we're throwing out cliches, I pay far more than this for health care and health insurance. I can promise you that me being alive still is the best thing in my life, and it is definitely not free.
Most of my subscriptions are for video services like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and HBO Max.. But some of the software subscriptions present there and my current monthly bill comes to little bit over $150/month. Well, at least it is what Bobby (iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bobby-track-subscriptions/id10...) says. The only problem I need not to forget to add/update subscriptions. There are apps which will track these things for me, but will require to share access to credit card/bank accounts, which I don't feel like providing.
A CEO I worked with a while back just cancelled her CC every few months. Then she'd resubscribe to things she was still using. She said she didn't have time to cancel all those subscriptions individually. I thought it was poor form since a lot of services bill at the end of the month and would never get that last months due.
Is this a common risk? Most subscriptions I can think of are prepaid —- they charge you when service starts. If your card expires or is cancelled, they shut down your account once the paid subscription runs out.
A notable exception is US cell phone plans. I think most people still have postpaid plans and of course the carrier will send you to collections if you don’t pay.
That’s why you have to agree to a credit check, though. I’ve never been subject to a credit check to sign up for a software or streaming service.
If by "cancel" we mean have the CC issue a new card with a new number but the same account, this doesn't always work anymore. The issuer may supply the new number to merchants who perform recurring charges.
Maybe one video (Hulu or Netflix) is understandable. Maybe one Spotify if the person likes to listen to music without interruptions or non-youtube form on the go.
Anything else in this article is hard to believe/understand for most of us.
My subscriptions amount to b2 for backup (<1$ a month), a Linode for projects/experiments from time to time (5$/month). Everything else I'd rather pay a flat fee to own it or find a free alternative.
A cheap way I’ve been keeping subscriptions from getting away from me is to log each one in a spreadsheet with name, type (monthly, annual), amount, and renewal date.
Using this, I can find things to cancel when I want to sign up for something new. It also helps point out opportunities for annualizing monthly subscriptions I want to keep for additional savings.
Most things let you keep access until expiration so just default to cancel and see what sticks for you. I always log in to cancel most things I start right away.
I log all my subscriptions and other periodic income/expenses and keep track of my daily net income... when you look at the impact a subscription makes per day it makes you very wary of them.
For people using GnuCash, you can define these in GnuCash rather than separate spreadsheets/files (menu "Actions > Scheduled Transations").
Then, whenever the scheduled time occurs, GnuCash will add the right double-entry accounting entries, and notify you the next time you start an interactive session.
Like any transactions added manually in GnuCash, these will be matched up with imported data (and any transactions in imported data that are not already entered manually or by schedule will be highlighted as new). The scheduled transactions also show up like any other when you reconcile a GnuCash account with a statement from the bank/CC.
I'm a big fan of privacy.com: they provide me with a spend-limited debit card number that varies by vendor. I use them especially for newspaper subscriptions that make it difficult to cancel and have balloon renewal payments.
I'm surprised that this crowd in particular is so incensed by someone paying $125 bucks a month for their software. If anyone knows how much it costs to make good software and run a company that operates and maintains, I'd think it would be HN.
It's been this way for years. HNers have a particularly egregious sense of entitlement around software, which is ironic because writing software pays their own bills. Perhaps a larger proportion of them nowadays are writing services that advertisers, rather than customers, are paying for, and so they don't see the cognitive dissonance.
Sure, but not the average net income for people on HN probably, or the author's. The entire article is about them realizing they're probably spending too much!
No, according to https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27... the median household income is the US is $67,521 in 2020, which $125 a month is about 2.2% of. If you look at "real median earnings", you get a number of $41,535 which comes to 3.6%. Except that number includes "all workers aged 15 and over" which includes high schoolers part time work, so it's a highly skewed statistic when talking about people who might pay for software or a monthly sub like this.
Neither of those numbers comes close to 5%, which would be a net income of $30,000/y.
The USA usually reports household income as you do, which contains about 2.5 people.
So per-capita income is far less than the $67k figure you picked, and 5% is about right.
In addition, using the mean (average) is deceptive, because it is skewed by the few people that earn a lot (Jeff Bezos walks into a bar). Using the median would make more sense (although the person you replied to hasn’t, probably because it is harder to find).
The mean on HN is possibly higher, making the point moot? There are a lot of international commenters that could swing the number down.
Side note: if you want to compare how well you are personally doing you need to compare by other factors. Age cohort especially matters for income and wealth comparisons - even for software dev?
> In addition, using the mean (average) is deceptive, because it is skewed by the few people that earn a lot (Jeff Bezos walks into a bar). Using the median would make more sense
Confused by this comment -- the source I linked IS using median, not mean. I guess that does mean (heh) that the number isn't skewed as much by higher numbers, but can still be skewed by the larger number of part-time high school kids too.
Maybe both of these two things can be true at the same time. This might be a sign that society is spending too many resources operating software companies for silly things when they would be better spent else where.
Looking at the costs and voting with your dollar, like OP did, is your responsibility as a consumer to drive efficient market and resource allocation.
I once had people screaming bloody murder at me here on HN for suggesting that, for a professional North American software engineer making a typical US SWE income, a one-time $150 purchase of a tool you would use daily in your professional capacity was totally reasonable.
There’s a baffling disconnect here between how people perceive their own value of time while feeling entitled to the product of others’ time for essentially nothing.
I would imagine that depends on whether they’re employed by a hospital or incorporating themselves and running their own private clinic.
If you’re a salaried SWE, obviously expense the $150. But for a contracting SWE? $150 is really nothing compared to what a woodworker, wedding photographer, welder, or most any other self-employed professional has to spend on their tools.
Chefs provide their own knives. A lot of blue collar jobs require purchasing the uniform. Managers and execs in some industries still buy “work clothes” and though work pays for their travel they still buy luggage etc.
I keep my work on work owned hardware and my personal stuff on my own computer/phone etc. That means paying for my own 1password etc (I only use free dev tools, as it happens)
I agree - my employer pays for IDEs and developer tools without question, and the main benefit goes to them. Some of it comes back to me in promotions and bonuses, but not all or most of it.
