My most recent experience is Shutter Stock, a completely scam company that charges ridiculous amounts of money with no easy to unsubscribe.
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.shutterstock.com
- Microsoft has used its dominant position to charge for MS Office in perpetuity, breaking features and now trying to trick people to use One Drive more (renaming files from an Office App is only a "feature" that works for files saved remotely on One Drive)
- Apple's "services" income is mostly from various apps that use predatory practices to maximise how much they can extract from users. For example, it makes sense for me, with a broken App Store search, to pay $4 for each download when I can get users to pay $5/month to use my app.
- Many other examples, with the whole industry going towards SaaS and HaaS
What has the world come to, where technology has been appropriated and we are left paying rents every month and companies are increasingly becoming user-hostile and predatory and monopolistic!
What confuses me is seeing this kind of question on the same forum where people often gripe about not being paid the 6 digit salary they expect to produce the software we use. How do you achieve super cheap products made by people making super high pay? Money doesn’t just materialize out of thin air to make that work.
PS: my comment comes off as advocating for the subscription model. I personally hate it with a passion: I’d rather pay for upgrades/updates to code, and pay for resources metered by my usage. My comment should be interpreted as understanding where the model comes from, not necessarily liking it.
Blame the victim?
We din't get any impression, as we don't set the prices. The companies set those prices.
For example Adobe customers never got or set any impression that "software should be free/low price". They paid 100s to 1000s of dollars for each update or package respectively, and they still got the mandatory subscription (and were some of the first users to be hit with one).
>How do you achieve super cheap products made by people making super high pay? Money doesn’t just materialize out of thin air to make that work.
We don't want "super cheap products", we want reasonably priced products we own after we buy.
I am afraid the ‘we’ here isn’t nearly as large a demographic as you think it is. If it was, we wouldn’t see the mass of advertising supported products we see.
Mainstream consumers do want free / cheap products, despite the many caveats associated with them and the market has adjusted to give them that.
The other follow up is, as a consumer, how do you determine what is a reasonable price for something. You have no visibility into the COGS other than your own experiences which may or may not apply.
Similar to the OP, I am not advocating for high subscriptions with no value or horrible dark patterns around unsubscribing…
Now that the internet has removed any friction between business and customer, business is reaching its ideal state: one where the customer pays as long as the business has recurring expenses, where production never stops, and where productivity of labor approaches infinity.
I don't think it makes sense to call anyone making an informed decision to overpay for a service a victim. If you don't think the deal is reasonable, then don't accept the deal and use something else.
The exception being profiteering in the case of a shortage, but I don't think this is the case. There is no software shortage being taken advantage of.
Subscriptions may make more sense as B2B software where the needs change over time, businesses tend to like having a two-way conversation more and a well-defined bill at the end of each year isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a private consumer though, selling a subscription is a surefire way to make me say no -- I'm not doing it.
That has [effectively] never been the case
You don't "own" software once you buy it
You own a license to use it (with some level of constraints around how/when/where you use it)
Even if that license happens to let you use it as much as you want anywhere you want, that doesn't mean it will continue to work "forever"
So many people don't understand that digital products are nothing at all like physical ones (except that you pay for both) - you own a paper book (albeit with restrictions on what you can do with it (can't make infinite/excessive copies of parts or all of it, etc), you have a license to an ebook; you don't own a copy of Microsoft Office - you have purchased permission to use it on X-many devices running Y operating system(s)
Even if you "own" some copy of a public domain or freeware tool, it's still constrained by the system(s) it will run on
My scribble on the HN wall that you're reading right now involved thinking about something more than I thought it deserved.
I'd fully expect someone to provide this if there is a market for it.
To take IntelliJ as an example, I can't think of an improvement since 2018 that I really would pay for. Largely enabling that is why they moved to the subscription process because people like me would use IntelliJ 18 for five or so years then update for OS support or whatever. €100/yr is way more than I used to pay for intelliJ, €240/yr is way more than I used to pay for Photoshop, etc. because SaaS conversions generally involved splitting the old upfront price as if customers were on a 2 year upgrade cycle rather than 5.
As for security updates, these feel like general hygiene, e.g. if someone's selling a physical electronic product here they need to keep it from manufacturer defects for two years. If my headphones have a bug where they catch fire the manufacturer needs to eat the cost and recall and fix/replace/refund them. Even if it does wipe out their margin from the upfront €100 cost. Similarly if commercial software lets someone own my computer with log message, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect recent software to be fixed.
100€/year for tools I use professionally every day and that improve my business is a no-brainer to me. Also I really like the way the prices go down if you use it for more than a year.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
> Even if it does wipe out their margin from the upfront €100 cost.
That assumes what the initial price wasn't at least x20, though.
> splitting the old upfront price as if customers were on a 2 year upgrade cycle rather than 5.
It is also about perceived cost and maintenance costs: you can charge $10/y but ~$3 from this sum would go to fees and taxes, and you still need a profit margin and sustainability margin for the future growth (and recession) and to be able to give out refunds.
You can keep running old version(s) as long as you want - but when a major rev releases, they have an upgrade option
The updates aren't "indefinite" - but they're pretty long-lasting
Not to mention the anti competitive nature of these two parties. They can just bundle an additional app in their subscription at not additional cost, and this way drive a competitor out of business.
Forced updates that remove or disable features people use.
Adobe created and added XD (Sketch competitor) and put it into its CC.
Sketch's still doing great but I honestly don't know how long it will be the case as XD becomes more mature.
When and how did that happen? SAAS has been the wet dream of the big software houses for a long time, it was just not really acceptable for people for quite a while.
