Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

Not really, because I saw too many software companies go out of business because not enough people wound up upgrading to the next major version -- the ownership model of software can be awfully feast-or-famine for developers' income, it's a very tough/risky business model.

Generally speaking, I'm happy to pay a subscription because this way I get a steady stream of all the updates, and it's much more likely the company has a sustainable business model. And I don't have to agonize over whether paying for a major upgrade is worth it.

Not to mention that a yearly subscription is cheaper than buying outright, and I find that in some cases I no longer need the software, or now prefer to switch to a competitor. So I feel like in the end, a greater proportion of my money goes to the software companies who have actually continued to earn it.

By this point, the idea of "owning" software feels positively archaic to me, as strange as "owning" a music album.

I actually prefer the subscription model for my software, if the monthly price is reasonable.

It gives me faith that they can actually sustain their business and pay their employees to maintain and improve the service over time.

I hate the other model, where with Windows and Office you end up getting useless forced upgrades and terrible makeovers because they need that upgrade revenue every few years. Or the ad driven model. I wish I could pay a personal Google subscription for better results and no search ads, for example.

Subscriptions allow companies to better develop organic roadmaps that's not tied to an upgrade cycle, and deemphasizes the needless shiny that's often there for no reason. They don't need to refresh the UI unless there's just an underlying good reason to (like with IntelliJ), but can still keep adding new features.

As a user it means I don't have these huge spikes in my budget every few years and can just plan for a predictable monthly cost. Or sub for something for a month or two and cancel when I don't need it, which I do often.

Owning software is worthless to me because their effective lifespans are so short anyway, usually just a couple years, before the ecosystem has moved on and left them behind anyway. It's not like code is collectible or appreciates over time. Owning it just means you prepay years in advance and lose access to the present value of that money in the meantime, and can't easily switch to a competitor if and when one appears. The subscription forces companies to keep delivering value unless they want you to cancel.

>So yeah, why is that? And is anyone else tired of the constant barrage of subscriptions for things that should be one off purchases?

It's extremely tiresome. And surely the only motives are profit and control.

It's gotten so bad that now auto manufacturers are charging monthly subscriptions to use features that are built into the car that you have already purchased.[0] It's a disturbing trend that will eventually have to fall short somewhere down the line.

[0] https://www.motor1.com/news/597376/bmw-heated-seats-subscrip...

I’m sick of every product now requiring I establish, and maintain, a personal relationship with the manufacturer.

Notable examples for myself are Wahoo Fitness[1], Water Rower[2] and Roche’s Accu-Chek[3], which all now require logins and agreements to leak health data to be hosted on external services in order to continue using the products I purchased from them.

In Roche’s case, they gave barely 5 weeks notice that their apps will cease to function at the end of the year, locking all data and functionality on January 1, and punting all responsibility to their subsidiary, mySugr[4].

[1] wahoofitness.com [2] waterrower.com [3] accu-chek.com [4] mysugr.com

Yes, and the only practical answer is to consider how many of these subscriptions you actually need.

For instance, I see no reason why a password manager should be a SaaS. I don't care how long these companies have been around thusfar; in my opinion, using a password manager as-a-service is asking for trouble and is a waste of money. The closer you approach "perfect" security, the more of your personal security you end up handing off to someone else for their profit. Having a handful of sufficiently complex yet memorable passwords and something like Authenticator or Yubikey might be an appropriate compromise.

Image editor? There's Kirta, GIMP, and Inkscape. No, they're not as good as Adobe software, but maybe that's less important to you than not paying Adobe.

Maybe just using Apple Notes can be good enough for you, if you can get used to it. No subscription necessary. Back it up on occasion. There are of course other note taking apps that aren't SaaS.

Too many streaming services? Consider watching less in general. The less you live vicariously through fictional characters, the less those fictional worlds will matter to you. Spend that extra time learning a skill or spending non-screen time with others. Not watching television only seems abnormal in the context of the last half century.

Tired of "live service" games? There's a million older games that you buy once, probably for way cheaper, and don't have a ton of bugs. Nothing is wrong with older games.

Subscriptions are mostly a problem for those with FOMO. Don't care so much about living in the now. Create some distance between you and the technological machine while still being able to interact with it when you think it's sensible. The only way that companies will back off from everything being a subscription is if enough people who don't appreciate it actually take action in their own lives.

As a software developer, I experienced the need for subscription revenue first hand. Regular users want support for their software and there's only so much you can do for a fixed one-time payment. As an example, Windows might update on their computer without their knowledge but that Windows update breaks something so the user is like "I didn't change anything but your app stopped working" and in that situation you're supposed to sell them a paid upgrade to the next version?

As a user, I share your concern. To me, SaaS means I might end up with files that I can't open anymore because the app needed to open them was forcibly upgraded.

In my opinion, the solution is what JetBrains does. Regular subscription payments but you get perpetual licenses so you can keep using old versions as long as you want.

And this is exactly the reason I self host[0]. I am pretty sure it's not just me. I have seen r/selfhosted[1] skyrocket in it popularity over past year or two. The number of applications that you can self host are increasing daily. The only problem at the moment with self hosting seems to be the maintenance and setup but that also will be solved once many people start doing it. History repeats itself. Self hosting too will become mainstream once again

[0]: Why start self hosting https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/why-start-self-hosting/

[1]: https://reddit.com/r/selfhosted

One big negative aspect is that everything tends to cost around $10/month, from a verified Twitter account to an app to teach English to my children.

Now, it may be small change for single people with Silicon Valley salaries, but I have a family to feed on my French experienced engineer salary, and I basically have around $150-$200/month left for entertainment for the whole family.

I cannot buy 10 internet services, whereas I could perfectly afford buying, say, a dozen or so $50 software a year.

I'm in the extreme minority here, but I recently ditched ALL of my personal subscriptions and life has been perfectly fine without them.

Spotify: I listen to the ads

Netflix: I switched to Kanopy, which is free from my local library

Cable TV/other streaming: Never had these in the first place

Lastpass: I'm using the desktop version only

Amazon Prime: Ditched it on purpose because I was spending too much money on needless crap

iCloud/Google storage: Purged my old docs and now I don't need it

Peloton: Was using it during the early part of the pandemic, but the instructors were way too annoying, so I sold my bike

It takes a little discipline but I'm not paying for any subscriptions at all anymore, at least not for personal use.

I don't mind newspapers being a subscription, because every day they have to do a lot of work to come up with a new version.

However, I find subscriptions super annoying for things that already exist in its entirety and doesn't cost the service provider anything to give more of.

Something I find unacceptable is the subscription situation coming up in the car industry:

Some examples include:

* BMW heated seat subscription [1]. The entire hardware for the heated seats is already in the car!

* Mercedes horsepower subscription [2]. Again, the entire capability is in the car. It's not like Mercedes sends the souls of horses OTA into your car after you subscribe.

Other manufacturers are also guilty here.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...

[2] https://www.kbb.com/car-news/mercedes-launches-rent-a-horsep...

> Want a password manager? It's a SaaS now.

No, not all of them. Here is a password manager that runs locally, no SaaS: https://www.pwsafe.org/index.shtml -- plus here is a long list of compatible alternate versions that also are not Saas: https://www.pwsafe.org/relatedprojects.shtml

> Note taking app? SaaS.

Hmm, purists would say Emacs and Org-Mode here, but there's also a whole host of open source text editors that are not SaaS, and function just fine for "note taking".

> Image editor or office suite? SaaS (thanks Adobe...)

Again, no. The GIMP (https://www.gimp.org/) runs locally just fine for editing images on my systems, with no SaaS anywhere in sight.

Also, Libreoffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/) runs locally, with no SaaS, just fine as well.

I would say this is Wall Street's fault. Wall Street values recurring revenue much more than one time revenue. It's causing companies to shift to recurring revenue when they have no reason to, like how BMW is charging a subscription to have seat heaters.

I can't believe no one has posted the infamous quote yet:

"You will own nothing, and be happy."

The WEF posted that article on their site in 2016, deleted it sometime later after it got a LOT of understandably negative attention, and tried to call it a conspiracy theory, but it's clear what's going on. (You can still look in the web archive for the article). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25068820

I deeply want to understand and solve this problem. I’m an indie dev that created a desktop app (electron) to design and print labels. I sell a one-time license for $147 but also a subscription for $14.99/month. About 20% of my revenue is MRR. It’s up to the user, and they seem to love it when they have this choice.

Is it sustainable for me? I think so. I license per computer. My largest customers have 20+ computers (grocers and franchises). My competition is 2-3x my price, and require yearly support contracts.

I purposefully do NOT enable auto updates because when label printing works you don’t want it breaking because I failed to catch a regression. Users can downgrade and their subscription still works.

My subscription server/license system is custom built on jwt, so I effectively embed license information inside the signed token and the app verifies authenticity using a public key. Thank you, node and react.

So why buys the subscription? Mainly four types of users:

1) seasonal, such as farms who only label a few months a year

2) users who can afford $15 now but not $147

3) users who can put a $15 monthly charge on the cc without filling out an expense form

4) suspicious users, who then fall in love, cancel and convert to a one time license

Yet, I don’t offer anything from the cloud. Yet …

I’m about ready to deploy a “cloud rendering” service that lets users upload a saved design file, and then you can call an API with variables that get rendered into the label result (barcodes, hide/show logic, color). But here’s the kicker, the result can be a bitmap image, or it can be the base64 data to send to the printer to achieve the exact label you need to print. With this solution you could effectively offload all design of labels from within your app, but still interface with the messy world of label printers.

For this last bit subscriptions make sense. I’m offering a monthly service that costs me money.

More info at https://label.live/

People are usually focused on how the payment model changed, but in fact, the products themselves have changed as well. Cloud storage and synchronizing data across multiple devices are now the norm, which incur continuous costs. And I think this is not something that's shoved into the customers' throat. Synchronization is indeed a valuable feature for many users.

Some of the subscriptions are certainly silly, like subscription for car features.