Me paying for tools to increase my productivity at work might still make sense if it helps my pay increase, but it's even more worth it for the employer to do it.
Surely depends on how things work out. Even though ultimately my employer is who saves money (and they pay for my work license), I end up benefiting because I have to work less , I’m therefore less stressed to hit deadlines and I’m seen as higher performing.
I pay for the Jetbrains all products pack, $250 a year. I spend on average 3-4 hours a day in their products. That $250 is pennies compared to the amount of value I create with the various JB IDEs.
Good software - like IntelliJ, GoLand, etc. - don’t just act as a tool to get the job done, they act as a force multiplier enabling vastly better UX, tooling, etc. compared to competing software. I can’t imagine relying on Eclipse or VSCode for my work nowadays - I could do it fine, but it would feel like cutting an arm off.
One thing that a lot of people don't know about the jet brain subscription is that the all product price goes down each subsequent year that you continue to subscribe, which is a great incentive. At this point, for me it's only $150 a year.
JetBrains is increasing pricing in October (for example $150 to $173 for All Products pack with that discount) but they announced this over three months in advance, on their blog and on Twitter, and are allowing everyone to prepay for around three years to lock in current rates.
Assuming the median person is willing to spend ~$1440 on a laptop every 3 years which amortizes to $40/mo, to justify another $120/mo would require those services to 4x their productivity/satisfaction compared to getting a computer in the first place.
For trade to truly be useful, it needs to provide surplus value for all parties involved; and I don’t think most subscription services make a compelling case to consumers at large.
Maybe for those who have lots of money to spare, they might be willing to pay as much for incremental increases in convenience, but I doubt that applies to most people — even in rich countries.
——
This is markedly different from the sentiment expressed in an Alan Kay quote (paraphrases): Most people spend about as much in their computer as they do on television, and use it about the same way. [He] would consider a good computer more valuable than a car, for the possibilities it entails [but no hardware/software creator seems to be operating with that level of ambition in providing users that much leverage].
I would be stunned if the median laptop purchased from Dell cost more than $750 before tax or was used less than three years. I think you're significantly overestimating that - maybe it's the median cost of a MacBook, but with the $1K MBA as good as it is, I even doubt that.
> Maybe for those who have lots of money to spare, they might be willing to pay as much for incremental increases in convenience, but I doubt that applies to most people — even in rich countries.
The cost of a product is more closely related to the cost (e.g. labor) of producing it than how useful it is. My mattress was purchased online for less than $200 and shipped. It's lasted almost a decade before showing any signs of age. That's maybe $25 a year for something I spend almost a third of my time using! By that standard, I shouldn't even be willing to buy a computer, which has a higher cost / value ratio.
Doesn't really work like that, of course. Competition acts to keep prices down, but this only operates within a product market, not between different markets. Most stuff is much cheaper than would correspond to the use we get out of it, thankfully. Expensive writing tools are targeted towards people who can definitely afford them, and they manage to get away with enormous profit ratios in part because they're in niche markets with little competition between products. They're a rare exception where the price has trended closer to the value to users rather than the cost of production.
> I would be stunned if the median laptop purchased from Dell cost more than $750 before tax or was used less than three years.
Fair… I was just trying to be generous in the cost estimate, but this just makes my point stronger.
> Competition acts to keep prices down, but this only operates within a product market, not between different markets.
That’s an interesting perspective. Reminds me of something I read — that home computer prices have straddled the $1K price over decades even though their usefulness has multiplied. It seems like there’s some other perspective that anchoring prices, AB’s whatever that is also tends to value hardware more than software.
I can’t speak for others, but I have limited, volatile income and subscriptions aren’t a realistic option for me. One-time purchases are much more realistic.
I don’t care for subscriptions because they lock out those of us with limited means.
Edit: even so, I still have $16/mo in subscriptions on my phone. :-/
Because the marginal cost of selling a license is often close to zero, and companies often add pointless cloud features to lock people into subscriptions they don't want.
It's possible to write software on your own or with a small team, and sell it for low prices, and make a decent income from it. I know it's possible because I've been doing it for a decade.
But somehow over the years software developers have moved everything to subscriptions, prices are going up, and everyone competes for the attention of the people with lots of disposable income.
The marginal cost of a copy has never mattered in the history of copyright. We're not talking about an item from a factory here; we're talking about works of mental labor that frequently take many thousands of person-hours and often tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to produce the first copy.
Judging by people in this comment section, no one has any disposable income to compete for, because $5/day is an insane poverty-making amount of money to spend on things.
I'm confused what price you think most of these softwares should be charging. If you exclude things like MLB or Disney+ where their cost is tethered to the amorphous costs of entertainment, most of these don't cost all that much per day given how much a full time developer earns/costs per day.
I wouldn't put Disney+, Netflix and the other streaming service in the "software" bucket. I'd rather pirate than paying for these, but if people are paying these to get rid of Cable, I'd say it's more than justifiable.
But what really drives me crazy is that if you asked people "Can you look at the actual software you are paying and take 20% to donate to developers of open source alternatives?", they would find all types of excuses.
Tech-oriented internet commenters have very different behaviors and spending patterns than typical consumers. We occupy a unique position in that so many of our tools and technologies are freely available on the internet. Many people also grew up during periods where piracy was rampant and even the paid tools and media could be acquired (illegally) for free if you knew where to look. People stuck in this bubble tend to resent any requests for paid software, especially when it goes beyond one-time payments of nominal amounts.
It’s a bubble. Outside of the bubble there are quite a few people who don’t mind paying subscription fees for software that delivers value. HN is not a good place to gather market sentiment or perform product research for this reason.
I tend to try to cancel some of mine a few times a year and renew the next I need them. That might be a two weeks (save 5%), a month (save 10%) or more.
This is also another reason (besides the credit card savings) why SAAS companies offering yearly deals really makes sense.
I find subscriptions interesting. Basically any business that wants to survive since forever used subscriptions.
