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Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software
274 points by Abhinav2000 on Jan 21, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 318 comments
The software world today is increasingly SaaS, user-hostile and rent-extracting.

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!




This sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades. Given that developers need to be paid, and resources cost money, there needs to be a way to rectify that gap between the consumer and maintainer. At one point we did so by paying for an initial version of software, and then paying for updates. Now that we don’t do that, but someone still needs a revenue stream to pay for the costs of maintaining and evolving software, the subscription model has emerged. It’s really not that complicated. Where it gets hostile is when you see a subscription model for something where the subscription doesn’t yield any evidence of effort from the provider. For example, a subscription to software that never sees updates nor has infrastructure costs. That’s just a money grab.

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.


>This sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades.

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.


> 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…


Nobody asked for subscriptions. Nobody likes them. People prefer free and second to that a one-time payment model. Maybe that payment only includes a year of patches, but people still prefer it.

Companies prefer subscriptions because it maximizes revenue. It's as simple as that. Zero sum game between company and consumer.


>Nobody asked for subscriptions. Nobody likes them

That's patently false

I, for one, happen to like being able to push costs from capex to opex (and yes, that's true for my own personal use like it is for business use) *for most things) - a subscription price gives me a closer approximation of a given tool's/service's value proposition than does a one-off purchase (most of the time)

Everything from car leases (albeit I typically purchase my cars, leases most definitely have their place for a significant portion of vehicle operators) to Netflix fees come in the form of a "subscription" - follow the terms of the subscription, and you get to use whatever it is as long as you want


Leasing vs. ownership of cars is a great example of having a choice between ownership and a service. About 1/3 of cars are leased rather than owned.

I should say your choice to subscribe should not be taken away. I don't think my choice to own should be taken away.


The example breaks-down (no pun intended) on cars, though: software is likely not usable after 3-5 years (the length of a normal car lease)

Cars are typically usable for well over a decade :)


> software is likely not usable after 3-5 years

Whoa whoa wait! How did we get to this point? Maybe I’m living in the past, but software should work essentially forever. There are no moving parts. No wear/maintenance items. It doesn't distort like a photocopy when loaded to and from media.

The only thing that should cause working software to fail is some underlying change to its foundation: an incompatible OS or browser change or deprecated API, and so on, and we should hold platform vendors accountable for regressions and breakage. I wish platforms took backward compatibility seriously.

Apart from a cosmic ray flipping a bit somewhere, there is no physics reason software should “wear out.” How did this become a fringe point of view?


>software should work essentially forever

Really? You're still running operating systems that are a decade old on hardware even older?

Why?


I own Lightroom 4.0 from 2012 (that's 10 years ago). It doesn't have the latest features, but it's still a very capable RAW processing software. I don't use it anymore because I've subscribed to the current Lightroom. I've subscribed last year, because (finally!) the new features were compelling enough for me. The old version still works well, even on latest-ish macOS. It still produces great pictures now, as it did 10 years ago.

10 years is not that long ago. In computers and software the difference between 2022 and 2012 is not as big as it was between 1992 and 2002.


>10 years is not that long ago. In computers and software the difference between 2022 and 2012 is not as big as it was between 1992 and 2002.

It's still an immense period of technology time - OS and hardware vendors don't support their products "forever": it's not sane to do so

Run 10-year-old hardware/OS if you want ... but you should expect increasing issues over time


The newer versions of OSes aren't supposed to break compatibility, and in fact they really don't.

The really old programs run in emulators. This is how I play 1980s video games. I highly recommend Mario Brothers (not "Super") from 1983. Still works.


But has it worked continuously on contemporary platforms for the entire period of its existence? I reckon there were many years between the retirement of the original platform and your ability to emulate that platform.

The point is that software should remain usable, but in your example that hasn’t been the case.


No, but that's because it's from 1983. It's only modern machines that have this awesome excess of power.

Apple did Rosetta in 2006. That proves this approach has been _commercially_ viable on top-end machines for at least 15 years. Not 39 years!


My Acrobat 9.0 is getting pretty long in the tooth. I still run it on occasion, but there are more issues with DPI scaling and new PDF features.

It looks like Adobe does sell one-time purchases of Acrobat Pro 2020 for $450. I'll cease my cloud-yelling.