At least in the world of computers, I don't find too many products which are unjustifiably subscription-based. Subscriptions are usually paired with some form of synchronization/storage. And if you don't want cloud storage (or if you have your own cloud external to the application, or if you want to self host), there are usually non-subscription or even free options. Bitwarden, libreoffice, gimp, inkscape, etc.

So, I'd say as someone who's not currently into car purchase, I'm relatively content with the subscription models in the tech world. The services I subscribe to really do need continuous maintenance, and I've never been forced to subscribe to something that I think should not have been a subscription.

Adobe, though, has never been affordable to hobbyists in my opinion. Now, at least you can use it for a month and turn off the subscription.

Ignoring all the issues around ownership, corporations being untrustworthy, etc., I think one of the biggest problems is that subscription costs aren't flexible enough and require too much micromanagement.

You use a program 24/7 for a month straight? That'll be $10.

You need to use a program just for a single 5-minute task in a whole month? That'll be $10.

You literally don't touch a program for a month? That'll be $10. Or you can unsubscribe, and then resubscribe, over and over again.

I dunno.

I felt like it was a mistake to get a Plex Pass that I paid for once because Plex had my money and didn't have to listen to me with product direction and Plex got worse and worse at serving media from my local server while it became increasingly focused on showing me ads for off-brand streaming services.

I think the subscription model actually works for Adobe in that the upfront price of creative cloud was astronomical and breaking that up to a monthly payment puts the product in reach of people at basically the same pricing.

Subscriptions for video games like the Xbox GAME PASS irk me. It's hard to make a case that they aren't a good value, but I think it's a movie that we saw with cable television and it doesn't end well. If I can't reward game companies by buying their games, I feel like I don't have any input into what games get made.

I'm with you, if something is just an app (so not a service that requires a serverside component to be maintained), and doesn't have a lifetime unlock option - I won't use it. I have money, but don't have the mental overhead to keep track of subscriptions, my usage of subscription apps, and I hate having it constantly on the back of my mind. I want to purchase something, and then not think about the monetary cost of it ever again while still having the peace of mind that the thing I purchased will be usable with the featureset at the time of my purchase as long as the OS allows it.

I have a lot of apps that I use now and then. Some had major upgrades that I may or may not need (like Reeder). If I like the new version, I'll re-purchase it.

Reading through the comments here, it looks like we're the minority, but I'm glad that there are still people and devs thinking like us, so there are luckily always one-off purchase alternatives to popular apps.

So here's the thing, the entire software development industry is topped around the concept of constant maintenance. Android keeps updating so all android applications must constantly be updated to keep compatibility. It's gone beyond security patches to "business cases keep changing so the software is never done." And when that's the case, it is not economical for a company to charge ou once and keep providing you a service indefinitely.

I refuse to rent anything too. So the only option is FOSS. That means I do a lot of my own maintenance (my password manager database isn't backed up on some server I don't have to think about for example).

What I hate the most about subscriptions is that if the provider gets big enough, their practices degenerate to what the telecom industry is doing.

Trying to unsubscribe? Here's a long and convoluted process to do that, which might not work, so you'll end up paying for a few months more. Unhappy about that? Go ahead and sue us for those €50 you lost. We're breaking the law by doing this? Seriously, do it. We have lawyers.

Also: Here's your updated contract(and updated pricing) into which we shanghaied you because you didn't say no. Naturally there's an early cancellation fee which is too high to be worth it.

I remember having to set the limit on my card to almost zero so that I wouldn't be charged for a service I cancelled via snail mail, because that was the only way to do it. I kept getting notifications about failed payments until my card expired.

Hilariously enough a year later when I asked the person in this provider's booth if I had any outstanding payments she said there was only the cancellation fee of €25.

Had I not set the limit my card would have been charged with payments that weren't even in the system.

I'm tired of it and everything (analytics, growth hacking, conversion metrics, ad-tech) that comes along with it. It has sapped my desire to make good products. I've decided to abandon all VC wisdom and go retro. I'm experimenting with an extremely liberal pricing model and business ethos for my upcoming products and hoping against hope that it succeeds. https://koodpad.com/notes/why-pay/

This is my opinion on the matter, whether popular or not.

Yes, I'd rather own than rent. Instances I really don't mind paying a subscription for:

1) an open source product that has a free / freemium model where the base product is great, and the "extra" stuff is cheap like $10 a year (Bitwarden and Zotero came to mind) and well worth the extra $. I'll happily pay for that and think that's worth.

2) anytime hardware is involved. Email and storage services come to mind. You're spinning other peoples disks and using their servers. Shit breaks.

Things I despise paying subscriptions for:

1) desktop software that runs on your own hardware that comes with no support (Microsoft office, adobe, etc.) piss off Microsoft 365

2) desktop Linux. I love RHEL, but paying $175 a year forever to have a workstation with zero ticket support is annoying. I know developers gotta eat, but it's a big turn off. I know Macintosh computers are overpriced for the hardware but you get 10+ years of updates.

I think that's it for now?

Yes, I also feel in many cases is not abuse but scam. For example, I bought a Muse Brain device just to discover that plain retrieving of EEG (not meditation or sleep options in the mobile app) metrics was a subscriber only option. So what are you selling Muse? Refrigerators?

SaaS is a menace. There are lots of valid use cases - streaming service, cloud storage, online games come to mind - but otherwise it means users basically lose yet another part of their ownership. I view software as a tool, like a hammer. You don't want your tools to break unexpectedly, phone home, or change their functionality without your explicit approval.

For a price I expect the developer to release bugfixes and security patches, nothing more. Feature updates and compatibility fixes can be billed. They should be worth the update price. Honestly, most software can be "finished": when it does its main function well, and has compatibility, why bother? Who even looks at changelogs of Jira, Photoshop or Office nowadays? Users are more afraid of what will be removed rather than what they gain.

It's each maker's choice to set up a scheme, but I see the industry sliding to exploitation by default.

I just wish subscription model would be more friendly for the individual entrepreneurs. Have an hourly/daily renting model.

For example, I pay for IntelliJ, which is my primary tool, and I see the value of what I am paying for. Right now, the price is ~200/year, and will be ok actually paying 10x of that as well. On other hand, I also used to pay for Sketch, Adobe Suite, Parallels, which I used only 1-2 months a year (used it for a week, and maybe another week about 6 months later). So I switched to Affinity products (which also great, just require some learning) for design.

I also really like the SetApp model, marketplace with 250+ apps, for which you pay a monthly/yearly subscription. If you use a few apps, it kind of already can qualify the subscription. If you are using 10+ apps, might be even abusing it.

Richard Stallman tried to warn people about this <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...>. As usual, nobody heeded his warnings, and now we're all living through exactly what he tried to prevent.

when Google killed Reader it (should have) taught us that the interests of software developers and users are misaligned

everything that's happened since just further reinforces that lesson

but it wasn't always that way

when software was a product, that you sold, your relationship to the user/buyer was different

if you put out an upgrade it had to be worth the money and the faff of installing it

subscriptions (and free-with-ads) and auto-updates destroy that, devs no longer have to add value to keep getting paid.

We mostly don't see this in games, which continue to be sold on the old model.

I argue that "ad-supported" and "subscription", as software business models, eventually but inevitably turn developer and user into enemies.

So if you want to avoid becoming your users' enemy, you should actually SELL software to them, rather than leasing or giving it away + selling ads.

-- (transcription of a recent twitter thread)

To that I'll add: if you doubt that subscription/ad-supported software companies are your enemy, just think about

  - Salesforce
  - Facebook
  - Slack's constant futzing with the UI that always makes things worse
  - Chrome constantly threatening to lock out ad blockers
  - Docker Desktop forcing you to upgrade to a newer version *that is broken*

It's universal. (edit: formatting)

I don't think subscriptions per se is that much of a problem, but for certain products I feel like there needs to be some kind of regulation mandating companies to enable some kind of self-hosted solution on the event they take their cloud down for whatever reason (including bankruptcy).

If the product requires online servers, and the company is not willing/able to keep those servers online, anyone who has paid for the product should at least have the option to drift it for themselves.

This is especially true for products that are upfront purchase+subscription. At present I just refuse to purchase such products cause I just know they'll stop working and then I'll own a brick.

Have pointed out for a while that I:

1. want to pay to keep companies in business

2. unless one can offer me a reasonably priced "all you want from almost everywhere" like Spotify or Apple Music (and even they are just barely good enough for the price), I want to pay by tokens instead of by month.

Exceptions exist: service contracts is a place where I can accept to pay happily monthly for a number of incidents even if 90-something of them aren't used.

I also understand very well that storage has a price even if I forget it.

That said, for us who (tjknk we) remember Microsoft Office from before it became a SaaS I think it went something like this:

You buy Microsoft office x at a crazy price.

Shortly after someone else gets Microsoft Office version y and you start getting documents you can't open.

At some point you give up trying to tell people to use the old format and you pay 25-75% of the original crazy price to upgrade.

And so it goes on.

Jetbrains is one of a few companies that has made a reasonable deal for users in this regard: you get to keep forever the last version you have paid 12 months for. Could probably be improved to 6 months, but compared to everyone else I can think of it is a different league.

A heuristic for somewhat ethical subscriptions it's probably to decouple subscriptions from the calendar.

Instead of $X/month, which must be paid even if using intensively, barely, or not at all the service, to have $X for Y amount of "no expiration date" minutes of service. Just want to try the service, pay $0.X for 10 minutes. Really like the service, pay $X++ for 1,000 minutes and not worry about it. Of course, the minute counter would stop when going away from keyboard. Maybe even more ethical, instead of paying for minutes to pay for actions per minute, $X for 10K APMs, use them how you deem fit.

Let me present a great counterexample - Adobe want a monthly subscription for Premiere that's about 40 quid a month.

DaVinci Resolve has a free-as-in-beer and a paid-for version. It works equally well (modulo some codec licensing) on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. If you go with the Free version, you get a maximum of 2160-height timelines (so 4k landscape video or if you want your Tiktoks in high def, 2k portrait) and you don't get the neural network filtering, denoising, and certain fancy effects (film simulation and so on).