The term subscription for monthly or yearly payments labeled as that just receives a lot of hate.
But what about the washing machine we have to buy again after X years? The iPhone we have to buy again after X years or any other product we use? Basically all subscriptions in disguise. Name one company that was successful in just selling their product one time to a customer.
If i sell you lunch, is it a subscription just because you will eventually eat again? That doesn't make sense.
The important criterion is that a subscription will make you pay automatically without you making another choice.
Musical instruments are a good example. Nobody _needs_ to replace their guitar/piano/violin/pipe organ/harmonica after x years, but they might build a collection based on the quality.
I get it, but when it comes to Photoshop, you buy it and then can use that one version of the software for 10 years if you don't care about all of the upgrades, which aren't necessary, or you can pay ten years worth of monthly subscription fees.
The subscription is massively more expensive.
Buying a product and then buying a replacement at some point in the future is massively preferred to me over paying every month for that product. It allows me to budget and update when I want to depending on what features are released that I need or want or to replace the item when it wears out a subscription generally costs more and robs me of any flexibility.
Production quality and innovation is also better without subscriptions. Businesses have to win me over with there new product or version and convince me it's worth paying to upgrade, if i'm already on a subscription, they don't really care as long as there are competitive to alternatives.
Interesting you chose Photoshop: I've stayed on my older version of Lightroom because Adobe moved to a subscription based model and I just don't use it enough to justify that. They're clearly addicted to that revenue stream over their former model.
This isn't how Photoshop works anymore sadly. Now it's all under "Creative Cloud" subscription so you pay monthly/yearly, and if you stop paying you lose access. For a while it was common for users to keep the last "purchased" version (called CS6) but it's been so long I see this less and less.
I fully agree tho when you stop subscribing you should be able to keep the previous version. It's a tool, not entertainment like Netflix/Spotify.
> Name one company that was successful in just selling their product one time to a customer.
Every funeral home.
Anyway, I find the term "subscription" misleading. A lot of software nowadays is more accurately termed "rental". If you have a traditional newspapers/magazine/comic book subscription, you get to keep the issues forever if you want. I still have some old comic books.
Whereas a lot of so-called "subscription" software stops working entirely when you stop subscribing. This is more like rental. You lose everything when you stop renting. In fairness, there is some software that has a subscription model for software updates, where you get updates for a year if you pay a subscription, but the last downloaded version works indefinitely. But that's a minority of "subscription" software.
The key difference between rental and ownership is that with ownership, the buyer gets to decide if and when to buy the product again, whereas with rental, the seller decides.
> But what about the washing machine we have to buy again after X years? The iPhone we have to buy again after X years or any other product we use? Basically all subscriptions in disguise.
The big difference here for me is that you own those, so you have equity in them. You bought a washing machine? You can sell it 3 years later, or purchase one used to begin with.
The washing machine in particular is not a subscription in disguise. You'll only pay (a well defined price) when the machine actually breaks (in a way that is not economical to repair), and you are free to choose any provider, with no pressure or default to just buy the same brand again. Especially if the machine asked for a "renewal" too early for your taste, you're probably not going with them again. They have to sell to you again.
With a subscription, by doing nothing you just keep paying to the same company in perpetuity. You even keep paying if you stop using the product unless you actively cancel. The company sells to you by default, not by convincing you to make an active decision for them.
A washing machine is also a big purchase that you'll probably spend some time to think through to some extent, much more than you will with your Netflix subscription - despite being quite small compared to typical subscriptions! A $600 washing machine that lasts 8 years is $6.25 per month. The subscription models are generally abused to charge way more for a product by making the payment seem small to people who are bad with money. A subscription washing machine would likely be "only" $3.99 per week...
For example, at rent-a-center a washing machine that costs $520 at Best Buy costs $1223.28 if you pay it off as planned (and I believe their business model also revolves around preying on people who miss payments).
Phones are also commonly sold as part of mobile plans, where you pay approximately the purchase price of the phone each year.
That's why most people who do the math hate subscriptions: They realize that they're now asked to pay 2-3x (and often even more) of what they were paying previously (or would typically be paying without a subscription model).
You don't have to buy a washing machine every few years, and you shouldn't have to buy an iPhone every few years either. That's just consoomer nonsense. Washing machines of all kinds are repairable. Subscription software is different. It's closed source, and often times there's no way to fix it.
My Omnifocus 2 outright purchase for what is effectively a todo app bugged out in one of the MacOS upgrades in a way where it was still completely functional, except now there's a permanent grey box in front of the interface. I could buy a new version, but they haven't added or changed anything of value, and it costs more, so guess what, not buying it. I'd buy an upgrade for $5, maybe $10 if I really used it. That's digital capitalism. Subscription services, where you don't get access to anything if you stop paying, are even more disgusting.
I have an iPad 3 that was more or less useless when I bought it, beyond the use of a few apps that I still have installed. The battery is crap, but the only reason it hasn't been replaced is because it can't.
Things like buying coffee (a hot cup of coffee while out and about) is not something I started doing before I had a full-time job. It would have been mad of me to do that as a student.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadI don't think looking at sums is actually much more powerful than looking at items. The count carries a weight. There's also no chance of analysis paralysis, slicing and showing things a hundred ways to avoid the heart of the matter. It's just you and the transactions. It leads to less understanding but better decisions.
But, there is no such information. Applications that reads data from banks keeps doing this, missing to display the single most important piece of data before I signed up.
Source: I work for Truebill.
We use Plaid for this support - there’s more detail here: https://help.truebill.com/en/articles/931156-i-can-t-find-my...
It is a bit aggressive in classifying recurring charges as subscriptions, but that's better than the alternative.
I think $100 may be low these days.
At a neighborhood party around 2017 I asked people what they were paying for their cable service, because I was thinking about switching from satellite. Not one was under $125, and most were in the $175 area. $250 with internet. The big sports fans were well over $300/month.
One guy who considers himself a "professional sports gambler" (when he's not repairing air conditioners 9 to 5) said he was paying over $600/month to feed the wall of six 60-inch TVs in his man cave.