It's also sounds like this is about poor software developers making a living, but the reality is that software developers are amongst the highest paid professions and software companies are ruling the world and typically have the highest profits. In fact I would argue this really started to take over when investors realised that they could get insane ROI from very little investments for software companies and started to expect these kind of returns.
The other thing that is driving this push is that the FANGS want to commoditize everything except for "owning" large amount of data, because that's their value add and everything else is just a cost centre for them.
I of course understand your point that software developers need to pay rent, but i'm interested in exploring other possibilities, such as non-profits gathering donations to pay for development/UX (like framasoft does).
Now, the same problem applies to all kinds of workers, from bakers to carpenters. If we take a look at the wider picture, why would anyone have to pay for rent and food? Wouldn't we all be better off if we did what we loved and shared unappreciated tasks more equally so that money doesn't get involved?
It seems like we have a "these people are not getting paid enough to pay for basic survival while doing their critical job" discussion every other week.
This sounds true, but isn't. Some software grow new features and should sell new versions to users who want those features. But many applications continue to be rented while they reached peak features a long time ago.
Office 97 was fine. Office 2003 was more than fine. You buy it once, you should not need to buy it again, or "rent" it, for no benefit at all. Same for Windows NT / 7. Every Windows version since 7 is worse than the previous one!
Developers need to be paid only if they build something users want. Many times, the opposite seems to be the case: they build things users would really prefer not to have, yet are difficult to avoid.
But that's still work! So your only chance is to abandon the software and reap the insults coming from clients who upgraded to a new Windows installation and can no longer run your software.
If there was some realistic ways to bundle software in a fashion that it will continue to run forever even if environment changes, then sure–but your software better not be networked. (This is also where docker and the likes come into play).
Before the App Store, it wasn’t easy to update software, so it was straightforward to lock updates behind paid upgrades.
By economy of scale. If you have 50,000 paying users, $10 each, that should cover either 5 man-years of average software development, or 2 man-years of one senior/principal level developer.
Most products in question have users in the millions, paying 10 to 100 times as much. Do the math.
This didn't happen by accident. Apple still refuses to add a paid version upgrades feature to the App Store. And by providing software like Numbers/Pages at a loss (for free) they normalized a zero or near zero cost of software in their ecosystem. At this point I'm pretty sure this is an intentional strategy of "Commoditizing their Complement"[1] on Apple's part.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
I also agree with you about Apples’s position re upgrades, which - until now - I found quite baffling. I guess that the subscription model is intended by Apple to create both a lower barrier to entry (cheaper in the short term) which reduces the entry cost for complements, and long term recurring revenue which potentially creates a lock-in effect - quitting the ecosystem means losing access to the investment in apps on the platform. It’s win-win from Apple’s perspective.
On the other hand I have always argued that when you write an app for iOS, you’re creating an accessory for their devices, and so you do so on Apple’s terms. (That’s fine IMO, as long as you understand that this is what you’re doing).
The bad part about these models is that they reflect the power of stakeholders in a company, not so much the worker/programmers. It reflects a mode of production keen on generating capital, not the interests of the workers on getting their salary, whatever many figures it may have.
The finger must be pointed at stakeholders doing what they do best; finding ways to generate capital. There is no animosity generated between work done and one paying for it at a market value, but there is between work and capital generation.
The marginal cost of another sale approaches zero. So if you make a popular enough product, you can sell many units rather than relying on rent seeking from your existing user base by forcing them into a SaaS subscription. Yes, the onus is now on the company to make good products that people want, and to continue to innovate such that people want to pay for the next upgrade. It’s easier to rent seek.
There is one case I can think of where this makes sense from both the provider and consumer side: niche software that has a high development cost and a small market. In this case, the one-time acquisition cost might be too high for many customers, so moving to a subscription model allows them to use something they couldn't otherwise afford.
Of course, that's not to say that updates shouldn't be expected.
Except when money does materialize out of thin air with fractional reserve banking. That's not for us, though. Obviously, we all know that burnin'-money for us tech folks grows on VC trees these days.
> now trying to trick people to use One Drive more
A lot of software are now deliberately blurring the line between local storage and cloud storage, not just Office. When I choose to save a file, I expect to save it locally to my hard disk, in a file that I can find and manipulate, and keep secure. More and more, software is nudging users to save their files in “the cloud.” Non-techie users don’t understand the implication of this: they are uploading their private data to the Internet!
Whenever I read an article about a creeper hacking so-and-so’s cloud storage to download their nude images, I wonder if the victim had any idea they were inadvertently posting their private files to the Internet.
iCloud is one of the worst offenders because it is so seamless and invisible. Apple urges iCloud usage constantly, and once you turn it on, the mechanism to de-iCloud yourself is buried in settings.
Software more and more are hiding the fact that they are either saving your files on the Internet or mirroring copies on the Internet, and this is a terrible trend for user privacy and keeping control of their data.
Is that the expectation of younger generations? Do they want their only copy of a file on something that can fall in the toilet? Is the home network router and device OS more secure and more monitored than the cloud hosted firewalls?
I know many people are annoyed by the dialogues that popup these days where they ask your something they want ("do you allow xyz?") and the only two choices you have is "yes" and "not now" and they proceed to ask you again and again.
Same with with cookie dialogues. The vast majority of cookie dialogues employ dark patterns that make you give up the maximum amount of privacy if you click the most visually enticing option.
I use cloud sync only for my contact list now where practicalities override privacy concern. Just recently, after years of usage (with lots of problems, merging various devices the wrong way, ending up in duplications, ghost contacts, inflated list with garbage) I turned off the sync on a computer getting retired with offering the option 'keep contact list locally' but it did not work. Selecting this option still erased ALL contacts from my local computer. Which actually was an intended way eventually, so no harm is done this specific time, but shown how unreliable and dangerous is using iCloud on top of the privacy concerns. I will remain using it for contacts - with the aforementioned problems - but will need extra care on making changes to it.