> follow the terms of the subscription, and you get to use whatever it is as long as you want

But you can run software you bought with capex as long as you want and it doesn’t cost more forever. And you don’t have to agree to new terms and conditions.


>But you can run software you bought with capex as long as you want and it doesn’t cost more forever.

...only if you still have hardware and operating systems that support it (or that it supports, depending on your point of view)


> Nobody likes them.

If that was true, financing wouldn't exist for consumer products. In practice, people pay extra to turn a one-time payment into a subscription.


Except with financing you own the product and one day the payments end. You're saying that home ownership is the same as renting if you don't buy upfront? That's simply not true.

Also, the vast majority of people would prefer to live in a home they own than burn money renting.


Some financing leads to ownership. Leasing a car does not lead to ownership - it is an extended rental.

I am not a fan of products that make it difficult to unsubscribe, but I do like the variable cost aspect of SaaS. Generally quick to start using and quick to stop.

I have not seen it commented on, but my sense is security is easier with a SaaS model. How many pirated versions of software have you come across in your career pre-Saas?


Sometimes people think they want things a certain way because

1. They have no idea it can be different

2. They wouldn't know what it would look like if it were different

3. They don't understand, or they resign to accept, the ethical implications of the status quo


Yeah, it's not really about free software; it's about paying salaries. Recurring expenses inevitably result in business models optimized for recurring revenues. That was always the case; it just so happened that the expansion of industrial production of goods was so vast for so long, that this was kinda hidden (and it was hard to justify - there are only so many widgets you can continuously supply to customers).

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.


Recurring expenses very often isn't necessary though.

For software the initial costs are big, but after that it can be pretty low maintenance or at least costing much less to develop new features when the foundation is set.

When you start to think about recurring expenses that's when you have to find a way to justify those expenses. And that is usually by adding bloat and unnecessary features that those that already bought it might not even want.

So now you have to pay for features that you don't want to keep using the features that you've already bought? Tough sell...


Companies are not made of 100% engineers. Production costs are only part of recurring expenses in a business. At the very minimum you have to pay an executive team, a marketing team, a network/security team, a legal team, an accounting team... these guys don't work for free, and want to be paid every year at worst - more often, every month. Even if each "team" is one person in your garage, you have to pay them. And when you scale up, now you have investors to service, and they also would very much like to get regular dividends from their investment (or see constant growth in the value of their share).

Note: I'm not defending the practice (if you dig in my comment history, you'll see pretty incendiary stuff against SaaS abuse very recently), I'm just saying that it's what business naturally tends like - in the same way it naturally tends towards paying people as little as possible, exploiting them, etc etc. This is what the market becomes when left to its own devices. If we don't like it, we need to proactively intervene in law.


For example, 1Password.

I’m happy to pay for a new version if my current version stops working. OS or browser update broke the app? I’ll pay for the new version.

But they are trying to force me to pay every month, therefore they remove my ability to use the app at all unless I pay for their cloud storage which I neither need nor want.


Well, they don't stop working on an improved app and new features while you don't want to update.

You don't only get compatibility with X with the new version but all that as well.


If no one wants those improvements, why should they pay them to keep working on it? Maybe 1pass should start working on something else to sell, and move the old stuff to minimal maintenance.


>If no one wants those improvements, why should they pay them to keep working on it?

They should not pay them, they should use one of the numerous alternatives.


Yep, and in the case of 1pw, I use Bitwarden instead.


Fine. They can work on the app and sell me on the benefits they’ve added.


Honest question: Why use 1Password rather than a modern browser’s built in password management?

Side note: Daring Fireball has had some discussion recently about 1Password moving to enterprise for employee password management and adopting the SaaS model in order to make this transition, alienating current client base in the process. A ballsy move!


Honest answer: I use more than one browser. If Apple Keychain autofill worked in 3rd-party browsers, it would almost cover my use cases though.


Password sharing.


Password managers are an exception for me. I pay them so they can continually stay ahead with device/browser compatibility, security, and breaches.


>For software the initial costs are big, but after that it can be pretty low maintenance or at least costing much less to develop new features when the foundation is set.