"Hunnert bucks a screen!" he crowed proudly. I ended up keeping my existing service, which I think was in the $35/month range.
Good for you. But I wrote about cable television service, not about internet service. Two different things.
£20 a month for only 65Mbps seems not great to be honest.
The savings pay for a high end phone every year, or a complete desktop upgrade every other year.
But whether or not these speeds would be meaningfully useful to you personally, the real observation here is just that GP is paying ~4.7x as much on a Megabit per second per month basis – your 20Mbps “I just stream” connection should cost hardly anything, a bad deal however you slice it.
(As an aside: yearly phone replacement?? I buy hardware to last on a much longer timeframe, so it more than balances out)
edit: back of the envelope network stat math – the 7.5TB I moved last month (up+down) would have completely saturated a 20Mbps connection for more than the month (34 consecutive days), assuming it was symmetrical (which a connection like that probably isn’t).
The GP was talking about a 50Mbps connection.
Also, I pay the same for a 150Mbps symmetric FTTP (well its fibre to the building and copper Ethernet to the demarc in my flat), with the option to upgrade to 1Gbps symmetric for £43pm. I dont use my home as a backup or major content creation store so for me its not worth the extra.
Either way, it sounds like Canada doesn’t suffer from the same problems as the USA as far as broadband goes.
> I know this has come up before, but since the gulf in cost is so stark I thought I'd mention it again.
I think you might be remembering conversations about mobile service or something. I live in the US and my gigabit fiber (to my house) is fifty bucks a month. The US is a big place.
And any tech hobbyist can quickly end up with a number of smaller subscriptions (e.g. hosting, backups, AV, password management)
But I've not yet found any mobile-only 'apps' that can justify the usually-overpriced subscriptions.
The upside is that I don't spend too many hours on mobile devices, as so many games/apps have such obnoxious monetisation (see Diablo Immortal, or any 'hypercasual' game with more real-money-gambling ads than actual gameplay), and the 'mobile web' isn't as good as it should be (endless app nags, poor ad-blocking compared to a real computer)
You mean the creator of JavaScript and Mozilla co-founder?
"Person made x, so why would you doubt them on y?"
Lots of people latch on to high school achievements as their life passes them by until they realize they haven't done much in a long time and have a mid-life crisis. Some people buy an expensive car. Others start a Chrome fork and crypto scheme.
> haven't done much in a long time
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
I think you're giving him too much credit. This is the guy who cursed us with JavaScript and set back Web development by a solid decade, then went on to say "fuck you" to same-sex marriage before getting fired from his newly-attained CEO chair of Mozilla. His contributions to the world at large are more akin to the French: he added a lot of fancy, useless things to the world and then cowered and backpedaled when he was questioned for his beliefs.
I think we call this an argument from Ethos. i.e. it leans on what someone is, rather than their persuasiveness (pathos) or how well their argumentation is structured (logos). It is not a particularly strong way to make a case, but it is a way to make a case. If you have a problem with it, you are free to speak of what you feel should be considered instead. I personally think "it's a cryptocurrency and therefore a scam" argumentation is lazy and not very compelling, but perhaps your target audience does not.
But looking at some of these comments, we appear to be the odd ones out.
> but I didn't think my list was particularly egregious
Grammarly is $150/year!! How is that not egregious?
My only significant subscriptions are:
1. Netflix 2. Amazon Prime 3. Youtube Premium
All shared with other people.
This guy was paying $40/year for a weather app and was surprised he was spending a ton on subscriptions. How?
I don't personally find Grammarly useful. But I know people who swear by it and, if it's an application that helps you write maybe every day, $150/year is nothing.
I pay more than that for Lightroom which I also use a lot.
More than that for The New York Times which I read daily.
Etc.
There's definitely a subscription version of "Does it bring you joy?" But there seems to be almost a moralistic pushback on paying for software/services things that you find useful.
except it is a lot compared to alternatives like a library card and cultivating literacy.
IMO $150 a year for something you simply should just learn (it's a basic skill). A library card ~$20 a year and you get so many more benefits.
Median skewed by the fact that even people with little disposable income have phones with access to the App Store but aren’t dropping $408/year for premium Apple experience.
But the mean is skewed by money is no object users who don’t miss a thousand dollars a month.
Either that or they are very wealthy. I can’t imagine looking at this long list of subscriptions and being satisfied I’m getting value from them all.
Personally, my only subscriptions are for hosting, cloud, music and video.
Most other things can be done for free or without a subscription.
Not to mention that the point of the entire article is that they found out they weren't getting satisfactory value from all of them and cut back some! I feel like half of y'all read the post and thought it was a brag about how rich they were instead of a mea culpa about how they realized they were spending too much.
Spotify, Netflix, Disney, prime, Adobe, jetide, reface (occasionally) toon faces (occasionally), peak,Duolingo. These are the ones I'm consciously aware of.
Various educational services from Monthly to coursera to music ones such as pianote and ultimate guitar and songsterr. Previously stuff like code academy or oreilly etc. YouTube subscription. Half a dozen patron accounts I support (I am well-off enough, and as ex-programmer and ex-photographer sufficiently of content-producing/livelihood mentality , to have the luxury and intent to support the content I consume).
Then there are the ones I only notice when I really think about it or look at yearly transactions - Microsoft office, Google drive, apple Icloud, backup (originally sync.com then back laze and now I Backup or something). 1password. Sometimes nzbmatrix and whatnot. Apple arcade. Geforce now. And it keeps going.
This empathically does not include traditional subscriptions. My father in law lives with us and I am embarrassed at size of our cable bill as that's what he watches all day long.
Mostly I wanted to indicate you don't have to have extraordinary needs to accumulate subs.
We've gone from cable model to Netflix monopoly (how I miss it) back to myriad subs to get content for broad family.
similarly for software, if you like to fool around with utilities computers, it's not hard to rack up the subs. A file comparison utility wants me to pay yearly fee. Image browsing program wants to be a subscription. Everything wants me to keep paying.