If you want to pay for it, it's (currently) about 300 quid, forever. If you bought a key way back in the early days it'll still work in current (18.1.1 at the time of posting this).

This is serious high-end editing, colour grading, and compositing software, at that, it's not iMovie. Things like Midsommar were cut on it. It appears to be the weapon of choice within Netflix.

You can download it for free, stick it on a potato PC with 16GB of RAM and a GT1030, and expect it to at least work, if slowly.

No subscriptions, ever.

Pretty much hate it.

It's a consequence of companies believing their purpose for existing is to make money, rather than to serve customers, however, so that's what they're optimizing. "The invisible hand of the market" may eventually smack it down, but consumers seem largely happy to participate in user-hostile decisions so far.

It really depends for me.

For something I might use once a year or something I play around with for a few weeks and then forget about? Just let me pay for it. (And I'll mostly just pass if you only offer a subscription as most subscriptions add up.)

But for something reasonably priced that I use a lot and would generally keep up to date with anyway? I'm fine with a subscription. That's the case with me and Adobe.

Subscriptions also do better align your interests with the interests of the company. If your password manager isn't the best any longer? Drop the subscription and get a different one. With a one-time purchase, there's also a lot of incentive to either charge for major upgrades or even just come out with a "new" product under a different name.

I love seeing how many people mention Jetbrains as a good example of a subscription model when this topic comes up. I agree. But I think the reason it is good is that a yearly subscription to one of their products can also be seen as a one off purchase of a 1 year older version of that product, with an accompanying free trial of their latest version. Then if you liked that trial, you get a chance to purchase it after 1 year, at a discount. And then another deeper discount after 2 years.

That's really hard to find a problem with, whether you prefer subscriptions or one off purchases. It's really a mix of the two.

Unpopular opinion probably, but the move to subscriptions 'backfired' on me;

Being a software developer myself in the past, I used to spend quite some money on all kinds of software. But since about 2 years i started a 'zero subscription' policy. I now only have subs for video and music streaming, that's it.

Since most companies don't really offer a (sane) 'single purchase/upgrade once in a while' pricing model anymore, i simply use (often less optimal) open source alternatives.

When making single purchases, you could always decide whether or not an upgrade was worth it (compared to the new features software gained.) With subscriptions however, this all becomes *vague*. It's unclear what exactly changed. Often you see tacked-on cloud services, or "under the hood optimizations" and things like that which are supposed to justify the costs. I'm okay with paying for software, but it's obvious many companies are being way too greedy.

PS. I love the subscription model of the "Due" app [1] (not affiliated.) You pay once, keep all the features *forever*, and can optionally re-subscribe yearly for *new* updates/features. This seems like a fair purchase model! And i happily pay for it (if, significant new features are added.)

[1] https://dueapp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360053244591-Wh...

I think about this a lot as well, but I always come back to the idea that many companies raise venture capital and they need consistent revenue to be able to raise future rounds. They get that predictability with the subscription model and in exchange they provide a product that gets consistent updates and new features. I agree with your sentiment though — as a consumer, I don’t love how I don’t have much control over the products I use. I might subscribe for a certain set of features, but those might be removed or changed down the road as the company’s needs change. But ultimately people have come to expect that their products just work indefinitely and it takes a ton of resources to make that happen, hence the subscription. Do you have any other ideas for models that enable a company to continue making money after the initial purchase? I don’t think I’d be opposed to a model where we pay for each time the product delivers value. Some examples that come to mind are paying per news article or paying a small fee each time I save a design in Figma, etc. But I think that gets super complicated to explain to customers and it makes it hard to justify charging enough to not only support that specific feature while also earning enough to invest in future product features and improvements.

"Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better"

https://twitter.com/wef/status/808328302213689344

When something is web based, I get it. That requires infrastructure to run. When it's a downloadable program that requires nothing but yearly or monthly licensing, then I am in full agreement with you. I would argue however that for most SaaS or subscription based services though, there are alternatives to them that follow a different business model or are FOSS. I do know, though, that in some cases this is not true.

Corporations are looking at a consistent and reliable revenue stream. Basically, they want a Universal Basic Income (UBI) from their customers.

UBI is only good for business where profits are made, so don't go talking about UBI for people!

The subscription model for the diving app is literally what made me decide against an apple watch ultra. I was disgusted and angry at the idea - over a thousand bucks and it doesn't work until I also pay a monthly fee on top of it? Fuck it.

It feels like pure rent seeking (It certainly isn't using any remote resource while 60ft underwater).

Quiz: „You own nothing and you’ll be happy“ (imagine this with a strong German accent)

Who is quoted here?

I understand the need for recurring revenue especially for things that offer cloud services. But I also would like to get off the cloud where possible.

I like hybrid subscription models. Where I pay monthly for support and updates and once I've paid off the price of a version I could stop paying and just not get any additional features, support, ect. I'd even be okay if this strips back a few features. I think Jetbrains offers something like this?

The thing I don't like about subscription models is that it makes it restrictive for who can use certain tools. I love messing around with the Adobe Suite for fun, I use it in a professional setting maybe once every couple of months. I can't justify the almost $1000 a year price tag.

I would love to be able to give adobe money. I would love to use their product. I just can't justify it as a non-pro user.

I am and it's only going to get worse with even car companies demanding subscription to enable features in cars. SAAS was a revolutionary idea once, hopefully one day someone will decide to sell a product or service for a one time upfront cost again and it will be welcomed like a breath of fresh air.

The entire point of "everything being a subscription" is a marketing ploy.

(Also revenue. "I forgot to cancel the subscription" pays the bills like no other, see Comcast's revenue.")

Subscriptions have to be renewed, subscriptions send billing emails.

All of these things create more "daily active impressions." And in the attention economy, the more daily active impressions you have, the more your net promoter score rises (any publicity is good publicity).

The reason it's tiring is that humans have FINITE ATTENTION.

We're living in "the attention economy." Subscriptions are simply the latest strategy to monetize our attention.

The cure is to cleanse your email inbox of all "SaaS" emails like it's a Covid outbreak. And to be genuinely distrustful of all subscription products.

Rejected subscription years ago, avoid as much as possible.

The idea that a product is not "complete", so we must pay for "future updates" is twisted logic.

The model should be "we are proud of our product as it stands today, and here is the price". The promotion and sale of future updates beyond a certain point should be separate.

Maintenance plans for example. You buy "version 5.2" today, and get free point release updates until version 6 or maybe even 7. But your version keeps working even after version 8 is released. If you want 8, you get a big discount and can jump back in at any time because you're a valued customer who not only paid, but is using the software and most likely talking about it online or producing work with it.

Yep. I refuse to use any of it. I want software to be like a screwdriver. You buy it, you put it in the drawer, it's there when you need it.

SaaS software is like a screwdriver where you pick it up and it goes, "Bing! Sign in to your screwdriver!" and you've forgotten your password so you have to reset it, then when you use the thing there's an "upgrade" button right on the handle that you've got to be careful not to press, and every couple of months the whole thing just randomly changes shape, maybe the grip disappears because a "sleek" look is trendy now, and so on.

If physical tools worked like that, it'd make everyone miserable. But when it's software, people just take it.

No: not if the subscription bundles useful continuing services, such as cloud sync or software updates. You mentioned password managers. 1Password’s subscription bundles in updates along with a cloud sync that works across the 4 devices I routinely use.

I once said “1Password subscription is nonsense, I can do everything it does myself, and for free,” so I cancelled it. After about six months of trying to use my own spreadsheets, I gladly went back to paying for 1Password.

Software wasn’t subscription years ago because we just didn’t expect as much out of it. In particular, we didn’t expect it to seamlessly work across multiple devices and platforms and keep its data synchronized.

If you don’t expect new versions and sync, go use free-as-in-Freedom software. It’s better than ever.

A note taking app or password manager in the modern sense is not a product, it's a service. Your content is stored and this costs money. Not only is it a recurring cost, it's also a growing cost as content keeps getting added and rarely removed. It's not illogical that a recurring fee is asked.

It's very much possible that a large company subsidizes these costs or runs ads, thereby making it "free". But the costs are still there.

You do have a point about office and image editing programs. A local desktop app in itself has no recurring costs for the company that built it, at least not directly. Still, after market and customer saturation it would mean the companies go bankrupt, as little new revenue comes in.

Yes. I won't subscribe to anything (well, hardly anything), certainly not Adobe's bloatware.

TV series: I kinda liked the free sample of Tulsa King, but I'm for sure not subscribing to Paramount+ to see the rest. Not with a 7-day free sample, not with anything.

I am incredibly tired of it. I cancelled every subscription except what I need for my job, and I'm working on moving to one time payment and free software there too.

I've discovered the joy of hosting my own services at my own home, and it has been life changing.

There are a few things I subscribe to, but they’re pretty few and far between now as I deliberately try and keep it to a minimum. For e.g. I use Google Photos and Gmail so I pay to upgrade my storage to 100gb, and I have a Spotify family subscription, but I think that’s it for ones I plan to keep.

I have a LastPass subscription but I’m planning to migrate off of that when the next renewal comes around as I don’t think the cost is justified compared to OSS options and I’m concerned at the recent issues they’ve had.

I used to subscribe to Evernote, but when I left academia I lost the need for that, and I was getting fed up with it getting slower and slower too.

Subscription is definitely better than ad-driven.

Unfortunately connected devices require continuing development to close security holes.

At this point, though, the ability to run something locally and just not have the internet touch it is a huge perk.

Most software is fundamentally a service. You want to be able to sync your passwords and notes, and receive security and bug fix updates. Companies need to fund that infrastructure and ongoing development.

The end state of all of this is fewer customers, but each customer is more passionate about what they're buying (and paying far more). Customers who were only marginally interested in the service are de-prioritized, and the business focuses on people who, for whatever reason, literally cannot go without the service and accept 10x prices (captive markets).

Why is it happening? Slowing macroeconomic growth means dividing the existing pie rather than going for maximizing volume in a world where there is more pie. You need to take someone else's lunch.