It is 'ironic' when there is an intended conveninece functionality that eventually makes your life more complex and miserable than before, without that.
More broadly files in the traditional sense (OS desktop metaphor) are irrelevant in a SaaS context, even if some UX show "files" (like Google Doc) for convenience or familiarity it's not really files but entries in a database.
Personally (and as a huge fan of classic MacOS Spatial Finder) it pains me, but I'm not sure if I'm clinging to nostalgia or if we are heading the wrong way. Maybe we could have a middle ground where files don't exist anymore but it's very clear for the user where data is stored.
Enterprise printers still have traditional driver suites that you can download from HP's website. But if you don't know that, you end up with HP Smart and their document cloud.
In last 30 days, I transferred over 280 GB of translation data from my service to end-users around the word. Should I tell DeepL, Google and AWS that they should offer me their services for free or what?
EDIT:
I apologize if this sounds too passive-aggressive, but I'm tired of hearing that subscriptions are bad. Thanks to subscription model, we can have many smaller service providers who simply have fun from working on something (like me). If you think that giving someone $5/mo for a cool app is too much, then okay. You don't have to do it, no deal. ¯\_(ツ)\_/¯
PS Great example of solo-developer is the InkDrop creator. He is working on this note-taking app since ~2016. https://www.inkdrop.app
To my mind, paying for an ongoing service (e.g. translation, or video streaming, or Strava, or whatever) is a reasonable use case for a subscription – if that’s something that suits your end user. (it could also be paid for by individual small payments – or tokens – as suggested elsewhere.)
I think the frustration is predominately in companies shifting payment for a piece of software from a single payment to a subscription, which over the previous typical lifespan of a single software purchase then costs significantly more. Sure, they bolt on superfluous ‘cloud solutions’, but fundamentally it just feels like an MBA somewhere figured out that they can make more money with a repeating subscription than a single one-off payment – and now they’ve all jumped into it.
Of course, it also has the benefit of protecting better against piracy – though I suspect this isn’t the primary driver for the change.
Use tokens instead of subscriptions.
Even if I end up paying the same on average this feels a whole lot better.
There are just too many services out there that wants me to subscribe, and everytime it feels like they are trying to fleece me.
I am old enough to understand that not everything can be free (even if many of my most used tools are), but in way to many cases the thinking seems to be to get me to try a subscription and hope that I forget it.
(I've never ever had anyone pop a notification to tell me that I haven't used my subscription lately, maybe I'd like to puse it? If that was the norm I'd maybe be less annoyed at subscriptions.)
Almost every time I’ve seen someone try that pricing model customers end up hating it and want a flat fee subscription.
I do think making it easy to pause and restart subscriptions is an underused model but would also bet lots of price smart SaaS companies have looked at that.
(Full disclosure: I know the guy that makes that service, but am not involved with that project)
Consider jetbrains: you have a subscription, true, but once you cancel you can still download and use whatever was the latest version released during your paid period. Uou get a perpetual license for it. Seems fair if you accept the fact your IDE no longer “moves fast” along with the ecosystem that seems to have a cult of perpetual churn. Some can afford it, some cannot, but the choice is there.
Consider also the braindead app store model where they expect that you pay $8.99 once for a small app, but all the updates are free after that. How do you fund the continued development and bugfixes? I guess that’s why there are subscriptions to text editors even if they don’t require another account or a cloud.
Or you can create what essentially is the same app under another name, in which case it’s difficult or impossible to have upgrade pricing. And discoverability sucks too.
Gotta survive somehow, or else we cannot have nice things.
I think it's actually the version that you started your paid period with, so usually a slightly older version. I think this is fair though.
Edit: It depends. See: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
If you use a tool for one month, you pay a small amount, if you use it every month for years you pay more. In the old world, if you wanted to use purchase-once software just once, then you had to pay far more upfront.
It aligns incentives too: developers are strongly incentivized to keep existing users happy, rather than ignoring them and constantly chasing the next new sale.
I do think there's a financial/UX problem with subscriptions though, and a lot of shady players trying to abuse that. Really, imo banks need to provide subscription management services as a standard feature. They already know what continual billing is currently linked to your card - they should let you block renewing charges by vendor from your account directly. That'd give you complete control and visibility into all your subscriptions in one place, whether the vendor likes it or not.
- The same mechanism to subscribe must also be available to unsubscribe
- Automatic billing is not assumed and must be opt-in, perhaps renewed occasionally
- If a user does not use your service for the billing period you cannot charge them for itI mean, the best case I can think of is Quantrix. It's an innovative spreadsheet progrem that tries to bring back the standards of Lotus Improv. I don't know of any equivalent in OSS. It used to have a perpetual license with small upgrades and while it was quite expensive, it means it could be bought to learn and experiment and if you needed to convince your boss to try it it's not that much of a layout.
Then the company that makes it was bought by a financial services company who re-targeted at that market. They do not list the pricing on their site any more. Want to know what it is? $2000 a year, immediate and total loss on lapse. So basically individuals can't access it anymore, nobody can learn it, and there's very little chance of any company that doesn't already know it or doesn't have money to burn taking it up. Which is a kick in the teeth, because I think many people agree that the standard spreadsheet is a crock, and what was showing signs of being interesting or innovative in that area is now a locked-down rich club. I guess you could write an OSS version if you were up for being sued over spurious software patents by a company whose backers can just manufacture money at will. Yea.
Or how about TheBrain? Their model had the potential for a ton of innovation based on evolving semantic technologies. What was their business model instead? Patent the Plex model to lock out competitors, push everyone's Brains into the cloud, go subscription, and then just sit. The upgrades have become smaller and smaller since the subscription came in.