- YouTube $10/mo and super worth it
- Netflix $15/mo and lately meh
- AppleTV $10/mo and meaning to cancel again
- AMC $10/mo ditto
- Apple Music $10/mo and want to cancel but need to figure out migration
- Adobe $10/mo for PS+LR and pretty happy with it
- DropBox $10/mo and I guess, whatever
- 1Password I forget how much…
- Old-School web hosting about $10/mo
- GitHub $5/mo, tribal membership fee
- Digital newspapers and magazines, probably around $50/mo or maybe double that?
…plus a few obscure software subs that are sort of “pro” and Amazon Prime which is for fast delivery to rural America a few times a year, plus a bunch of domains, plus Patreon including at least one software person. Plus whatever I’m forgetting.
My goal for media is to have one streaming movie/TV service at any one time, and go back to paying for music one album at a time. But who knows if I’ll get there. My monthly software cost will definitely increase soon.
And despite all this, I think I’m pretty conservative and don’t have too many subs. Someone with a good income who subscribes on a whim, probably spends at least double this much.
Also YouTube music is pretty decent and replaced Spotify for me. Since you're already paying for it, it may be a good replacement for Apple music.
My point is that it’s super easy to end up with this kind of expense, or much more, without subscribing to “much.”
In general, I find it silly to look at anyone else's situation, and outside of extreme situations, try to take a "you're wrong and I know better than you about how your life would be better if you spent your money differently." position.
You're look at it as a zero sum game though. The GP may be able to afford all of these and spend $850 on the latest widget too, all without blinking.
like i get a lot of hackernews can afford it but i got so many friends who r "broke" while spending like that and won't stop.
I have a Netflix and Amazon prime subscription and that’s about it.
1. I somewhat object to them including things like Disney+ or MLB in this calculation. Sure, it's an app subscription, but you're primarily not paying for an app with its features and development, you're buying access to content that you happen to be receiving and paying for via an app. You wouldn't include subscriptions to products on Amazon as an "app subscription" even if you bought it through the Amazon app.
2. I'm curious to balance the rise of the subscription model with what I see as a generally increased quality and upkeep of many of the apps that are on it. There's obviously exceptions, but apps like Carrot Weather, Craft, and Flighty I find to be a generally superior experience to the $3 single-purchase apps that they generally replaced. Many of them are on the cutting edge of using new OS features well, for instance Carrot's widget support is amazing. I've totally forgotten the dread of an OS update where half of your programs just stop working for weeks or months, or even forever.
I'd split it up as Content, Services, and Applications. Something like Apple News, The New York Times, or MLB you're buying access via an app to content you could potentially get/consume via non-app means, though likely still paid. Services like a Grammerly or a VPN are an ongoing cost for usage. Applications like a Bear or Carrot Weather are purely optional. You could use Notes and Apple Weather if you wanted, but you're paying an extra X per month to fund the development and upkeep of a tool you find use out of.
The split I think helps you identify what you may want to stop paying for because each of those are slightly different calculations. You could maybe replace Netflix with a local library card, or just buying theater tickets and DVDs. You could go back to using Notes or some other app instead of using Bear. There's no real alternative to paying for a VPN, so that becomes harder to decide you no longer need once you've decided you need it.
Not sure about the last 2 but a weather app is a simple problem that needs to be solved once and then never messed with again - I would personally prefer my weather app not to be constantly updated. The last thing I want is the UI on my weather app to change all the time.
I don't go buy a new screwdriver or hammer despite newer and slightly better models being available unless the existing one breaks or stops being compatible (let's say a new kind of screw/nail became mainstream). I want the same from my utility apps.
The collection of weather data itself is a different task but that's something that's already often done by governments and given away for free (as we pay for it indirectly via taxes).
It also helps pay for their use of those weather data and forecasting APIs, some of the more effective of which are private and paid APIs.
And that's totally ignoring that almost nothing, especially in mobile apps can just be "written once and never updated". APIs change, new sizes of device come out...
I think we live on different planets...
I appreciate recurring revenue helps businesses, but that's true of all businesses. Software just has the lock-in, generally, to enforce it. If this is the only way to pay for stuff, though, I think JetBrains has the best model I've seen. I pay a subscription and can update software on my own schedule. If I decide to stop, I have a fallback perpetual use license.
If anything, I find my subscription money helps to support smaller developers and developer teams that tend to be better about not being all about meteoric growth and trend-chasing and focus more on just delivering a quality product.
Amazon products, even if you paid monthly to get them would still be in your hand, and potentially of value if you canceled your subscription. Same goes for “build this ship one piece a month” kind of irl subscriptions: arguably nobody would buy your half built ship, but it’s still in your hand when you stop paying, and it makes a decent paperweight.
Disney+ or MLB leave nothing if you unsubscribe, in that respect looking at it the same way as Adobe CS if fair imo.
What's left when I cancel a media subscription is all the enjoyment I had in the past while engaging with the media it provided, and maybe the conversations I had with friends or family about the Baseball game we all watched. They don't "leave nothing" any more than going to spend time with a friend leaves you with nothing when you come home after.
That seems meaningfully different than something like Adobe CS or a VPN - When I cancel my VPN subscription, I no longer have a VPN. I don't subscribe to Adobe CS because I inherently enjoy my time using Adobe CS, I do it because it's helpful for a hobby or job I have.
I'd pay $9.99 a month for that.
I use one dedicated free debit card to pay for all my subscriptions. You can see the bank statements in details every month. Also graphs.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bobby-track-subscriptions/id10...
At this point I thought I was reading satire, but reading to the end it is clearly earnest. How is an annual subscription to a weather app not egregious?
Commercial VPNs are mostly scams preying on people's irrational privacy fears. I personally wouldn't pay an ongoing fee for a password manager. And paying $400 / year for cloud storage seems pretty steep, but we can't know whether the author really needs 2TB.
Some of those definitely seem high for what they are. Certainly he has more than I do although I do subscribe to The Economist and The New York Times which are relatively high ticket and also have an Adobe subscription--in addition to various streaming content.