I can live with subscriptions, though part of me rebels at it. But I really dislike software that makes me pay ahead of time to even try it. This isn't exactly common, but it is seen at least on the Apple app store. In a world where subscription models are so common, what makes it hard to give me a 7 or 30 day trial before I have to put out money? I've had to ask Apple for money back three or four times, and that is both a drain on my time and attention as well as (possibly) some poor schmuck at Apple.

I’m happy with the way JetBrain’s pricing work: pay a subscription to get the updates, but you’re free to cancel at anytime and you can continue using the product as-is as long as you want.

The garage door opener feature is behind a subscription for Chamberlain on Tesla. Lol. A monthly fee to be able to open a garage door. Nah thanks I'll clip the opener to the sun visor. I hope they throw enough money away on this to learn a lesson and give up forever.

https://support.chamberlaingroup.com/s/article/myQ-Tesla-Fre...

I only wish my subscriptions would auto pause or cancel when i stop using them actively.

Of course that's the whole point of the subscription model, they want you to set and forget.

The paid upgrade model creates some perverse incentives and support headacches. It encourages a company to declare something a major (and thus paid) upgrade0 Years ago, Adobe used to do this with supporting new RAW formats that came out. it would only add them to the newest Photoshop version when there was absolutely no reason they couldn't add it to the RAW plugin for all versions.

This fragments the user base and creates support headaches. If a user has a problem, is it a KP with that version? They won't pay for an upgrade. Are you going to backporta a fix? It might be a little used version. This leads you to having policies that EOL software. Nobody really understands that. The customer gets mad because they paid for the software in 1987 and it should still work.

Subscriptions solve these problems. It can create problems too eg:

1. The Adobe dark pattern model of having to subscribe for a year and hiding the auto-renewal and how to cancel;

2. Once again, the Adobe model of setting the subscription price of basically the sticker price you once paid divided by 12; and

3. Requiring you to be online to monitor your subscription status meaning software that should work offline doesn't.

The gold standard for a good subscription model is Jetbrains.

Yes. Handing control of my life to 3rd parties has almost always resulted in me getting screwed. Product pricing changes, companies shut down, features removed, etc. If I spend my money on something, I want to enjoy as permanent of an upgrade to my quality of life as possible. I don't want to constantly have to balance an ever-growing list of subscriptions, either.

For example, I used Fusion 360 for a few years under their hobbyist license. Then they started pulling the rug out: limited number of projects allowed, then they disabled local simulation features (forcing you to use paid cloud tokens, even though my local computer was often faster to run the simulation). I won't begrudge them asking for money. I did, however, realize that they can change the deal anytime they want, and thus my built up skills were at the mercy of Autodesk. So I dropped Fusion and learned FreeCAD (of which I am a paying supporter), OpenSCAD, and other open source tools. Those are much less polished, but I can all but guarantee that I'll be able to use those products until I'm past any need for software.

> So yeah, why is that?

Because like media or newspapers, the product continues to require work and has no defined expiration date. I assume you want updates for your password manager?

Companies also love the idea of subscriptions for cash and approval management reasons. In government, subscriptions can even prevent you needing to go through a formal procurement phase, which might lead to some important infrastructure losing and needing to be ripped out.

Its much better than the ad driven model of the Internet where advertisers and investors called the shots instead of the users.

Maybe subscription model would have been de facto model of the Internet from the start if the unlimited amounts of VC money that was made possible through low interest rates and the dominant foreign ex currency position of the dollar did not enter the landscape and turned everything into a growth race without heeding any healthy financials.

So we ended up with gigantic social media companies that do not have actual revenue that could justify their stock price like Twitter, FB etc, companies that basically rode on attempting to corner a market with the assumption that it would end up being profitable at some point like WeWork, Uber etc.

Companies that had healthy financials and unit economics were belittled and ignored, they were not ambitious enough and they were not growing fast enough.

Now that the global economics is changing with competing currencies eating into dollar's foreign currency dominance and cash-awash economy through low interest rates not being possible, the startup game will likely change.

The subscription model is one of the models that could make things work. But everything being a subscription does not feel like its sustainable consumer-side - $3-$5 apiece, dozens of subscriptions for different things, amounting to a hundred dollars or more - that doesnt look like manageable or affordable. So eventually bundled services may rise - subscribe for $x, and get all of these services across the Internet.

Not the open Internet we want yet, but its better than the corporate dominated Internet - at least this format gives an opportunity to small players too.

I think a big factor for indie developers is this:

If you have a subscription model you don't have to prioritize marketing and sales as much and can grow at a more gentle pace and focus more on the quality of the product. I'd rather spend time and money on preventing churn by making the product better, instead of investing in shiny stuff and ads to keep the existing revenue stream at a constant level.

It's an old trick.

Most people will jump on a new subscription justyfing it with a low entry cost and the premise of hassle free return policy, but even if they won't like or use the service they'll be too lazy to actually cancel it.

In the next few weeks many people will sign a gym membership as a part of their New Year's resolutions. Many will give up after a month but only few will immediately cancel their memberships.

Yes and no.

No because for things I care about a lot, and want to ensure long term support/service/updates (e.g. password manager, email host). Having a subscription model also means I generally know the cost of keeping up to date (no being surprised by a new $359 version to shell out for at some arbitrary point in time).

Yes for three main reasons.

First being that it feels like it doesn't scale with the amount of software that's trying to use that model. Sure I can easily afford a couple of $20/month subscriptions, but 20 of those? Not a chance.

Second is that its a bad fit for software that I value but only very occasionally use. In such cases it feels like I'm paying way above the odds for the amount of time I use the software.

Third is that I actually find it stressful to have to remember and manage subscriptions for everything. I have to spend time figuring out whether it's still worth paying, check to see if rates have changed, worry about getting locked into another year's worth of contract, etc. With a one-off app purchase it's done and takes zero mental bandwidth in future.

Software development is expensive, and selling a product needs frequent support and updates, which is also expensive. The best working model is buying a product with one-year long support, and you own the product forever. I bought Camtasia in 2018 and while their updates were not frequent and it stopped right after the next version. Still, I can use it forever. Fortunately, there are always open-source alternatives for tech needs, even if it's less friendly or bundled with issues and bugs.

Depends on the product.

If a product provides some value that requires additional resources for using it like cloud and keeping information constantly updated (like email) then subscription is fine.

But many now create a product that just sits on mobile or PC without any real need for additional resources or efforts from the company that released it. Like a meditation app with list of audio files of guided meditations that user constantly use daily just replaying them — this shouldn't be subscription or at least should be a very cheap one. Like $1-2. A meditation app that doesn't produce anything outside installed app that asks for the same money as Netflix for the mere fact that users use it daily is just wrong.

Obviously, a meditation app is just an example. You may easily add Adobe products here. If one just uses an app for personal use on one's own PC without needing to connect to other team members or upload anything in the cloud, there is no need for subscription. One-time payment would work much better. Especially when one doesn't need every new update and could stay on the version one bought without being pushed to pay for features or updates one doesn't need.

Again, if subscription then it should be really small for such cases. Adobe desperate acquisition of Figma is exactly the sign that Adobe executes wrong pricing policy. The company could make even more money than it does should it provide really cheap or free access for personal use and make real money on businesses. There would be fewer open seats for competition to eat Adobe's pie and more users invested and familiar with Adobe products that would want to use them in businesses too — basically free customer acquisition. Figma did this and crushed it making Adobe in desperation pay $20B for the same product it already has — pure defensive move.

Personally I'm tired of walled gardens. I have nothing against paying a newspaper to read it, but I want to read it via RSS, with full articles in the feed, so I can choose some newspapers, save their logins as needed, and get all the news in a single UI on my desktop instead of having various different crappy modern web sites who do allow much profiling on me, but very little usability on my side.

Similarly I'm tired of baking porcals to be even worse coupled with mobile second factory auth instead of a classic physical OFFLINE time-based tocken, who do not allow OFX or similar feeds, some even do not offer decent exporting options and of course NO ONE IS THE SAME being different banks even if MY damn USAGE is the same.

And so on. Long story short: I accept to pay someone else works, because we use money as a tool to interact in society to get what we all want in more or less fair compensations BUT I do not accept and very tired of crappy IT choices not to ask for money but to trap users, munge more then formally paid money and offer far less with a coat of colorful nice crappy UI.

Subscription services are a bit like gym memberships. GREAT for those that workout minimum 3 days a week, a waste of money if you go to the gym once a month. Absolute bargain if you go to the gym once or twice a day.

Now, if I could pay $1/day for some service, instead of $30 / month - I'd probably only use subscription services. But that's not how they make their money.

Yes, in part -

If it's a _service_ I'm happy to pay a subscription (e.g. streaming TV series, an ad-free version of a podcast, Kagi search etc...).

If it's software - I will try to avoid the product if it requires a subscription, and instead either purchase software outright (with the expectation that I may need to in 3-4 years again for a major rewrite) or stick with Open Source alternatives.

Yes, but also no.

I'm more tired of all the damned Ads, and the tracking that they stuff into things.

I'd happily pay for a service that lets me keep up with all my family if it wasn't trying to know everything about me. To be clear: i'd prefer an open protocol that i just connect up to the network, and get my own feed, but at least a subscription model could mean an ad-free experience.

I agree with your sentiment but something I can't get past is the need for security updates.

Perhaps it says something awful about the way software has become structured, but there are very few applications that are safe to keep using if they are never updated. As soon as you concede that the application has to continue being updated you also have to concede there has to be an ongoing cost model to support that. Not doing this has led us to routers that are the gateway to most people's homes running totally unpatched 8 year old versions of linux.

What I do wish is that the bare minimum viable updates were separated out from the major application feature updates. I would be happy to pay $5 a year for many of the applications I own and perhaps that would be enough to just ensure that security fixes are delivered. But instead I have to buy the major new version which not only costs 20x as much but also totally rearranges the application UI etc. and sometimes even loses features I care about.

There is hope. Well, sort of. Services exists because of the unprecedentedly large middle class that's been created artificially by using currency emission to stimulate consumer demand and thus grow the economy ('raegonomics'). But it's been quite a while since emission stopped working and started to give the opposite effect.