A couple of months ago I blocked allcky cards via App (so that only when you unblock it payments go through).
At the end of the month all my subscription services whined that they couldn't charge me they sent an email saying that my subscription was at risk.
Tidal, YouTube, Google Storage, AWS, among others.
AWS and Google Drive did the right thing: it provided me a page where I could manually run the payment (after temporarily unlocking the card).
YT and Tidal were terrible: after contacting their support (For YT I had to go to twitter... what a joke), they told me they had no way for me to pay manually. The only way was to wait for their automatic billing.
Tidal was the worst: After two days they cancelled my plan (OK) and THEN I was able to repurchase the plan to ge charged there... and immediately after I paid , THEY BLOCKED MY IP!!
Automated billing should be prohibited. Or at least companies should be forced to provide manual renewal option.
Alternately it incentivizes vendor lock-in. If you can't keep users happy, why not keep their data hostage instead?
And yes, it is mostly the cost of convenience. For example, I manage my own server not because it's cheaper (which it is), but because I don't need to pay extra $50 a month to get a "managed" experience.
Same goes for very mundane tasks like image compression. You can pay some company to do it on your behalf, or you can go to GitHub and grab a fully functional library to compress 1,000 photos in an instant.
If you have had 1,000s of bloggers write about your free product, advertising it on your behalf for years. Why not take that success and squeeze the living soul out of it?
I mean, it's not like people are going to go back to their reviews or old blog posts to correct something. All the "juice" is still being passed to you, and search engines like Google are none the wiser.
That being said I believe the SaaS loophole plays a big part in this, a lot of code that is out there today would have to be re-written to be sold in a traditional model and still be compliant with copyleft software licenses and usually this is not mentioned in these discussions.
[1] https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/the-saas-...
[2] https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11467/can-i-u...
I understand that there is no self-hosted alternative for certain SaaS services but I think that will change as more and more people choose to be in control of their data.
This is a good place to start https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted
The two most striking things are 1) how good the free software is. 2) how much less time i spend avoiding gotchas and dark patterns.
At this point it seems like the capital markets have long past moved from symbiosis with the productive economy into parasitism and are now accelerating their killing of the host.
When you have a $29 a year subscription for a one off use utility app they can fuck off.
When you have a $29 a month subscription for storage, music, TV, fitness, games that spans 6 people I’m fine.
What has changed is extortion for some products which have dubious or little value and really difficult to exit contracts.
The last point is incidentally why I want apple to manage my in app purchases entirely, because you are not submitted to the cancellation will and drama of really horrible organisations with bad policies.
Regarding free software I am probably mostly done with it now because I can’t even pay people to fix issues as a rule nor can I get people to accept fixes I’ve done for free. Usually met with silence on both.
A point on the apple ecosystem is you can share purchases in your family. I paid £7 for a perpetual use of GoodNotes which is used by three people. That’s amazing value.
The real world today is increasingly run by subscription humans, or “employees.” They are lazy, business-hostile, and rent extracting.
My most recent experience is John and Amy and Sam, completely do-nothing, scam people who command ridiculous amounts of salary with no easy way to fire them or unsubscribe.
What has the world come to, where labor has been appropriated and we are left paying rents every month to these business-hostile humans!
Why can we not force them to create software for us, for free?
/s
One-time fees for software were common less than a decade ago. How did those companies manage to make payroll each month?
;)
Imagine if every company took 5-10% of their IT budget to sponsor alternatives to the products they need, even if they were not using it. Take every marketing agency that subscribes to Adobe Suite, and get them to sponsor Gimp/Krita/Inkscape/etc. Every startup using Google Apps/Office365/Slack/Dropbox, get them to donate just $5/employee/month to Free and Open alternatives.
It would be a win-win. Best case scenario, the OSS alternative becomes a viable substitute. Worst case, SaaS providers will have to continously push prices down and/or innovate.
You can still buy a definitive, noncloud, without subscription of MS Office, and they still release it (there is a 2021 edition).
For example, I used to buy a non-cloud/non-subscription license through the Home Use Program. It used to be relatively cheap.
Now that option is not available, they only sell a slightly discounted cloud/subscription ($60/year vs $99/year).
It's been this way for at least a few years and I think actually near half a dozen.
- Cronyism. The only way to get a big B2B customer for you SaaS product is if you are friends with an executive at a big tech corporation. Otherwise your chances are nil - No matter how good your product is.
- Regulatory capture. Big corporations have an advantage because they can use their connections to politicians to change the regulatory environment in their favor.
- Monetary capture. The monetary system reinforces the dominance of big corporations because they and their customers (from which their revenue is derived) have access to easy money from huge government contracts and banks (since they can borrow at lower interest rates than others).
- Limited liability. Corporations are legal constructs which are not liable for crimes (especially negligence) in the same was as people are. Corporations don't go to jail for example; they can always replace executives who have been committing crimes on their behalf, pay a small fine and keep going as if nothing happened. This creates an incentive for executives to commit crimes on behalf of corporate shareholders and then shareholders have an incentive to use their aggregate political connections to shield executives as much as possible from personal liability... They will throw them under the bus in extreme cases but then repeat and keep trying to normalize misconduct.
So with vendor lock-in, there are 5 factors which rig the markets - Each one is very powerful on its own but apparently still insufficient to keep the economy running as it is...
I bought MS Office (non-subscription) and honestly Google Docs/Sheets (free tier) works for most of my needs.
While Apple wants to push subscription apps, you don't need to subscribe to them. I don't. If the value is there, sure subscribe to them.
Apple is pretty in your face with selling their services. I get nagware iCloud storage limit subscription notifications that I can't dismiss. They are pushing for Arcade, TV+, Music, etc. sign -ups in their OS settings. I haven't paid for them and don't intend to.