I…guess it could make financial sense? If you do use Apple Music for streaming, and you do watch shows on Apple TV, and if you have a family that could plausibly use 2TB of backup storage. But yikes that seems costly—I have the 200GB iCloud Storage plan, and I still have over 100GB available.
An unexpected feature is their News app. I pay for some subs to read news in my RSS app, but sometimes i come across a paywalled article that is free with the bundled apple news sub, so I read it there. I wouldn’t pay for that benefit but when the marginal cost is $0 I’m glad it’s there.
It’s a good deal for this use case. I’d actually think there are a lot of people in that category.
I'd also say my password manager (1Password) is by far my most used and most bang for the buck subscription I currently have. I literally use it almost every hour of every day and paying a few dollars a year is not a big deal
I'm on the free tier of Bitwarden and it's been perfect for me. I'm a cheapskate with subscriptions though.
Also for those who are not aware, if your company uses 1p business, you get one FREE personal family account for every business user.
It's also a good way to obstruct mass data gathering by governments, provided your chosen VPN lives outside the 5/9/14 eyes.
Same with every single ISP in Germany. Law firms representing rights holders basically scrape peer swarms on content they "protect", and use the ISP to arrange to send letters demanding a fee be paid or else they take you to court.
If you torrent in Germany, a seedbox or VPN is essential.
https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pirating-streaming-movies-...
My home-rolled solution worked OK on desktops but using it on tablets and phones was no fun at all. After several months I went back to 1Password and am now happy to pay for it.
I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app. You use it daily on many platforms. If you don’t, either you repeat your passwords or are using some other bad practices. Proper password manager saves your time and probably keeps all of your services more secure.
I agree but I think the point being made is that there are free password managers that do the job just as well. I use keepassxc on the desktop, it has autofill, it's backed up in my Google Drive, I have an Android app that works pretty well too.
I've never really felt a need to pay for a password manager, my current solution works well enough.
It's easy to see why some things need to be subscription-based; e.g. the value is actually in some kind of constantly updated content; or providing ongoing service actually has a significant cost to the supplier, e.g. in bandwidth, compute resources, operations. Neither of those is the case for password managers. (Or at least, should not be the case.)
That is their greedy business decision, and it should not reflect to every one of the password managers. If it costs too much, change service.
However, there is a reason why you would pay for the password manager. They have the highest security requirement from the every app. Their auto-fill properties should not fill to scam websites. They should support every possible machine, like BitWarden for example does, even CLI is there. They should be accessible at any time. Their data can’t be leaked with bad memory managment. Their UX should be designed in a way that everyone graps the idea of good password, and can keep using them. Too often people stop using them, because they are too difficult or clumsy to use.
Anyway, open source does not mean that much unless you are able to verify identical releases with reproducible builds.
My bed is the best investment in the sense that I spend 1/3 of my life there. That doesn't mean it would be a good idea to pay 1/3 of my income towards a bed and mattress subscription.
Healthy competition from many suppliers means that I can buy a bed for a one-time, materials cost + profit margin price instead of purely value-based pricing, and spend the surplus elsewhere.
Instead, you certainly want to get a good enough bed. However, at some point, you get diminishing gains when investing more into it, and it does not matter anymore. Usually, good enough is the point to which healthy competition leads—an affordable price and with a not too high-profit margin.
Similarly, with password managers, are free alternatives good enough? The initial comment implied that it is not worth paying at all, but I think the good enough is not met with current free alternatives, at least for non-tech people.
To get a different / global perspective I also pay for windy premium.
These payment options vary from $1/month to $30/month. For a weather app.
They seem to be intentionally obtuse. It's extremely difficult to parse out which one you might want. I believe you need "Premium Ultra" to get weather notifications, to let you know it's about to rain, and that's $8/month. The listings in the Apple store are different from the documentation on their support website, so that's no help.
Seriously, check out the in-app purchases at the bottom of the Apple app store. How could anything be more anti-consumer? And I like this app. If they sold a new version every year for, say, $10 I'd buy it.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/carrot-weather-alerts-radar/id...
http://support.meetcarrot.com/weather/
Also, I'm not sure what you're looking at, but looking in the app, Premium Ultra, which seems to only give you notifications for lightning and storm cells, as well as tidal data and the ability to hook up to your own weather data source, is $29.99/year.
I'm literally not seeing anything that costs $30/month on either of your links, or in the app.
They even do a decent job on your link of explaining why they charge money:
"The subscription is necessary because weather data is very expensive. Without charging extra for the subscription, in just one year it would cost CARROT more to supply weather data than a $4.99 upfront payment for the app. So CARROT's Maker either had to offer a subscription or not add these awesome features at all."
What's anti-consumer is how the app store obfuscates things in their UI. If you open the app itself and look at their options for purchasing a subscription, it gives you plenty of information that's clear and explains the levels. If you think this is your height of anti-consumer behavior, you're blessed in who you're shopping with.
1/3 of this list is just BS. Another 1/3 are things that you can go for the cheaper option.
Not to mention stuff like "CleanMyMac"
(oh yeah I'm not paying for 1password)
NordVPN and CleanMyMac or the oversubscribed options like Apple+ are not enjoyable nor convenient to me
"fundamental lazyness" - things like relying only on your phone to unlock your car then running out of signal/battery/etc and getting stranded somewhere and looking like a dunce because you were more lazy than you should have been. Or getting takeaway coffee as first thing in the morning when a coffee machine would pay for itself in a month of usage.
I'm not seeing any of these that are "fundamental lazyness" unless you're trying to claim that entertainment is a bad value proposition.
Commercial VPN services certainly have some valid use cases but for the vast majority of the population they effectively do nothing or worse.
If there’s any benefit to their proliferation it’s in the security service case. Now that all of your non-technical friends have signed up for ExpressVPN because they heard about it on a podcast there’s just that much more data to sift through. Not that security services can’t handle vast amounts of data… I’m just certain that from a classification standpoint intercepted data coming out of a VPN (and certainly Tor exit) is likely classified higher for analysis, potential manual review, etc. Much bigger haystack in the VPN/Tor case.