This[1] Russian guy explains the roots of the situation really well (just ignore the title, it has nothing to do with Russia and sanctions). BTW, this is the first time I see him speaking for English-speaking audience since I know him (12+ years).

[1] https://thealtworld.com/scott_ritter/impact-of-sanctions-on-... [1]

I heavily dislike the subscription model, but I don't feel like it impacts my life. I have only used two services so far: Netflix and Humble Bundle.

I picked Netflix because after hearing about it for years and having some people swear by it I decided to finally try it out. It wasn't worth it, most of the content I was interested in was on other services so I stopped and went back to TPB because every other streaming service has the same problem and I refuse to partake in such a broken system.

Humble Bundle was a quite good deal for a while. While there's a subscription it's not really a classic subscription model, as you get to keep the games. They even had a pause option so it was possible to skip months that did not interest you. Unfortunately at one point they lowered the price and started shifting the billing days in order to confuse the clients. They've billed me twice for the stuff I didn't really want and after that I've realized I have been pausing Humble Bundle for the past year or so, so I just unsubscribed. I don't miss it at all.

The rest? I don't really need Spotify, I'm building back a curated stash of MP3s like it's the early 2000s and for everything else YouTube is good enough for me. Each other piece of software I use is either free or open source. I can't recall any moment in the past 10 years where I would think something along the lines of "a subscription to X would make my life so much easier".

The only software I feel like I might be interested in that is subscription-only might be Adobe products. The problem here is that the prices on their page are either in EUR or USD and none of this is a currency I earn money in. This means the pricing is very inadequate considering the average purchasing power of Western Europe or the USA, so it feels very overpriced. It doesn't help that this kind of pricing is bound to exchange rates, which means there's no real way to calculate the exact cost.

Because of all the free, open source software, I don't see it as a big deal. I don't mean to say that you can just get the free version of everything in OSS. Rather, that the entire software landscape has shifted, in a meaningful way. On the one hand, you get A TON more software for free, and on the other, for something that has a real moat - yeah, you pay. I think it's fair, software moats are hard, and therefore expensive.

I too prefer to buy, not rent, wherever possible. But the way I think of subscriptions is, first of all, as one-off annual expenses, which I can decide if I still want or don't.

Something like the office suite, I think you get the basic for free. And you can have a workable email client like thunderbird for free. But outlook is a million times better. So when I did this one piece of work, in my mind I said: okay, this one pays for Office till I retire. Mentally, I allocated the money, and stopped thinking about it.

Absolutely. I hate subscriptions and tend to avoid them. No Netflix or Spotify or any of that popular stuff. I've only done them for things like toothpaste and shampoo where I really do need more periodically anyway, and if I cancel they just won't send the next batch of physical goods, so not really the same as SaaS stuff.

I am annoyed at it too, and I avoid such things since I can just use my own local FOSS programs. Devices I use are old enough that they do not have these problems, and it might be more difficult to find one in future unless we can make a better one. If FOSS programs do not exist for the specific domain, then hopefully we can write them.

I’d be willing to build and sell software on a pay once own forever model if there’s two caveats: No free customer support, no free updates.

If people don’t care about either of those, good. I don’t care about providing support unless I’m paid to and I don’t care about forcing myself to continue updating something just because I have subscribers.

I've _very_ tired of it. If I do develop an app, it'll be a one-item purchase.

Hell, subscription model is making its way into CARS. It's so stupid. Mercedes is doing that... 1200 USD a year to "unlock" power. I mean, for fuck sake. You're spending a hundred grand on a luxury car and you still need to pay?

One issue is that when you build on someone else's platform (Chrome Webstore, iOS App Store, etc.), you have to periodically make updates just to stay in the store. Sometimes these are very large changes, like with MV3.

If I sold my software one-off, I could charge people again for an MV3-compatible version to cover the cost of the transition. But many/most people wouldn't understand what was happening, and there would probably be a lot of confusion/unhappiness with having to pay again just to maintain the same feature set.

People are used to buying subscriptions, and part of the reason why is that developers are constantly having to update their software just to stay 'alive' in the app stores. I do long for the days of purchasing software versions and upgrading when needed. But those days are fading into the rear view mirror, it would seem.

I guess we have different experiences because we choose different things.

I use a commercial OS that includes a notes app, a syncing password manager, and the vendor provides a pretty good (IMO) “office” suite for free. That software is essentially “paid for” by the cost of hardware.

My IDE is a subscription if I want to update to a newer version - but the version I have works perfectly fine “forever” if I don’t want to keep paying for it. Given how much money I make with this tool, it’s not much once a year to pay for updates.

I have a few other less critical dev tools that use a “pay per version” approach, which I haven’t necessarily got the latest version of.

Subscription software is relatively common now, yes. But I’ve not seen too many examples where there is no alternative at all: either a different pricing model for the same tool or an alternative tool with a different pricing model.

I think it comes down to how often you use this thing. I don't want to pay subscription for Photoshop because I open a photo editor a few times a month. So I bought Affinity. But I'm happy to pay for my email client, note-taking app and the calendar, because I'm using them all the time.

Quite honestly, how annoying a subscription is depends on how easily it is to obtain whatever the product/service is another way, plus how critical it is to my personal metric for quality of life. This could be impacted by nostalgia. Rents and mortgages have been around for a long time. but if Toyota was suddenly only renting cars as opposed to selling them, I can't see being happy about that. They can alter the agreement any time, and tow "my" car if they don't want to rent it to me anymore. If it breaks down, am I still responsible for repairs? Will I be reimbursed? Will a replacement be provided in the meantime? I'm picturing this coming to large household appliances and the plumbing and getting a fine for taking a dump when I'm behind on my monthly lavatory subscription bill.

I'd be happier to rent more if housing wasn't a disproportionately large share of my rental budget. Software developers continue to develop/maintain software in perpetuity. Landlords on the other hand have no incentive to do anything, because if tenants don't rent they simply die ignored on the street. So I suppose I am tired of renting.

Having been on both sides as a customer and foundee, I love subscriptions.

Every business needs a business model. Subscribers is a very clear one. I'm untrusting of any service that's free and doesn't rely on ad-revenue, because they have incentive to make money in other shady ways like selling your data to third-parties who will use it against your best interests.

Subscriptions are a nice business model because they are predictable costs/revenue to both customers and the business.

What I don't like are subscriptions that don't grandfather you into higher pricing, and pay-as-you-go plans, because it's so easy to forget about then and their rules and get charged a nasty bill later.

As a customer IMO subscriptions are the lesser of all the evils, and the best alternative to ads, eg YouTube Premium.

A subscription model takes away the user's option to install the software they bought inside of a VM disconnected from the internet, where that software would likely remain runnable to the end of time, regardless of the software company's opinion about it.

Sure, such use might not be allowed by the Terms of Service, even for a one off purchase. But my point is simply that it is possible.

I personally think this makes subscription-based software a worse option than a one off purchase, off the bat. But there's not really a single answer to this. There are good and bad companies, there are good and bad SaaS, and reasonable people will disagree in which is which. If a SaaS looks like the best option for something, and the company looks nice, sure, I'll subscribe.

I simply do not subscribe and except things like Netflix only use products that offer perpetual license

For certain types of software, like audit editing, I am definitely tired of subscription models. I'm looking at you Avid - I just want to be able to buy a version and have reasonable support for 3-5 years, and then a small paid upgrade fee for the next major version.

It really depends on what it is and how much value it adds to my life

Photoshop I pay. I tried switching to Affinity Photo but Affinity Photo had a poor workflow for my needs that would have ended up taking 10x longer. I value my time such that paying $120 for a year subscription to photoshop was well worth it rather than spending more time with a much slower solution.

On the other hand, I go on the Apple App store to look for an app that does perspective corrections for photos (more than the built in one). I found them but they want $6-$10 a month. This was something I just wanted to play with, not something I'm going to use a bunch so no, I didn't sign up.

Where it really bugs me is IoT devices that don't need to be IoT devices. I just don't buy them.

It depends. There are some products which are so excellent that I want to continue funding development because I know it’s an investment in a great tool from a great company.

Other products aren’t so compelling and I hardly even want or need it, but not having access proves to be inconvenient at times. I’ll pay for a month here and there. I’ll occasionally forget to unsubscribe when I don’t need it.

That’s where I’m a little torn. At least I can get access when I need it rather than paying a lump sum. At the same time, $25 for a month of access when I’m only using it for 2 hours feels like bad value as well.

Also, some developers out there aren’t doing subscriptions but I almost wish they would so I could continue funding them.

Definitely mixed feelings about it.

> So yeah, why is that? And is anyone else tired of the constant barrage of subscriptions for things that should be one off purchases?

New models of Fitbit require a subscription to unlock the full feature set – I decided not to upgrade the device at all as long as the old one still works.

There are one-off purchases for services – e.g. generate an AI video in order to gift it to someone. Many services provide monthly subscriptions with a fixed amount of credits. For creators and folks with businesses subscriptions make sense, but for occasional, one-time use it makes zero sense. While I'd be willing to just pay-per-use, I will walk away from services offering subscriptions only.

A subscription model is closer to how most consumers assume a software 'purchase' should work.

If you're ok with never wanting an update, bugfix, or security fix, then a one-time purchase would sort of be alright. Most consumers, however, expect that the software they buy will get some kind of support over time.

I used to work at Microsoft. I can't tell you how many times my relatives/friends complained to me about Microsoft dropping support for XP. They expected that the software would be supported forever, even though they bought it once more than a decade ago.

A subscription cost matches the expectations of the consumer better than a one-time purchase, and better aligns the incentives of the company with the consumer.

I'm fine with monthly payments as long I have time to use it. Which is fine with Spotify, because I use it daily. But I refuse to pay 4 streaming services when I know that I can watch 3-5 hours weekly on their content. It makes 1 hour for one service monthly. So no deal for me.

As long time Adobe user for professional work I'm fine with paying, because I use it daily and make money from it. As tool I like it. What I hate is their development that is more bloated and robust with every update. Also they do not respect users privacy and usage is not possible on linux - which is only reason why I cannot use linux as main OS.