Written by someone who - probably - doesn't understand how complex software is to write/update/expand/maintain


Oh I am. The whole point was that you might not need to write/update/expand as much as you think.

And the case have previously been that such development is largely paid for by new users.


In the case of local software, I agree. But most users expect connected services nowadays, which mean recurring costs for the developers as well in many cases.


What do you mean by “connected services”? If that’s just a code word for cloud storage, then no, thank you. I’ve got cloud storage, and I don’t need yours. You’re just trying to justify charging me every month.


Only if companies force their users onto “their cloud”. There are plenty of remote storage services; why can’t we use those?

The answer is that it makes it harder to justify perpetual revenue streams then.


>Yeah, it's not really about free software; it's about paying salaries

Well, that's on the software maker.

Why pay salaries in perpetuity for something made and sold once?


Almost no software these days is "made and sold once" because of network support - even the most "local" apps will have stuff like saving settings or document to remote servers, talking to network peers, receiving updates when new OS versions are released, and so on. Anything sold on Apple platforms, for example, nowadays has to be updated at least once a year just to keep up.


A lot of the "network support" is unwanted BS nobody asked for, that could be sold separately (or be open to other providers to offer). Like the BS "Adobe Cloud" they give you when you subscribe to the CSuite.

>Anything sold on Apple platforms, for example, nowadays has to be updated at least once a year just to keep up.

Factually wrong.


Can confirm. I still use Sparrow for email on MacOS. Yes that Sparrow - the one bought by Google and discontinued a decade ago.

I think the need to update software constantly is sometimes a self fulfilling prophecy with SaaS. Features that need constant maintenance get added because: "Why not? We have a continuous income stream."

Edit:

Another example: I use Transmit on iOS. It hasn't been updated since 2017[1] because of lack of sales. Still works great on the latest iOS/iPhone.

[1] https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-transmit-ios/


> Anything sold on Apple platforms, for example, nowadays has to be updated at least once a year just to keep up.

Incorrect.


Minimal maintenance doesn’t take the same size team as making new features.


This is not blaming the victim as there are no victims. OP’s is wrong that SaaS is rent sending. Software should not be free (in cost), yet always receive new features and updates. Indeed, the alternative is the ad-tech surveillance state.


That's a strawman. Who exactly demanded "free in cost" plus "always receive new features and updates"?

If the software companies (in mobile in particular) had a race to the bottom, it's on them - and on those (hobbyists etc) that undercutted them (though, if hobbyists can undercut your prices, is your product really worth that much, or could it just as well be replaced with a hobbyist-made app?).

Users have since forever paid top dollar for shrink wrapped and then downloaded software like MS Office or Abobe Creative Suite and co, that now is nonetheless "subscription based".


One could argue that MS Office and Adobe products were always "subscription-based", if companies and professionals never left the update treadmill. After all, if all you need is MS-Office 2000 or Adobe Photoshop 6, no subscription is needed and you can still find licenses around.


One could argue it.

But they would then have to answer why would non-business buyers, that is, users who did "leave the update treadmill" and bought new updates (or skipped them) at their convenience, suffer the subscription model too?


Because they are such an irrelevant part of the market that they basically could disappear and no one would care, and the hobbyist/non-professional people who don't mind using years-old software could as well just use Free/Open alternatives?

There is nothing stopping Joe-who-only-pays-full-licences to continue using his MS 2007 Office suite, is there?


Os support, especially in the Apple world.


It's not merely "especially in the Apple world" - very little in the way of older Windows/DOS software still works today (unless you're also running old/unsupported hardware (subject to its own foibles) and operating systems

Products get deprecated/go out of support all the bloody time - there is nothing wrong with that: should Ford have to "support" the Edsel or Model T today "for free"? Why?


The only thing I don't like about subscription is rent-seeking. I'm fine paying a small amount every month if I expect security updates or small features that won't impede my workflow. If there is a lot of request for additional features, you can always bump up to a new version. If there aren't, that means your product is mature, or you may need to market to a different segment. But I'm not paying you every month just to shuffle the UI around or to be able to access my data.


You don't get to decide what is "small features" and if you start fragmenting software into multiple releases you are going to make it more expensive for everyone, because now the company is supposed to maintain N versions because you are a special snowflake.