Just because these paid subscriptions exist does not mean they are entitled to your money every month.
So to answer the question of how we came here: The same way anything in the commons sphere rots and dies. Not enough people care enough about it. They're OK giving away control one way or another and companies are more than happy to sell it as a service. What user gets in return is diminishing but once the process starts it's kind of runaway I'm afraid.
The root issue is that big tech has too much power. It is thrusting a model onto the public that primarily benefits itself.
I'll bet some of the people here on HN who argue for the subscription model work at smaller businesses, not for big tech. That seems crazy to me: customers can't afford to experiment when it comes to subscriptions. A customer who shells out for 'essential' subscriptions (ie: Netflix, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc) won't have money left to subscribe to your Shopping List app.
If a 'conversation' is needed, its aim should be how to defang (pun intended) big tech. A conversation about 'subscription software' alone is pointless unless you have the ear of Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, etc.
In my case, I pay subscriptions for things like Strava or Duolingo – software that realistically needs to have a service component and where I want the extra features. I don't really mind this model – the service component is key to their operation and there are offline-only alternatives available. Paying a regular fee is reasonable for software that has an ongoing cost for the seller.
Similarly, there are a bunch of mostly-offline apps that I'm happy to pay a one-off fee for – things like Sublime Text, Dash or BetterTouchTool in my case. Games too, for the most part. I like the model that offers maybe a limited number of future updates free-of-charge, after which another license or an upgrade is needed.
I think the frustration you feel is for software that tries to straddle these categories unnecessarily. Like 1Password – a totally fine software package that worked great for me offline, but which I would now need to subscribe to if I want to continue using it, despite having zero interest in connected features.
Adobe is the worst at this though – I have literally negative interest in any of the "cloud connectivity" features or whatever. They actively make the product worse for me, but they will refuse to take my money in exchange for a one-off license to use software they sell. So now I have the stupid-ass spyware running on my machine in order to bombard me with shitty ads for other things they sell. I hate it.
There is little more annoying that wanting to buy something—and I'm not talking about cheaping out on it either—and having the seller actively refuse to sell it to you. And I think that's where the feeling of frustration comes from – the constant feeling of something trying to trick and manipulate you into becoming a more profitable customer for them by making your experience worse.
However, I strongly believe selling software with a one-time fee was the problem in the first place. An ongoing service requires ongoing efforts to keep it stable, secure and modern. Just like you pay for housing on a monthly, recurring basis. It's the same with software.
btw: the oldest subscription models are insurances. No one is complaining about them.
It's like people complaining about 1000+ dollar phones, you don't need to buy that, and the company isn't going to listen to complaints.
Most companies listen to the market only.
If nothing bad happens or if whatever happens is not covered, the insurance company gets to keep the money. It's a risk management business. It's quite different from a SaaS, imho.
Now with games becoming digital, if you break their 'terms of service' they can lock and ban your account; taking your 'digital' games away or even locking the console. (Unless you paid for the physical version.)
Arguably this goes for all proprietary software. You're allowed to use software that you paid a license for, but you were never allowed to make and distribute copies of it.
For most practical purposes, licensed software that runs on your computer feels like ownership. After all, we're not allowed to make and distribute copies of published books but we're pretty comfortable saying that we own a book that we've bought. But those copyright limitations are still there. You can own a physical copy of the book, but there are some things you're not allowed to do with it.
Owning a subscription to online software as a service points to the limitations of what we mean by ownership.
- Has a big enough moat that its immune to competition - in which case you get rent seeking behaviour; or
- It's vulnerable and could disappear / become economically unviable so you wouldn't want to have your business rely on it.
So you essentially have to choose between two unpalatable choices.
One significant advantage of SaaS over traditional download-and-run-and-pay-for-updates apps is the fact that everyone is always on the same version. In a large organisation, and across organisational boundaries, working around people using different versions of things is an incredibly inefficient use of time.
Office 365 is worth the money for that reason alone.
I hate recurring billing as well, and it works very poorly for occasionally used software, but for software that I use every week, I’m indifferent to whether it’s billed lumpy or smooth; the total price vs total value is what matters.
1. It's easier to charge for, holding the software hostage in a way. Also gives a nice excuse "Look! Need to pay for server costs!".
2. Greater choice in programming language and libraries. If you want to do ML of any kind for example, that's most convenient using Python + libraries. Moving inference client side is still a hassle.
3. No out of sync client versions
4. Faster release cycle and iteration speed
5. If you have a need to store lots heavy user data like images, videos etc, you need to charge anyway, so might as well get the benefits of 2, 3 and 4.
6. If you need interaction between users, which many apps need today, you probably need centralized severs anyway.
From a technical standpoint, SaaS has forced so many companies to invest more time and energy into their software engineering practices. Since being able to respond to customers with new features _fast_ is a big part of what makes SaaS so lucrative, any company choosing to go this route had to start thinking about how to write, test, and ship software in days or weeks instead of months or years. SaaS has also accelerated the uptake of distributed systems and platforms to support them, like Docker containers and Kubernetes, since being able to have development teams own smaller domains in toto instead of a huge monolith that requires an entire company to manage is huge in shipping software fast. Reliability Engineering is also huge now thanks to SaaS. It's one thing to host your own instance of a thing; it's another ballgame to host many instances of a thing for other people!
All of this has made software engineers and sysadmins who are SWE-adjacent significantly more valuable in the market (and we were already valuable before!)
From a financials standpoint, the subscription model makes it possible for more active users to subsidize the cost of less-frequent users, much like purchasing airfare tickets. The subscription model is why I can pay $8/month to get a best-in-class password manager stored in infinitely-large storage (to me) with an amazing API and CLI (1Password!) instead of having to use `pass` or something hand-rolled to avoid paying $300 or whatever a perpetual license would cost. Best of all, since I'm not stuck with a contract, I can (theoretically) switch to Dashlane, iCloud Keychain, or whatever tomorrow if I don't like it.