Yes. At Deckmill (https://deckmill com) we hated subscriptions for language products, so we built a language product that you buy once and get the content forever (much like a book).

Absolutely. I'm becoming allergic to subscriptions and I'm even dropping all my website and service ones now as much as I can. I've just had it with this money-grabbing. Subscription models just won't work for me.

Yes. This is the result of vast olygopolization. Market shares cannot grow and natural growth of revenues are not enough for boards of directors. Thus, they want you to pay many times over your lifetime what you’d have paid once for a product.

Nope. I pay a subscription for JetBrains CLion and I love it. Recently paid for the next 3 years in advance. Their software is wonderful and I want to see it continue to exist for as long as I am alive. So why would I not want to pay for it.

It’s kinda make sense on a deep philosophical level - we all are just subscribers for our own life, never the owners.

This means we never own anything but temporarily, i.e. subscription is more fundamental pattern of object/subject relationships.

> why is that?

It is essentially for licensing and DRM reasons. It's been around for years in B2B stuff. But as it turns out it works for B2C stuff too, and you can actually charge more by charging less.

Let's look at it by using an example. Many people see a 9$ fee as something they can afford right now, and the company sees it as a 108$ per year, per person, payment for the service. Even if they loose 30% of that in operating costs, it is still 75.6$. If 1000 people pay, you have 75 600$ in annual reoccurring income. If you have to sell hardware for people to use your service, you can now sell that at a loss and recoup the loses via the subscription.

The actual horror is the DRM and the forced updates that come along with it. Nothing is stable anymore, all things are fragile, forcing you to develop against a rolling release by default and good luck expecting something working. The only provider of stable releases for some software by now are pirates. So you buy the license, to be safe legally, and then you use warez, cause the DRM is shit by default, trying you to buy more licenses, and they know they can wiggle out of all responsibility, even the ones stated in the license agreement if they can get you to switch to pirated software.

Open source, looks prettier every day.

I do, but also if you are willing to do the work, a lot of these can be self hosted. Password manager? KeepassXC. Note taking? Obsidian and markdown (or whatever and markdown) + syncthing. Image editor? Paint.net or DarkTable. Office suite? LibreOffice.

I am pissed to be asked to pay a subscription for something that is one and done. Apps you install on your phone and are purely local for example. The most egregious example is the shift of the car industry to that model.

I am fine when it requires them to operate a service, though I prefer self hosting because I don't trust companies with my data.

I dislike this too, although I can understand arguments for it in software that keeps iterating and (hopefully) improving over time.

I wrote an article about this issue for How-To Geek earlier this year that explores the reasons why the subscription model has become so prevalent: Why Is Everything a Subscription Now?

https://www.howtogeek.com/817963/why-is-everything-a-subscri...

My thoughts on this are two-fold. Firstly, people need to earn money for their work. The age of ad-based revenue sharing never really worked and created un-usable experiences in various app-stores of the world.

With the decline in digital advertising, revenues for BigTech will go down therefore, the revenue for companies depending on such services will decline accordingly.

We operate stakepools that have introduced a really smart and effective way to introduce a monetary layer into content and services online. They sit on top of treasuries that pay out every 5 days and this concept is really nice and works well.

I run Linux on my HP laptop. I don't use any proprietary software. So, for myself, I don't see this buy vs. subscribe dichotomy.

By the way, I'm using Linux Mint + MATE and everything works pretty well.

Unfortunately, my work supplied computer is a pretty locked down Windows with a limited corporate approved software selection. Luckily, this selection includes VirtualBox! ;)

So, with VB, I'm able to do all my dev work in a Linux VM (I run both Mint and Alpine..)

You may want to consider trying some Free / Open Source software alternatives to your current setup if you are tired of subscriptions..

I wasn't buying paid software before, and I'm not buying the SaaS version either.

There's enough perfectly good open source and freeware(Although you might be the product with some of it), that I don't currently pay for any software at all at home, aside from maybe $15 a year in DLC for games, and services that aren't just SaaS. Although Tile Premium doesn't do much that couldn't be done locally as far as I know.

A bigger problem is media streaming, which was great back when everything was on 2 or 3, but it's getting insane now.

I just flat out refuse to use it if I feel the subscription is rent-seeking. So far I don't feel like I've missed out on any must-haves because of this policy.

One thing I'd like to pay for but won't because of rent-seeking subscription is Roland's VST audio plugins. I'd happily pay hundreds of dollars for them if I could BUY them, but that's not an option. Instead, I'm holding on to my Roland XV5080 hardware synthesizer module, instead of replacing it with the software alternative, which I'd very much want.

As a customer, I do hate subscription for everything...

But as an entrepreneur, I think subscription revenue is a good business model to support the ongoing development of a business.

To find a balance, I don't think it's necessary to make monthly subscription a default option. Daily or even hourly subscription could also work - https://www.listennotes.com/blog/instead-of-monthly-billing-...

Yes and no... for software I use all the time I don't mind. But there's some stuff that are occasional use type things, and I'd just like to pay a single one off cost that makes sense to me. But usually, it is some low ball subscription like $6 a month. It's like I wish for something like "Softify" where you pay a subscription to a service that has a ton of utility like software and based on usage it distributes to the creators (doesn't have to be as predatory as spotify)

It depends on how it's done, I'd say. On one side, there are companies like Sublime Text and JetBrains. Their subscription model is fair, to me atleast. Also, for most software that HN users would use, they'd likely have alternatives planned or data export methods available, so it's not an issue in that respect as well. On the other, there's stuff like Adobe which… well, I've no review because it's too expensive anyway lol

Yes, absolutely. Being frugal is one thing, but there's also the mental baggage of having these renewing financial decisions stacking up. I am begrudgingly a Photoshop/Lightroom subscriber but resented the monthly fee to add Premiere and paid $x00 for DaVinci Resolve Studio. I definitely appreciated their model of having a generous free tier so I could learn the software and have it prove its worth, then a one-off charge buy it properly (even though I barely need any of the unlocked features).

In the niche of Laravel PHP, a dev shop out of Belgium, Spatie, has been doing the opposite with a email marketing platform [1]1.

Flat license fee for source code that I can customize and run in my existing app. Running it at scale and just annually renewing licenses to keep updates and bugfixes coming. It's wonderful.

But that's the only exception to a long list of annual and monthly contracts. One bright spot. Thanks Spatie.

1 - https://mailcoach.app/

Yes! The solution is to go 100% public domain.

Programming language information: pldb.com (100% public domain — you can download the CSV and even entire git history)

Music: try https://musicofapeople.com/ (actually, far better than ours is NoCopyrightSounds: https://ncs.io/)

Newspapers: check out https://longbeach.pub/

Much, much more coming

I have kept my desktop software as a one-time payment for a version N license (pay 40% to upgrade to version N+1) since I started in 2005, when this was the most common model. But I do look a bit enviously at products that charge a subscription - it would be nice to get that steady income. But I don't really want to completely change model at this point. So I may offer a choice of perpetual license or 1 year sub at the next major upgrade. It does add a bit more friction to the purchasing process though.

I think software companies should offer both. A subscription gets you access to any version of the software as long as you keep paying. Or you can purchase a particular version.

Unfortunately though, this is very hard to achieve with Web based products, since then they would need to retain copies and host copies of every version. This to me just highlights how Web based software makes ownership harder, and is why I will always preference software I can download and backup and store how I please, etc.

I don’t because software requires maintenance and R&D which improves it over time. At the end of the day, I choose if I want to pay monthly and if I do it’s saving me time and energy.

I think I really love subscriptions but for the wrong reasons.

Since every app that I purchased moved to a subscription model I entirely stopped buying new apps for fear of being screwed up again.

Here goes my list: (1password, fantastical,unread,1Blocker, pocket cast…)

Nowadays every time I see an interesting app I think: nah they will eventually become a subscription and I will simply loose my investment of time and money. This in turn, saved me a lot of money in random apps that I would just instantly purchase a few years back.

Yes. For all the reasons. I want to own stuff, I want my stuff to be mine, forever, to do with as I please.

I want physical things to mess about with, I want to be able to experience things as I did when I first got them.

We're in a cultural dark-age.. The hoops you have to jump to experience "new" artefacts are something else...

How bad WAS the initial version of the new sim city game? How do I even run that?

What about that TV-Show that said something that upset people.. That episode is offline again.

I hear you... between music subscription, film subscription, tv subscription and software subscription the monthly spending gets crazy.

Not long ago I was subscribed to a nice app called Saffron (dev is here in HN). But after a couple of years, I just couldn't justify paying to use that kind of app. Same with feedly, I was a paying customer for about 4 years.

Now I pay $5 for a Digital ocean instance and have several self-hosted open source alternatives. They do what I need, at an unbeatable price.

One thing I'm excited for in the digital markets app is app stores that allow a "paid upgrade" model. This is pretty much untenable with the current incumbents.

I'm working on a consumer productivity app and really want to provide it as a paid upgrade model, because I'm philosophically opposed to SaaS for everything as well. But, when I go cross-platform, I won't be able to offer the paid upgrade model on either iOS or Android.

Yeah, I actively resist it.

Running old versions of products that I own. I'm 100% on Linux now running pretty much everything on Wine which seems to be more compatible than Windows if you're going down this path.

Nothing good has come from subscription models and there's some fantastic FOSS options taking over where purchasable software once existed. I'd rather fund those.

As a developer I do like that there are people out there happy to have me attach a leech to their wallets.

There's nothing wrong with subscription based model.

The problem arises when you pay for the software and you have it disabled remotely for "violating terms of service".

Property is one of the basis of autonomy so this shift that makes economic sense and scales for large corporations will probably many very undesired societal effects. It's the missing link between the optimism of early web with the dystopias of cyberpunk, if everything is a subscription not a product you have no control over it, and can be easily banned from it. Infrastructure as a subscription is the royal road to tyranny.

I wouldn't say so. I only have 2 subscriptions so I don't mind. If I had many, it would give me some itching but 2 are fine, IMHO (perhaps I can get rid of Netflix soon too).