Or you can sidestep the whole thing entirely and use/fund/ promote Free Software. Your "small monthly amount" will go a long way and you will be free to pick and choose as you want.


Right, which is yet another explanation of why companies moved into subscription-based models: unless you are willing to be frozen in time with all your software tools, you will be in the update treadmill one way or another. Bitrot exists, and someone needs to pay for it. A license you paid 15 years ago does not (and should not) cover that.


Isn't a big reason for this development precisely that many didn't pay top dollar? There used to be a lot of Photoshop, Windows and Office warez floating around.


I suspect most of the piracy in those apps was among people who were never the target market. Someone who wants to make funny cat pictures, or even edit photos they took with their $300 point-and-shoot camera isn't going to pay $400 for Photoshop.

Professionals who make their living using Photoshop usually don't have much trouble with the cost, whether paid monthly, or occasionally when a new version has a feature they care about.

Being able to bring in some more casual customers with a lower initial cost is just a bonus.


No, since that's orthogonal. You can pirate with or without a subscription.


Well if this isn’t the pot calling the kettle black. You raise the statesman that I said people claim software should be both free and maintained indefinitely. I did no such thing. I merely asserted that it should not be.


Not true. I prefer paying for upgrades on my own schedule to a subscription any day.


Including skipping upgrades?


Yes. I don't need every upgrade, especially when 9/10 it includes new bugs on essential productivity software.


Plus today it's easier than ever to make updates (or bunches of related updates) selectable and installable on demand.

So you could skip 90% of the BS updates you don't care for and get the 10% you do, as opposed to pay the full update price or maintain a subscription...

In other words, you could get a base product, they keep maintaining, and even release new versions you can update to for free/cheap, but with features you haven't paid for locked. Then, if you paid for a feature, you get to enjoy it for all free/cheap updates of the program.


That's how software used to be before they went SaaS.


> Indeed, the alternative is the ad-tech surveillance state.

One way to increase recurring revenue when you have a captive audience (i.e. they can't refuse an update) is by adding adware to your software. I think SaaS is the driving force behind the ad-tech surveillance state, not the thing that will save us from it.


Can you give me some examples of SaaS that has ads? Cable TV, Hulu, newspapers. They all do it, but I can’t think of any SaaS providers that also push ads. I suppose cross-promoting s/w from the same vendor is an ad, but those kinds of ads don’t require intrusive surveillance.


In the case of Adobe you are paying for near malware Levels of surveillance on your device to use their products.


Like what?


> Software should not be free (in cost), yet always receive new features and updates.

That sounds like an extension of "you wouldn't download a car".


How so?


> Blame the victim?

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.


>I don't think it makes sense to call anyone making an informed decision to overpay for a service a victim.

No, those I'm calling victims are people like me, who would like to buy the update and own it, but are instead forced in a subscription - which if they ever have to stop paying for whatever reason (e.g. out of a job, medical bills, etc) they lose their access to the programs they've been paying for month over month for years.

A music program called Reason is a good example of the scumbuggery involved. It used to have $129 annual updates - which were already overpriced, as they had minimal changes, and more professional competitors like Steinberg with much bigger update deltas (new features, work involved, etc) charged much less for their annual updates.

Now, they switched to subscription, for $20/month ($240/year) where they give access to some extra plugins to entice you. But to force the user's hands (since they still offer the paid annual updates), they also bumped the annual update price to $200/year (without the extra plugins, the regular, already-overpriced-at-129 update).


I don't think you are a victim because you don't agree with the the terms of an offer. As you said, the actual changes are minimal. You can just reject the deal and stick to your old version, if you don't think it's worth it.


>You can just reject the deal and stick to your old version, if you don't think it's worth it.

Which gets incompatible and can't run with changes to OS, plugin SDKs, and so on.

Victim here doesn't mean "they put a gun on your head".

It means they removed a specific update model and replaced with a shitty one, while doubling the prices, and fucking you over if you want to continue using the platform.


The other model that works well is the open source one, with the maintainer having "another job"; e.g. academics doing scientific research (CERN!) or corporations who use the project internally. Unfortunately, the fact that the latter vastly outnumber the former means that the largest open-source projects are arguably corporate middleware or those of benefit to large corporations rather than users per se. People like me who use linux a lot are free software zealots. I wish Apple was more open on this -- they could quite easily be a hardware company and charge for services and yet make the code free -- but for whatever reason they've always kept the code close to their chest.