The alternative to SaaS was pirating and waiting until the next golden release a year later for cool features. That world sucked IMO.
Remember any recent big UI redesign in an app you use? Were you unhappy with the previous UI? Is the new design a big improvement compared to the previous?
Most likely not. But many hours have been spent on meetings, designs and implementation to ship a new UI to all end users.
I think if you have a lot of employees you need to find work for them. Growth, new features and redesigns are good for everyones career. No one except for already happy customers benefit from keeping the status quo. But pretty much everyone involved in the company and _maybe_ most customers will be happy when the software changes.
No one wants to declare software as 'done' or at the very least 'feature complete'.
For example for Office365 Home you get 5 licenses including 1TB of OneDrive all for $99/year.
If I had to pay for just one Office Suite License(word, ppt, excel) would be around $200(low end). If I needed 5 that would be $1000. Now divide that $1000 over how many years you would probably use before wanting upgrade which for me would be 3-5. At 5 years it is average $200/year for lesser product because it doesn’t even include the value of 1TB OneDrive.
Thus 99$/year is cheaper in my mind and I am happy to pay them instead of looking for for some pirated version. It just works and I get newest version whenever it is released.
For a business however Office 365 w/Outlook makes sense because maintaining your own email server is way too much hassle these days.
Some services will block & close your account, but some will continue to accumulate the debt to a point where it's high enough to sell to debt collectors.
I'd be more accepting of SaaS if I could regain at least some of that control, which is only available in non-SaaS software.
So far the list:
1. Fantastical
2. Unread
3. Notability
4. 1password
5. Infuse
6. 1blocker
7. PocketCast
8. Ulysses
I'm well aware that some grandfathered their previous paid licenses after a lot of noise (Notability). But I don't care, this subscription hysteria is actually having the unintended effect of saving me a lot of money on apps that are one time purchase. All I can think is that it's a matter of time before they all become a subscription service, so I don't even bother anymore buying new apps.
On that note... if you don't want to use your free Pro PocketCasts subscription going forward, I would be more than happy to pay you $5 for it.
1)Users who would love to have new stuff quickly have to wait, often for years until new version is ready
2)You unload everything in one go with the release and that means tons of bug reports/feature requests/urgent work at this time. This is stressful and counterproductive.
Subscription solves those problems and aligns incentives so developers ship new stuff as soon as it's ready which is better for everyone. I agree it's very nice to have a standalone one time payment option but that has to come without free upgrades (or only for limited period) or otherwise it doesn't make business sense.
There is not an easy way to implement buy your software and get limited subscription for upgrades model as you need to solve the problem of "what if they don't prolong the subscription for a few months but then want back on it". What Jet Brains has done wouldn't fly in consumer market. It's just not an easy problem to solve.
My own experience is that a few years ago people were thankful we don't offer subscription but these days more ask for it as they don't want to front the bigger cost and would be happy to get updates faster. As a consumer I want subscription for everything that may get new useful features.
Let's take a "traditional" sales model: you spend T amount of time (and money) to get a customer. They pay you M money. Once. You want to sell them something else? Gotta go through the whole song-and-dance circus all over again.
Now look at a subscription: you spend T amount of time (and money) to get a customer. They pay you S subscription fee (way lower than the M in the previous example (per unit time)), but includes the fact that they're already paying a [small] amount to have your thing. To keep* them, all you have to do is NOT SCREW UP. And if they do want to cancel, you can offer them a time-sensitive/-dependent/-limited "discount"; if they stay, you - basically - didn't lose anything (except a couple bucks for a few months); if they leave, then they're gone, and get no more updates, support, etc for whatever they were paying for.
It's why magazines have a newsstand price of, say, $7.99 an issue, but you can subscribe for a 12-issue yearly subscription for $12. The major cost of acquiring a customer is up-front. Once you have them, it's "cheap" to keep them.
While many of us here would prefer the idea of owning and licensing software in perpetuity, the reality is that most users don't care and are typically more price sensitive to the point that they will prefer to pay a small amount monthly than pay a large lump sum once. The monthly pricing mechanism also provides a safety net, as you can stop paying at any time if a product no longer provides utility or if you straight up can't afford it.
At the other end of the spectrum, SaaS works very well for business. Larger companies always paid recurring fees to software vendors anyway - typically as support and maintenance, because they need SLAs and commitments that ensure continuity of being able to use the software in a reliable manner. In the past, these were usually a recurring add-on that was paired up with a major up-front cost. Today, it's reversed where you now might pay a small once-off cost for implementation or delivery, but the bulk of the pricing is weaved into the recurring subscription cost. This works better for most businesses.
Also, a much higher percentage of software makers these days are doing so on the back of venture funding. The north star metric for most venture-backed companies is annual recurring revenue, so a subscription model is almost the default when it comes to a venture-backed startup. When a company is focused on rapid and high scale growth, having to start every year at zero makes it significantly more difficult to succeed.
As a developer I sell subscriptions.
As a business, it's repeatable income which makes it easy to calculate how much you'll roughly make. I'm also much more inclined to purchase a subscription as a business: you have more money and generally you're buying something trying to save you time or making your more money.
I agree that offline software sold as a subscription is ridiculous; I'd much rather purchase a software and then buy updates if I want to.
That's the reason I do online SaaS: I don't know how I could sell an offline app as a subscription with a straight face.
I think the problem is that companies started understanding how important it is to have repeatable source of income, the cornerstone of your business and they tried to make everything a subscription.