Besides that, I can't imagine how else this could be - I mean, how would someone keep operating without revenue from subscriptions? You may say "ads" and I'd say I totally prefer paying a subscription to watching ads.

The main problem is the SaaS model. Subscriptions for updates to local software are fine. At least (1) you can still continue to use the older version when paying the subscription isn’t worth it for you, and (2) you can control when to upgrade to a newer version, reducing the rate of churn and adapting to what fits your schedule, and also in the case where the new version is actually worse for how you’re using the software.

The key word here is maintenance.

Most things you own you also maintain yourself. It doesn’t hold true for software. People expect software to work for some time.. On their new device, after the OS update. Bugs need to be removed, new features built.

You can and will fix your car. You will maintain it too. And you will happily pay for it. Same with the house you own. You might even renovate it, add a new level.

It is not possible to own and maintain software that way.

What REALLY sucks is subscribtions getting into physical products now. For example, (at least in my country) - you can't buy a BMW with Apple CarPlay - you can only rent it for $x per year... I like BMW's cars and I wanted to buy one when I'm old and have much more money than I need, but I also hate to be milked like this. So I guess, I'll have to look for a new retirement toy.

I think at first thought it's annoying, but it's worked for me since Everquest since I know the company I'm subscribed to will deliver updates forever, and if they don't I just cancel. I think it is annoying that I have to keep track of all my subscriptions, but that's a very minor inconvenience.

Subscription services have almost single-handedly ended the consumer need for pirating software as well.

Your employer could also be tired of you being a subscription for them but this is what it takes to make people work for you continuously :)

I think the main reason that the subscription model is gaining popularity is that it can discourage piracy. To prove that you have a valid subscription, you have to log in each time. And it's harder to patch out a login system (especially if parts of the program code are stored server-side and are downloaded each run) than it is to patch out a simple cd key check.

For public companies this is mainly a push from wallstreet as they now prefer that business model for many reasons. https://www.zuora.com/guides/three-reasons-wall-street-loves...

I realized from reading these comments that I basically don't pay for software except for games. Everything else is just FOSS.

First of all I totally agree with you; the industry has turned to more rent seeking than it did previously. I think park of why this has happened is also related to the transition to cloud computing. This means that unlike earlier versions, modern photo editing software includes cloud storage and computing and therefore you have recurring upkeep costs for the software maker.

> I generally refuse to rent anything in life

It depends. I like that my rented apartment is housing-as-a-service because if any plumbing breaks it's not my problem. If it collapses in an earthquake it's also not my problem, I can run away and rent another one.

Sofware-as-a-service, on the other hand, I'm largely against. I much prefer one license for life with free updates for a set period of time.

My main issue with Saas tools is they keep changing and it's not always clear why or that there are any benefits. Many of the changes feel like they were resume driven. Case in point, Dropbox.

Many years ago they were awesome. Now they've added a much heavier client UI client. I stopped using them because of that and also I just noticed a huge uptick in resource usage.

You can thank the finance people for that. If you want to get investors for anything these days they ask for your plans on getting recurring revenue. So no longer one off purchases for anything. Even more traditional companies move to this stupid model for that reason. Like car makers putting features you already paid for behind a subscription to activate them...

I try to think about subscription costs in multiples of 12, so if I see a $6.99/mo subscription service, I just think "would I pay $84 for this?" and the answer is often no. That's a fairly simple strategy. Obviously, every pricing team wants to lock you into the yearly cost for a long time, so you should really think of it as more like $840.

Only open source and free/libre software are forever yours. Do you want to stop paying for things, stick to Open source.

The only thing I'm annoyed about this model is for WordPress plugins. There are a lot of sites using WordPress and pretty much every plugin has moved to a crippled free version + full paid version that requires a yearly subscription to receive updates. I'd rather just pay more upfront one time fees for lifetime updates.

It's really great, because it means that avoiding spending is really easy, and has been a massive improvement to my budget.

Cancelled Hello Fresh, so I'm doing to just Netflix (which is on thin ice, but I have a kid.)

"Oh, look I want this, oh wait, it's a subscription service and you'd have to fill out a 2 page form. Fuck that then."

I'm tired of all media now being a series!

From Netflix having 10 hours per season for what should be a 2.5 hour movie, to podcasts.

I've been of this opinion for essentially all consumer grade items since the beginning of the trend years ago. For Enterprise software I'm squishier because I have to bear in mind a bunch of things where long cycles and certain guarantees are contractually baked in that aren't as easy to weasel out of.

Convenience Vs. Control is a mostly lost battle and Everything-as-a-Service is but one of its ugly children.

Yet, it's all up to —and due to— "We, the People", as a group which values convenience way too much.

Gosh! We should know better, but still...

.

My solution?

Accept some small sacrifices in order to privilege ownership and control as much as possible — and vote with my wallet.

Care to join me? :)

Mobile app stores are the worst at this, apps which have no business being subscription try to get you to pay monthly, like a sleep analysis app, nickle and dime with DLC and add subscription pricing on top. Never a dime to a company like this.

Continuously add value and allow old versions like JetBrains, totally makes sense.

Yes and no. I'd rather pay ongoing costs for something that has ongoing costs (even if that's just paying some dude to create features I don't want) rather than have it be ad supported.

Having thought on it a small amount, I know as a software creator I'd rather fleece a sheep many times over than skin him once.

I kind of understand online services or games being a subscription, because you have to keep paying for infrastructure and devs etc etc, but apps that don't have online functionality (looking at fitbit right now...) or had its functionality forcefully replaced by an online one is just a joke.

I'm totally for subscription. But please give me an option for either on-time or short-term burst of usage too for a small price instead of a high monthly. There are times when I want to use something just for a few hours and that's it. I might never need to touch the software for many months.

I released my first "SaaS" back in 2002. It's always been a "web app". And, yeah, as I've developed new features and made structural changes I've introduced bugs that had to be found and squashed.

But it's gotten a lot better over those years as web tech and my skills have progressed and users have influenced what I worked on since that first release. I have users that have been using it for most all of those years now and consider them friends.

I made a version that runs offline. The user has to install CouchDB on their desktop pc to use it. I made it easy for them to set up and explained the benefits, and I thought they were huge, but no one wanted to do that.

I've also had users who stopped using it call me a year or more later asking if I could send them their data, and I could, and did, and didn't charge them anything because it's a trivial task. They were very grateful.

So, no. I don't really think about it that way. But I'm old. I can recall the days of getting excited when a magazine I paid to subscribe to showed up in my mailbox and walking to the local library to find a book to bring home and read.

I agree with the sentiment in this thread that there's not enough purchase choice when it comes to online services.

So this thread inspired me to offer more purchase choice of my online free SaaS once I've set up collAnon.app as a self-hosting software too.

In a couple of weeks you'll see :)

Yes, oh my goodness. And it's not just software--I've been feeling this pretty acutely while holiday shopping. Have lost way too much time funneled and sidetracked onto subscription-only "box" sites.

And I just got dark-pattern-suckered into a nakedwines.com subscription...

Not really, like others said, in many cases subscription is well justified.It normally brings consistent updates, data hosting and backup on top of typical purchase.

In addition, for me most importantly, it forces a continuous relationship between business entities that brings trust and continuity.

> Want a password manager? It's a SaaS now. Note taking app? SaaS. Image editor or office suite? SaaS (thanks Adobe...)

All your examples are things with free alternatives.

Or just come with the OS sometimes in the case of a note taking app (that is why it's called Notepad on Windows).

Asking about "everything being a subscription" in tech, on a tech industry forum where, presumably, a lot of people/employers are the ones doing it... doesn't seem like it's going to get a response distribution representative of users.

I'm an outlier. Most of the software I use on a daily basis isn't subscription based. But I'm far from the bleeding edge. I write a lot of my own software at home in Lisp. It's a lonely existence, but at least I know how stuff works.

Buying a product is no guarantee, companies should also release a patch when they stop running the license server e.g. certain adobe products can no longer be installed by the owner due to adobe neither running a license server nor released a patch.

Whenever there is merely a one time effort by the seller i see no reason to paying ad infinitum.

Of course nowadays we often see cloud services being offered/bundled/forced and those cost (some) money to operate. Password managers are a good example.

Not only that, but it's so expensive too. Everything is $40/month. It adds up fast.

I don't mind so much, I remember multi-hundred (or more) version upgrades, so it's better in some ways. I was just thinking about how I wish I had some way to manage all subscriptions in one place, it's so hard to keep track of.

We operate stakepools that have introduced a really smart and effective way to introduce a monetary layer into content and services online. They sit on top of treasuries that pay out every 5 days and this concept is really nice and works well.

It makes sense a bit in a world of continually releasing and patching software on the fly. Some are ridiculous cash grabs (Adobe) but how am I gonna charge a one time fee for a web app? Are you obligated to maintain and upgrade it forever?

No, because as software developer I want that the authors of the products I use for my work also get their well deserved payments.

Unfortunately subscriptions seem to be the only way to force people to pay for their tooling, contrary to other professionals.

I just surveyed the market for bug tracking systems, and ended up installing Redmine to get away from saas. I installed it with a template onto a cloud server in a couple of clicks.

It is not sexy, but it is robust... and exactly what I needed!

I think it’s the business response to piracy of desktop software that we saw a decade ago.

When I was in college, everybody seemed to have free music, windows, office, photoshop, etc. Subscriptions are probably the easiest way for companies to avoid it.

If you can offer a service for a single purchase, where other require a subscription, then that might be your way into the market.

It's what I do for my (quite simple) ux app that doesn't require online features at the moment.

Nah I kind of like it. It's a low upfront cost to demo something for awhile plus it encourages developer updates if you do stick with it. Too much software gets abandoned when it's just a one-time purchase.

As someone with a fixed amount of monthly disposable income, I could buy new software every month - or I could maintain a fixed number of subscriptions.

Subscriptions sort of take the first derivative of your buying power.

I won't buy software that isn't licensed like zw3d or bitwig.