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.


A problem with open and free projects (to oversimplify the ideological differences) is the source of time and purpose.

The production cost is subsidized as a Hobbie not as a profession, so it's hard to expect a 'consumer product'. When you put external money and corporate interest in your hobbies, something breaks.

Not saying open products don't have to exist, we all love them. They cover different creative needs, and usually are a gift for the community.

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211229 - The Gift of It's your problem now


That's a FANTASTIC blog post!


If Apple open sourced their software, they'd go back to the same spot they were when they allowed other companies to produce Mac clones[0]. It's not going to happen.

[0]: https://everymac.com/systems/mac-clones/index-mac-clones.htm...


>we want reasonably priced products we own after we buy

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


>You own a license to use it (with some level of constraints around how/when/where you use it)

That's neither here, nor there. I didn't argue we buy and then own software like a shoe or a tire. People bought software before and we know the semantic and legal differences between it and buying physical products.

But that's irrelevant, the discussion is about software-bought (with the license and all it entails) vs software subscription -- not about the semantics of bought software vs bought physical stuff.


I, mostly, don't want products. I want to be able to communicate or veg out with a movie or have CI run. I generally don't care about the how. I just want the results. And I want to not think about it much beyond that. I, like everyone else, assume that's what everyone wants.

My scribble on the HN wall that you're reading right now involved thinking about something more than I thought it deserved.


>My scribble on the HN wall that you're reading right now involved thinking about something more than I thought it deserved.

Well, you might not care or what to think about the market, but the market cares and thinks about you.

And if you don't pay attention, you can easily get taken for a sucker, overcharged, forced in abusive rent-seeking relationships and so on...


> We don't want "super cheap products", we want reasonably priced products we own after we buy.

I'd fully expect someone to provide this if there is a market for it.


The problem is that the money and safety (which investors love) provided by “recurring sources of revenue” are too strong to counter with market forces alone.

Kinda like how the money and safety provided by monopolies can’t be corrected by market forces either.


> The problem is that the money and safety (which investors love) provided by “recurring sources of revenue” are too strong to counter with market forces alone.

There are two markets: the market of customers who might buy your product and the market of VCs who might want to fund your startup. Lately the latter has been making most of the decisions. It's nearly impossible for a bootstrapped startup to compete against products sold at a loss with VC backing.


That's so quaint, it's like it's 1950s, and people still believe there's a free market and open competition...


> or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades.

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.


Even though I don't like paying for software monthly, I think that the JetBrains suite of tools is an example of how this can be a fair deal.

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.


Your specific use case is explicitly afforded by Jetbrains licensing model. I don't think there is any problem to be had. You can buy a license now, use it for 5 years, then buy another.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...


If that's your IntelliJ usage model, why don't you just go for the perpetual licence and then update after 5 years (or whenever)?


> 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.

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.


> That assumes what the initial price wasn't at least x20, though.

Yes, I assume this is true because these companies were profitable businesses charging 2x annual, not 20x, before the move to subscription models. Requiring 20 years of subscription to profit sounds highly risky and not all the kind of thing investors would support.


Photoshop CS2 in 2005 was $599 for the full version. Today that's the equivalent of $850. That would pay for 3.5 years with the current subscription model. So if you were upgrading every 2 years it's actually cheaper now, but of course if you wanted to keep the old version for 5 years it would be more expensive.


Right, and the old way let you choose your upgrade cycle, rather than letting the company choose how often they’d like to make you buy.


Outside of [possibly] amateur hobbyists, who isn't upgrading their software/hardware at least every ~3 years?


Have you _seen_ the IT infrastructure of some non-tech companies? The amount of companies that had to scramble for the Windows 7 (released 2009) EOL in 2020?


I'm aware that some laces are completely unaware of the world around them

Doesn't change the fact that the world keeps going whether you're paying attention or not


Do you think version 21 of a piece of desktop software is usually substantially better than version 20? Do you think those places are missing out on a lot?