Wait till cars also become like this. Features of infotainment enabled if you pay subscription. Greed, greed everywhere ...
https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-...
It's not just something software vendors push, it's what many of their clients actually want.
Now, as a private user the situation may or may not be completely different. But prefering a monthly license over a fixex license is not a dark pattern as such.
ARR (annually recurring revenue) or - yeah, monthly licensing - is also something the stock market incentivizes. Generally stocks have gone up considerably for companies that have moved to subscription based revenue models. For publicly listed companies this is a fairly strong signal as well.
I need the Adobe Suite, MS Office, and a couple of developer tools, as a day-to-day requirement to do my work. Not an issue. I was already paying to maintain them, usually on a yearly basis.
I used to pay about $900/year for a subset of the CS Suite (I don't remember what it was called, but had Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and maybe Dreamweaver or InDesign -neither of which I used).
The full CS Suite costs me about $600/yr, and gives me access to every single one of the apps. I don't use InDesign, but every now and then, someone sends me an ID file, and I can download it, open the file, then delete it.
Users then started asking extra features and down voted my app when I said I didn't want to implement them.
When the app lost its popularity and was making barely no money, I realized that I was working for free. My user base paid for a product having a well defined set of features and kept asking for more, for free.
Moreover, think about a service that needs to rely on an online backend, for instance to synchronize app data between devices, how are you supposed to do that with a single payment business model?
How would the world of cars have looked if it had a primarily subscription model (which will probably come in this area as well)?
So long story short, I find subscription model bad because it drives down innovation.
Some software require APIs that cost money to run. Like collaboration features or some number crunching things.
Most software must be updated continuously, because that is the expectation of some users, some platform owners (App Store, the OS, …).
In reality, most software has an expiration date and you can calculate the yearly fee from the expected time till EOL.
Now, the subscription fee can be higher than a one time fee, or not. Depending on your usage.
I've heard of people keeping a version of XP running to run DAW software, never connecting it to the Internet, because newer versions of Windows have higher audio latency. Old games also don't expire--I'm sure some people still have their DOS machines to play old games, just like people keep their old game consoles.
Also some software is more or less "done". What more does Word need in it, for example?
While there are cases of obvious abuse of the subscription model, in general, the subscription model for complex software is here to stay. Simple, one-off applications that don't require support or further development may not need subscriptions though.
1. The SaaS price is significantly cheaper per month and allows for unsubscribing. I view this like a paid short term trial. I actually appreciate this option versus a high up front cost; or
2. When there is ongoing, regular feature or service improvement.
Microsoft and Adobe are two good examples where this is not the case, pushing customers who previously paid a one time fee to pay monthly charges with little additional value being provided.
At least, that's how I perceive it.
Of course, my first sentence is a lie, because it only works if everyone would just do what I do, and at no time in the history of humanity has everyone just, so I have no solution.
This is the issue. While the subscription model may be the right choice forward it may also be the catalyst of a collapse (like the dotcom bust) if the users get bullied enough.
Eventually, the market saturated, and his competitors shifted to fashion based sales, with model years, etc. Ford resisted, but eventually gave in.
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In programming, the cost of production is effectively zero. There are no disks, boxes, and manuals to produce and ship any more. The costs are in support, and bug fixes (like recalls in cars).
Nobody expects to get next year's model car for free. But if a defect is found that can hurt people or damage the car in a premature manner, the manufacturer is required to recall and repair the defect.
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It seems reasonable for people to want to buy and own their copy of software. Because of the complexity of software, there might be a need for support. It is up to the manufacturer of the software to specify, up front, what support they include in the purchase price, and for how long.
It seems reasonable to want any manufacturing defects to be corrected for no additional cost to the customer.
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It does NOT seem reasonable for a manufacturer to be able to force the rental of a product instead of selling it. IBM was forced out of the exclusively rental business of its hardware for good reasons.
If someone wants to offer their software as a rental, to run on the customer's premises, that's fine, as long as purchase is also an option at a reasonable price.
If software manufacturers don't want to offer a reasonable price purchase, they should be forced out of the rental business by government fiat.
To be blunt, you seem like you're ranting and your conjecture is not wrong but just, opinionated.
Are you old enough to have had a chance to use your eyes and look and see what's happened to computer games over the past twenty years? Things went from shareware and honest games to essentially NFT or addiction scams. There are good indie games here and there, but it's rare.
What's happened to games is happening to most other parts of software. There are exceptions of course, but they're rare at scale. If you don't want to pay for exploitative software don't use it. Find an open source alternative or an honest software broker. I know it sucks because what used to be a fair deal has turned sour, but accept that not only has the relationship has changed, but the landscape has too. The psychopaths read "data is the new oil"[1] and did an "orly?" and now they're here addicting grandmothers into squashing candy.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNDBo3spnwg
[1] https://twitter.com/theeconomist/status/860135249552003073
Years ago, if you wanted to use Adobe Photoshop, you had to pay thousands of dollars for a license. Now you can pay for a subscription for the period of time you use the software.
It is easy to justify the subscription cost if you are making money using Photoshop.
It's a model which lets you sustainably sell software and keep working on it, delivering updates, etc.
The pay per update model forces the creator to release big feature updates, even if the features are just bloat, as bug fix releases and stability work will usually sell much worse. That's mostly fixed by the subscription model.
I don't see how these are user hostile.
Yeah, subscriptions that are hard to cancel are bad. But that's just a scam, not an inherent problem with subscriptions. I can go and cancel any subscription I have in a few clicks - with the best experience being in the Apple App Store, where I have a single place to manage all subscriptions paid through the App Store.
They lock you in to continuing to pay even when you no longer derive value.