You own the software. The purchase lets you get updates for some amount of time, but you can use what you bought and the updates you're entitled to forever.

Everything should be pay-as-you-go. We need infrastructure for low fee microtranscactions. Subscriptions exist because of the minimums on card payments. You can't charge a cent to read an article because the banks will be taking 20c + 2%.

Micropayments are my dream. I'm extremely negative on cryptocurrency but the lightning network is the closest technology I have seen to achieving it. It is just a nightmare to use. I looked into going through banks and it was just a nightmare to set up something that had the hint of being a money service business. I will feel like the future has arrived when I can pay 5 cents for a news article or pay per second on a YouTube video.

Micropayments would also unseat advertising (and tracking!) as the defacto payment mechanism on the web.

Quite the opposite. I no longer have buyer's remorse - worst that happens is that I lose a monthly fee. (I never pay for an annual or multi month discount until I have used something at least 6 months.)

Yes, but it's not going to change now that it's been proven viable.

The era of cheap/free things is over.

Here in India, a market that has NEVER seen delivery fees for any online services, there are now fat delivery fees tacked onto every ecommerce transaction.

And boy do the customers NOT like it

Look at what hackers and makers have been able to do by owning the software. You can also resell software you own.

Subscriptions empower the big businesses and owning it empowers the everyday average little guy.

I don't pay for any subscriptions, outside of video streaming services. I guess I'm fortunate that I've never wanted to do anything that didn't have a one-off purchase option.

At least you can cancel after a month if you don’t like it.

Otherwise I feel the pain, too many little easy peasy stuff is looking for big bucks.

Maybe there is going to be something like humblebundle for these subscriptions tok.

I can't keep track of it all, so some bills go unnoticed or cancel windows lapse, or every time I want to use it, I need to go somewhere else.

The lack of aggregation on subscriptions is a problem.

I really like the Jetbrains model. Buy a yearly subscription for the software, but you get a perpetual license for the major version of the software when your subscription is renewed.

These sorts of subscriptions are a user-hostile plague, and I refuse to use such software. If that means certain sorts of software are unavailable to me, well, so be it.

Bonus points for those cunts at 1Password who have updated the non-subscription version so it is nagware and pops up an upgrade window every time I add a new password.

Subscriptions are the best way to support a company without it having to produce constant hits or a never ending line of products that end up in the dump.

I'm 100% in favor of it.

I use software for most of the things you mentioned and I don't pay for any subscriptions. I have always found tools I enjoy that give me what I want for free.

Yes.

On the other hand, if Microsoft still sold Visual Studio, I might be stuck maintaining somebody else's website in VB.Net. So there is that.

After someone buys App2022 there's no reasonable way to sell them App2023 on most platforms, while both the platform and the customer expect updates.

I'm not tired of software subscriptions. I just avoid it 100%. I have principles.

For software I prefer open source. If I can't find what I need, I write it.

And if you're pissed off at this in relation to software, think that something way worse is coming: cars, house appliances, you name it.

Depends on the software really. I dont hate it tho. I'm not sure why I really care if I own the software if it's a commercial product.

Yes, but that’s how the market works. Turning everything into subscriptions gets you more money and makes migration even harder for customers.

I wish BAT was viable (did not try it myself but I like the concept).

edit: sorry, had a kneejerk reaction to the title, didn't read you mean SaaS.

I have no problem with it as long as I can cancel it without talking to a human at any time. E.g. Google play subscriptions.

No! I can try out a wide variety of products and services for a month or two and then cancel the ones I don’t like.

I was already tired of it a decade ago. It's ok when the service also offers a lifetime option though.

Tired if adtech, applications mining your personal data. Better if one would pay for the content instead.

Of course a lot of us are. It's probably one of the top 10 topics that gets moaned about on HN.

Life is a SaaS :) (Body subscription service for souls - if you believe in that theory)

Is this a hint that we will see a new Subscription Manager service launch soon on HN?

Please drink a verification can

Tired and relieved at the same time as I’ve started to ‘consume’ a whole lot less.

I am like you. I would prefer to buy once and own it instead of subscribing.

SaaS software? Yes.

News papers and media? No. They should have done it a long long time ago.

i've often thought that building a business that specializes in making it easy for SaaS companies to implement e2ee for complete customer data confidentiality and portability could be interesting...

I own nothing and am happy.

The subscription model is a business answer to a recurrent problem in tech: how do you make your revenue streams more reliable?

If you build the perfect product, and everybody buys the first version, then you'll have no revenue stream left after everybody who wanted to purchase it has purchased it.

And that's where the subscription model steps in.

It's also a way of slowing down innovation (and therefore risk) while remaining profitable. In a world where your revenue is based only on how many new copies of your product you sell, you are forced to innovate and keep selling, or your sales will drop and competition will eat your plate. If you already have a user base of subscribed users instead, it's much harder to attack your bottom line.

So yes, it's a great model from a business perspective, but it's an absolute nightmare from a user perspective.

I personally started paying between $300-400 a month just in subscriptions at its peak (about 3 years ago), and we're talking just of 8-9 services. I decided that it was not sustainable, and that I had to fight back.

Today I reward news outlets that let me pay for content "on the go" over those that put the "subscribe now" paywall in front of my eyes. I am very happy (and proud) to scrape and pirate those services without feeling an inch of guilt. If in order to read a single article I have to start a subscription that involves cumbersome interactions with your customer service just to terminate it, then you deserve piracy.

And, when it comes to other services, I started self-hosting everything. There's plenty of open-source alternatives to literally every paid service that you can run yourself. A Celeron minipc in my house with a few TB of storage connected cost me about $350. After 1-2 months running Nextcloud, Miniflux, Wallabag, Matrix, Ubooquity, wger, Bitwarden etc. on it, it already paid its own price back in terms of subscription savings.

Cars that disable features unless you pay to unlock are infuriating.

Not enough yet. Too much is still free or free-with-ads.

Stuff costs money to maintain

To me it's been obvious ever since the term SaaS was coined, that it would be worse for users. Not only is it more expensive, you don't get control over your data or how you use the product. The idea of cloud computing is similar - you have to pay more for someone else's computer. Granted, SaaS and cloud computing make sense if you're an organization, and can have advantages in terms of scale, reliability, etc.

But also, when business interests get involved in producing software in general, it often causes problems, i.e. ads, worse interop, performance considered unimportant, marketing emails, DRM, the software not working after the company is acquihired or fails. However, producing software takes time which costs money. So, commercially produced software can only exist at this intersection between there being a business model, and the software being useful. The condition is, the usefulness must be enough to be worth paying for, and the result is what we have now.

Imagine rewinding to 1990 with unlimited borrowed VC funds, hiring every person employed in tech full time until 2023, and building a massive suite of useful software for individuals, companies, govt, with a few different alternatives for each use case (like we have now), except they communicate via a series of well defined and public APIs. The entire software stack would be developed in this way, for maximum usability, performance, interoperability, features, etc. . After getting to the set of features we now have in late 2022, we pause the thought experiment, note the date, and split the cost between the users. Ignoring the various practical issues with this experiment, I bet it would be possible to get to where we are sooner and far cheaper per user.

Long story short, I don't think the goal of making money as a business is very well aligned with the goal of producing really good quality and long lasting software, even if the users are willing to pay, and this is a real problem. For personal use, I won't tolerate ads, DRM, etc., so I now self host.

It's a little disingenuous to expect regular security updates and not be willing to fund ongoing development. If you don't need regular security updates you need to get back to 2000s, your Delorian is stuck in the 1900s.

no, i never used such a product.

> Want a password manager? It's a SaaS now.

i have never had this problem because i implemented it myself in a few hours of work

Yes, but also no.

I think we have to look at why everything became a subscription based model before we even talk about how the model is being abused now. When I was a kid, everyone was a pirate. Napster and Limewire were king because. Buying movies and music was absurdly expensive and extremely inconvenient. Amazon didn't exist and if your local record store didn't have something good luck. If you were in a smaller town, good luck getting a movie if Wallmart or your local mom and pop didn't have it (if you even had a Wallmart). But then Hollywood Video and Blockbuster ended up eating into the video pirating because let's be real, we only are going to watch that movie once and then it sits in storage. Now you have racks and cabinets full of tapes and disks. (My brother even had his car window smashed in where someone stole his entire CD collection) It was bulky and inconvenient, so renting made things easier. Music was the same way. But services like Napster weren't just free, they were FAR more convenient. That's why Spotify has taken over and to this day won. Convenience. I think Benn Jordan (The Flashbulb) did a good video talking about the music side of this argument (including software), so I'll let his video say more[0].

There's a second problem that has led to our hardware crisis. Where hardware is cheaper than ever but if you don't attach a subscription model some manufacturer in China will sell the same thing 10x cheaper than you. See Boston Dynamic's robotic dogs. Reverse engineering hardware is pretty easy, see K-13 missile[1].

The problem today, is that now EVERYTHING has become a subscription based model and we're basically back to where we were before (notice the resurgence in piracy lately?). So I think the problem is that we learned a lesson but we didn't learn THE lesson, of what people are actually after. I don't think our modern video streaming services are much different than buying cable in the past.

So I think the trillion dollar question is: what is the new model that learns THE lesson? But that has a lot of sub-questions, including what it is actually that people want. Surely convenience and accessibility is one, but that's clearly not all. Though the solution to this may be impossible, because no one wants to centralize everything into a single player (and I'm not convinced that's a great idea either, despite the success of services like Pirate Bay, Napster, and PopcornTime).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7EHRpnJICQ

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-13_(missile)

You will own nothing, and you will be happy.

What are alternatives to subscription models?

> You'll own nothing and be happy.

Ask HN: anybody dislike [bad thing]?

VSCode extension? SaaS Gym app? SaaS

Archive.today is your friend...

Just use open source software.

yes, its all extra individual items you have to keep in your working memory

Yes.

It is interesting that capitalism is getting rid of the idea of private property. I guess it is only private property for capitalists themselves and not the serfs?

welcome to rentier economy.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Rent-seeking is the end stage of late neoliberal capitalism.