I have no idea what version 21 vs version 20 of some hypothetical piece of software is in every case

though, the odds are quite good that version updates are improvements (security, platform support, features, etc)


Of course that's unknowable, which is why I said "usually".

As for the second part, that's not been my experience with commercial software at that point in its life at all. Maybe yours has differed.


I cannot recall any commercial software I've used in the last quarter century or more wherein a new release did not bring a host of fixes and features along with it


Indeed. I'm still using Paintshop Pro 7.04 10th anniversity edition, that I purchased in 2001. It still works great today, blazing fast.


This is more-or-less how Logos (a bible study tool suite) works: you buy this "version", and you get updates until/unless a new "version" comes out

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


At least Microsoft are still making personal office subscriptions cheaper than buying office was. 5 users, each with several devices and their own terabyte of OneDrive, is £60 a year at many retailers. I assume they will jack up the price later.


> Microsoft are still making personal office subscriptions cheaper than buying office was.

Nah you are missing the forest for the trees. Office at the moment is a gateway drug for Microsoft to get you on their cloud services. Office is not an end product anymore, it is a hook to capture market into their cloud services. They could sell office at a loss and still make money from all the Corporate/government contracts they got hooked on Azure.


Eh I still chose to buy, I usually use a copy of office for 5-10 years, so it’s still vastly cheaper to buy.


You can get Photoshop for half the price with the Photography bundle. Just includes less cloud space, which you probably don't use.


The problem I have with this post, is that it's assuming erroneously the "eternal development" mindset. Once a software has reached maturity, beaides (very rare) security fixes there is not much that needs to be done to it. Is anyone seeing LaTeX receiving feature updates all the time? Or grep or vim in need of continuous updates? No! And MSO, which was mentioned here multiple times, also has reached maturity decades ago. So the "dev needs to be payed" argument is wrong. Correct is: "while the software is not yet mature enough, dev needs to be payed". The problem with predatory subscription is that they usually kick in for mature software, when there is justification any more for paying fictitious work (perhaps that's why MS change the UI every few years, because hey, new UI lurea gullible customera while also making us look as if we actually do some programming here).


This is spot on. Adobe went subscription once their software was more than mature. Now that it's SaaS they're using paid subscribers as beta testers of features. Every once in a while something good comes of it. But then there's features no one asked for which introduce new bugs.


Or...updates nobody asked for. Quite a few casual users might be perfectly happy with Office 2003, or Adobe PS6, as anything after that they don't need. And not just that, they may not want the UI to be revamped every 2 months. The option to just have stable, working software is increasingly taken away.

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.


Your point needs more attention IMO. Most updates for most software don't add usability or convenience for the end user. The way conversational rhetoric with my family and friends seems to have transitioned from "wow, these computers are cool! This will really help with x" to complete frustration.


Jonathan Blow posted something a while back I thought was interesting: type "frustrating" into Google image search. Notice anything about the results?

https://www.google.com/search?q=frustrating&tbm=isch


Yes -- and subscriptions in some sense may worsen this problem, in that subscriptions create an incentive towards ongoing interface and feature churn, to create a notional justification for ongoing revenue.


Like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29983959

Forced updates that remove or disable features people use.


Reminds me of XD versus Sketch.

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.


They have to justify that subscription right? Every yearly version upgrade of Adobe is filled with productivity-breaking bugs that don't get fixed until months later. Everywhere I've worked, artists know not to update to the latest Photoshop until the first patches are released and it's been evaluated. Why should a subscriber put up with that? The only recourse is to not subscribe, which isn't an option if you're content with a current version of the software.


There is a serious amount of diversity on the app stores, though. It's not as if you must use Photoshop, with zero alternatives.


>This sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades.

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.


But you're now getting the worst of both worlds. It was not uncommon back in the day you could buy a copy of the software which was bundled with the source code. Now you have to pay and you don't have the source code. You're just trapped into an ecosystem you have no control over.

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.


Seriously? Since when could you buy COTS and expect to get the code too? I don’t remember a source archive accompanying the pre-subscription Adobe, Microsoft, or any other major piece of software that is now subscription-ware. That’s pure fantasy.


> Since when could you buy COTS and expect to get the code too?