Say you stopped using Photoshop years ago but suddenly need to export one of your old documents. You’re now forced to pay rent to Adobe for at least one month to access one of your own files. And Adobe won’t make it easy to unsubscribe again, which adds to the hassle.
> The pay per update model forces the creator to release big feature updates, even if the features are just bloat, as bug fix releases and stability work will usually sell much worse. That's mostly fixed by the subscription model.
Perpetual fallback licenses[1] solve that issue without forcing users to keep paying rent.
[1]: https://github.com/vitorgalvao/perpetual-fallback-licenses
Yes, if a software uses a proprietary file format and you lose access to that software, then you can't open the files anymore. That sounds pretty straightforward to me. Though in the case of Photoshop files it doesn't really apply, as a lot of other software accepts their file format.
> Perpetual fallback licenses[1] solve that issue without forcing users to keep paying rent.
That's basically what I meant with paid updates. I know the model, I use Jetbrains software. I don't think the model would work as universally as subscriptions. I expect most people wouldn't keep paying if the maintainers are only doing stability and bug fixing work, as long as these specific issues don't affect them, which in turn would raise the price of a single fallback license.
Economically, if you're receiving ongoing value from software, it is not illogical that you'd pay ongoing cost for that software. We don't do this with most physical goods because it's logistically difficult to accomplish. But that doesn't mean it's an inherent evil. I really don't see the problem here.
This is the expected outcome of Capitalism and was only a matter of time until it happened. If you let for-profit companies run wild, power will consolidate, allowing them to enact whatever policy has the best ROI at the cost of being user-friendly. Hoping for such an individualistic system that rewards greed to be nice is, to put it gently, naive.
The only way to ensure that users are the priority of a software is when users collectively have the power to make decisions. This can either happen when they own the whole process, or if it is run under a license that gives them the power to keep the admins in check. The Copyleft model is the only one that can give those guarantees, and it doesn't prevent admins from earning money
(Though I don't really agree with your second para. If users actually cared, at scale - vs. reacting like Pavlov's dogs to corporate marketing & such - then the nastier corporations would have to change or die. Note what happened to the "American" car companies, back when they were selling un-reliable gas guzzlers, and Americans decided that buying reliable Japanese econo-cars was the smart way to fight back.)
So the solution is to wait for another for-profit company to be slightly better, migrate en masse, and hope the new one isn't as nasty as the old one. This is what people did when migrating to gmail (so much free space ! so much speed ! so much cool !) and look where we are now. Same with Apple, Facebook, and others. It's the perpetual myth that competition keeps bad actors in check - but it assumes that starting a competitor and gaining users is so easy that anyone can do it if they don't like the current offer. It's wishful thinking at best, and still doesn't give any guarantees to the user.
And ten years later, when all developers who did the development for these FOSS products are only found on a sheep farms (because duh, somehow FOSS projects developed in your free time doesn't pay for a 3 bedroom house in SF and nobody bothers to pay for a free (as in beer) *GPL products and all Subscription companies are bankrupt because everyone went *GPL), who would develop these FOSS replacements instead?
However, not all aspects of subscriptions - and not all players - are shady or bad. I wrote about the different aspects of subscription businesses recently[0] if you're interested.
[0] https://trive-studio.medium.com/do-you-hate-subscriptions-th...
Things worked out great! There was a strong impression among everyone that everybody was getting what they needed in the forest, or at least living in the forest was the best of all possible worlds, now that we were in it. Many had lost a lot on the plains because of lions, and the heat. The general trend towards forest life just felt like a no-brainer. Eventually, some people even rationalized that, because we have fingers and toes that easily grab onto branches, we were probably always meant to live in the forest.
There were some pretty early on who argued that we were better off on the plains, or others who (still pretty early on) argued that if we could successfully live in the forest, we should go ahead and try to make the full, dangerous journey through the main basin of the forest, because supposedly at the other end was a beach, with even more resources.
In the latter group, many people died trying to get through the forest, and those in the former group, those who tried going back to the plains didn't do much better. After enough failures on both sides, our forest society was a little shell shocked, and decided to focus on just optimizing forest life.
It took a while, but eventually people realized that the forest, while it was most assuredly the "best" place to be, had problems. There were bugs, and bears, and as we walked through dense shrubs day by day, we compacted dead leaves under us, and created large swaths of compacted, dead forest floor. This compounded into problems of forest fires, as well as the fact that so many dead leaves produce an unbearable ode=or for some. Some areas of the forest burned up so completely that people found themselves living in, essentially, the plains again.
But we could live with these negatives, it was still the best possible world.
Enough time passed, and people started to not remember there was anything other than forest life, and yet ironically, through some unconscious unease, strived to change the forest in their image, to make it more bright, less infested. People started saying things like: "What if we could remove all the leaves from the trees, except for the ones that we know are strongest, and that way people can see the sun again, and the heat will drive away some of the bugs". Others started to be angry that the forest had so many trees, and started saying: "I love the forest, but I wish we could clear out some of this space here to be completely free from the bugs that come so often."
Others started saying: "Why is it that wherever we go in the forest, the forest bugs follow us, the bears still come and eat us?" Some people try to explain: "That is just what a forest is! You can't have your cake and eat it to: if your gonna live in a forest, there will be bugs and bears, if your angry about it, don't blame the forest, we are the ones that moved in here in the first place."
In general, if trying to get through the forest is out of the question, we got to suck it up and realize we live in the forest, and its not going to get any better, but its not the forest's fault, and its not any one person in the forest that is causing the issues. It's just a forest, there is always bugs and bears in the forest.
Is greed wrong? No. But it will definitely shorten the lifespan of your startup. Most of these SaaS offerings are trash.
I dislike Software as a Subscription as much as the next person but the two examples OP gives do miss the mark imo.
Would be more "fun" to target the likes of Adobe imo.