Personally, given the kinds of friends I have, a VPN hides my traffic from them when I’m on their WiFi. But I don’t need a commercial VPN for this.
This is kind of my point - now if a law enforcement or security service wants to get access to a treasure trove of traffic and analytics that is likely significantly more interesting to them than general ISP traffic they send an NSL or equivalent to a VPN provider and have it all nice a collected for them. That said, DoH appears to finally be gaining some traction (default on Firefox, IIRC).
Hah, I’m a little curious about what kinds of friends you have for this to be of concern :).
This cat and mouse game has been going on for a while. I actually subscribed to Expressvpn for my kid, who likes to watch tv in the languages he grew up with: he says their customer support is really good for this use case. (This reminds me he’s now old enough to pay for this himself).
It's odd to me that they have pivoted to marketing VPNs for out-of-region TV, because that's against the terms of service of pretty much every streaming provider. I guess if the ads don't mention a name, they can say "oh we expected you to find a streaming service where that's not illegal, not use Netflix."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY
Additionally unfortunately at least in the United States a lot of ISPs snoop on your traffic, so you can avoid throttling and achieve some semblance of net neutrality by running everything through VPN (assuming of course that VPN doesn't do any throttling).
Obviously your IP records may be available, depending on whether or not the VPN keeps logs, but in general most cease-and-desist requests for torrenting go after the low hanging fruit e.g. people who don't obfuscate their IP address at all.
Some of the more affordable providers that I know of:
So Hetzner can be €41/year (though taxes vary) for a single TB, but all other providers that I know of cost at least twice the amount of money or so.However, while using it I've found some unlikely virtues of using VPN:
- I'm never offered ads based on my location
- Services like Google are not suspicious of your logins and don't bother you with additional 2fa measures. Previously it could be a real pain if you are abroad without your regular phone service and Google really wants you to enter that code it sent you over SMS.
My ISP sees me connect to one server and one port only. I think it's great. It's irrational not to want my ISP to record my activity on the internet all day every day, and associate it with my real life identity?
Also I despise subscriptions
A notable exception is US cell phone plans. I think most people still have postpaid plans and of course the carrier will send you to collections if you don’t pay.
That’s why you have to agree to a credit check, though. I’ve never been subject to a credit check to sign up for a software or streaming service.
Unusual in terms of HN readers, I'd think most people here have at least 1x video streaming service at home.
Anything else in this article is hard to believe/understand for most of us.
The author's list is ridiculous.
Using this, I can find things to cancel when I want to sign up for something new. It also helps point out opportunities for annualizing monthly subscriptions I want to keep for additional savings.
Might just do that. The auto-renews always slip past somehow...
Then, whenever the scheduled time occurs, GnuCash will add the right double-entry accounting entries, and notify you the next time you start an interactive session.
Like any transactions added manually in GnuCash, these will be matched up with imported data (and any transactions in imported data that are not already entered manually or by schedule will be highlighted as new). The scheduled transactions also show up like any other when you reconcile a GnuCash account with a statement from the bank/CC.
Which really makes you wonder, what businesses just survive by just this SAAS model that couldn't before in perpetual license/pre smart phone world.
Neither of those numbers comes close to 5%, which would be a net income of $30,000/y.
So per-capita income is far less than the $67k figure you picked, and 5% is about right.
In addition, using the mean (average) is deceptive, because it is skewed by the few people that earn a lot (Jeff Bezos walks into a bar). Using the median would make more sense (although the person you replied to hasn’t, probably because it is harder to find).
The mean on HN is possibly higher, making the point moot? There are a lot of international commenters that could swing the number down.
Side note: if you want to compare how well you are personally doing you need to compare by other factors. Age cohort especially matters for income and wealth comparisons - even for software dev?
Confused by this comment -- the source I linked IS using median, not mean. I guess that does mean (heh) that the number isn't skewed as much by higher numbers, but can still be skewed by the larger number of part-time high school kids too.
Looking at the costs and voting with your dollar, like OP did, is your responsibility as a consumer to drive efficient market and resource allocation.
There’s a baffling disconnect here between how people perceive their own value of time while feeling entitled to the product of others’ time for essentially nothing.
And there is nothing more accurate about the average HN user than that.
Especially me. I’m the best and smartest.
If you’re a salaried SWE, obviously expense the $150. But for a contracting SWE? $150 is really nothing compared to what a woodworker, wedding photographer, welder, or most any other self-employed professional has to spend on their tools.
I keep my work on work owned hardware and my personal stuff on my own computer/phone etc. That means paying for my own 1password etc (I only use free dev tools, as it happens)
This same thing comes up anytime the topic of paid IDEs comes up, and people will act surprised that people pay for Jetbrains IDEs
I think it's understandable when we consider most people struggle to meet ends meet, especially in their college and formative years.
However really if something provides value to your life, it should be rewarded , especially if that value is higher than the cost.
E.g Jetbrains IDEs pay for themselves every week in time saved. Many apps I subscribe to easily provide higher value to me than they cost.
Me paying for tools to increase my productivity at work might still make sense if it helps my pay increase, but it's even more worth it for the employer to do it.
Good software - like IntelliJ, GoLand, etc. - don’t just act as a tool to get the job done, they act as a force multiplier enabling vastly better UX, tooling, etc. compared to competing software. I can’t imagine relying on Eclipse or VSCode for my work nowadays - I could do it fine, but it would feel like cutting an arm off.
good way to treat customers IMO.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/06/29/increased-subscri...
Maybe for those who have lots of money to spare, they might be willing to pay as much for incremental increases in convenience, but I doubt that applies to most people — even in rich countries.
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This is markedly different from the sentiment expressed in an Alan Kay quote (paraphrases): Most people spend about as much in their computer as they do on television, and use it about the same way. [He] would consider a good computer more valuable than a car, for the possibilities it entails [but no hardware/software creator seems to be operating with that level of ambition in providing users that much leverage].
> Maybe for those who have lots of money to spare, they might be willing to pay as much for incremental increases in convenience, but I doubt that applies to most people — even in rich countries.
The cost of a product is more closely related to the cost (e.g. labor) of producing it than how useful it is. My mattress was purchased online for less than $200 and shipped. It's lasted almost a decade before showing any signs of age. That's maybe $25 a year for something I spend almost a third of my time using! By that standard, I shouldn't even be willing to buy a computer, which has a higher cost / value ratio.
Doesn't really work like that, of course. Competition acts to keep prices down, but this only operates within a product market, not between different markets. Most stuff is much cheaper than would correspond to the use we get out of it, thankfully. Expensive writing tools are targeted towards people who can definitely afford them, and they manage to get away with enormous profit ratios in part because they're in niche markets with little competition between products. They're a rare exception where the price has trended closer to the value to users rather than the cost of production.
Fair… I was just trying to be generous in the cost estimate, but this just makes my point stronger.
> Competition acts to keep prices down, but this only operates within a product market, not between different markets.
That’s an interesting perspective. Reminds me of something I read — that home computer prices have straddled the $1K price over decades even though their usefulness has multiplied. It seems like there’s some other perspective that anchoring prices, AB’s whatever that is also tends to value hardware more than software.
I don’t care for subscriptions because they lock out those of us with limited means.
Edit: even so, I still have $16/mo in subscriptions on my phone. :-/
It's possible to write software on your own or with a small team, and sell it for low prices, and make a decent income from it. I know it's possible because I've been doing it for a decade.
But somehow over the years software developers have moved everything to subscriptions, prices are going up, and everyone competes for the attention of the people with lots of disposable income.
I'm confused what price you think most of these softwares should be charging. If you exclude things like MLB or Disney+ where their cost is tethered to the amorphous costs of entertainment, most of these don't cost all that much per day given how much a full time developer earns/costs per day.
But what really drives me crazy is that if you asked people "Can you look at the actual software you are paying and take 20% to donate to developers of open source alternatives?", they would find all types of excuses.
It’s a bubble. Outside of the bubble there are quite a few people who don’t mind paying subscription fees for software that delivers value. HN is not a good place to gather market sentiment or perform product research for this reason.
Or is it serving a lucrative niche that pays for itself every day in productivity? Need to be clear before making a judgement.
This is also another reason (besides the credit card savings) why SAAS companies offering yearly deals really makes sense.
The term subscription for monthly or yearly payments labeled as that just receives a lot of hate.
But what about the washing machine we have to buy again after X years? The iPhone we have to buy again after X years or any other product we use? Basically all subscriptions in disguise. Name one company that was successful in just selling their product one time to a customer.
The subscription is massively more expensive.
Buying a product and then buying a replacement at some point in the future is massively preferred to me over paying every month for that product. It allows me to budget and update when I want to depending on what features are released that I need or want or to replace the item when it wears out a subscription generally costs more and robs me of any flexibility.
Production quality and innovation is also better without subscriptions. Businesses have to win me over with there new product or version and convince me it's worth paying to upgrade, if i'm already on a subscription, they don't really care as long as there are competitive to alternatives.
I fully agree tho when you stop subscribing you should be able to keep the previous version. It's a tool, not entertainment like Netflix/Spotify.
Every funeral home.
Anyway, I find the term "subscription" misleading. A lot of software nowadays is more accurately termed "rental". If you have a traditional newspapers/magazine/comic book subscription, you get to keep the issues forever if you want. I still have some old comic books.
Whereas a lot of so-called "subscription" software stops working entirely when you stop subscribing. This is more like rental. You lose everything when you stop renting. In fairness, there is some software that has a subscription model for software updates, where you get updates for a year if you pay a subscription, but the last downloaded version works indefinitely. But that's a minority of "subscription" software.
The key difference between rental and ownership is that with ownership, the buyer gets to decide if and when to buy the product again, whereas with rental, the seller decides.
The big difference here for me is that you own those, so you have equity in them. You bought a washing machine? You can sell it 3 years later, or purchase one used to begin with.
With a subscription, by doing nothing you just keep paying to the same company in perpetuity. You even keep paying if you stop using the product unless you actively cancel. The company sells to you by default, not by convincing you to make an active decision for them.
A washing machine is also a big purchase that you'll probably spend some time to think through to some extent, much more than you will with your Netflix subscription - despite being quite small compared to typical subscriptions! A $600 washing machine that lasts 8 years is $6.25 per month. The subscription models are generally abused to charge way more for a product by making the payment seem small to people who are bad with money. A subscription washing machine would likely be "only" $3.99 per week...
For example, at rent-a-center a washing machine that costs $520 at Best Buy costs $1223.28 if you pay it off as planned (and I believe their business model also revolves around preying on people who miss payments).
Phones are also commonly sold as part of mobile plans, where you pay approximately the purchase price of the phone each year.
That's why most people who do the math hate subscriptions: They realize that they're now asked to pay 2-3x (and often even more) of what they were paying previously (or would typically be paying without a subscription model).
My Omnifocus 2 outright purchase for what is effectively a todo app bugged out in one of the MacOS upgrades in a way where it was still completely functional, except now there's a permanent grey box in front of the interface. I could buy a new version, but they haven't added or changed anything of value, and it costs more, so guess what, not buying it. I'd buy an upgrade for $5, maybe $10 if I really used it. That's digital capitalism. Subscription services, where you don't get access to anything if you stop paying, are even more disgusting.
Remember when Maytag's advertising shtick was how reliable their appliances were?
Good luck selling your lightly used subscription on Craigslist.
Just to add another data point, I'm currently at $858.21/year:
Music, TV Apple One (Family): $19.95/month Amazon Prime: $139/year Formula 1 TV: $79.99/year
Fitness OpenSnow: $29.99/year AllTrails: $29.99/year Strava: $59.99/year Strong: $29.99/year
Learning Lingvist: $9.99/month Waking Up: $99.99/year
Misc VSCO: $29.99/year