Since the 1950s and 1960s. IBM, for example, provided source code for their products until 1983.[1] The full Apple II source code was included in the Apple II Reference Manual;[2] similarly for the Atari 400/800 Technical Reference Notes.[3]

1. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hSBrPSYgjI4C&redir_esc=y (page 59)

2. https://archive.org/details/applerefjan78/page/n78/mode/2up

3. https://archive.org/details/CO16555AtariHomeComputerTechnica...


But back then, you were rarely paying for the software directly, you were paying for hardware.


If anyone is curious what happened in 1983, that’s the same year that Apple Computer Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp. set the precedent that binary data is covered by copyright (before this case, only source code was covered).


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer%2C_Inc._v._Fran....


I vaguely recall that you could get source code back in the 70s and early 80s, with early UNIX say or mainframe code, because the revenue was from the big machines. Technical reference manuals for the early IBM PC were awesome.


> Given that developers need to be paid, and resources cost money

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.


Upgrade pricing leads to feature bloat. Sure you could stop at say office 2003 features and then only update it (for free) when you need to fix bugs and compatibility issues with new systems.

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).


I would still gladly pay for updates—nobody expected to get updates for free, we always did it that way before. My impression is that the AppStore model, with the updates provided for free (for bug fixes, etc) is what began that shift to subscriptions.

Before the App Store, it wasn’t easy to update software, so it was straightforward to lock updates behind paid upgrades.


> nobody expected to get updates for free

if there's a security vulnerability, i'm sure you'd expect the update to be free.


Let's say feature updates make sense to pay for, bug fixes don't.


I mean, I remember the days when I didn’t expect free updates. That’s my whole point.

I don’t know if I can explain why. Maybe security wasn’t as big of a deal.


Why though?


Because If I get a faulty vacuum cleaner I expect to be able to exchange it for a working one for free.


and yet if a lock could be picked, you don't get to exchange it for another one that couldn't be! Analogies breakdown when compared too carefully.

I think software sellers is doing a courtesy when they provide security updates for free. They are not legally obligated to do it. The users are entitled to switch to a competitor however - by not having their data held hostage (which, i think modern laws don't properly address).


> and yet if a lock could be picked, you don't get to exchange it for another one that couldn't be! Analogies breakdown when compared too carefully.

There are no locks that can't be picked. If it unlocks itself all the time you bet your ass that I'll get to exchange it for a new one. Maybe you should be more careful when making analogies.


I picked the lock analogy deliberately, because like locks, there are no software that has no security vulnerabilities.


> and yet if a lock could be picked, you don't get to exchange it for another one that couldn't be! Analogies breakdown when compared too carefully.

https://www.cycleryusa.com/articles/kryptonite-locks-recall-...


> nobody expected to get updates for free

Every single comment thread on Parallels releasing update is crying "money grab" over and over.


> How do you achieve super cheap products made by people making super high pay?

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 sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades.

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 don’t think I read it at the time, but Joel’s explanation of what was going to happen to Sun was prophetic, and also explained some of the craziness of Java that I’ve never been able to work out.

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).


It would be rather hard to sell one time software today and then sell an update once a year. Why? Because most software is in the cloud or has a great dependence on at least a backend in the cloud. I think it is more difficult (and dumb, from a security/quality perspective) to have multiple versions of the backend, with different patches and features applied depending on version bought.


I appreciate this reply. I often see nerds on the internet decry things without understanding the needs or motivations of people not like them, especially on topics that really bother nerds. Thanks for pushing hard to do that personally. It’s inspiring me to try to do it more too.


I think your comment is the most sensible because it tries to understand it.

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.


> 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.

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.


> subscription to software that never sees updates nor has infrastructure costs. That’s just a money grab

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.


I'd be okay to pay for a specific version of a product and LTS for 5 years. Do what Sublime Text does. Let me live with an older version and I'll happily upgrade if you give me features I'm interested in. Subscription models suck because yes it takes development time to come up with fixes and new features but sometimes I don't want your new features. I just want the old thing.


>Money doesn’t just materialize out of thin air to make that work.

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.


A lot of comments are already addressing this horrible trend of moving from standalone native software to “SaaS” but this one is also terrible:

> now trying to trick people to use One Drive more

A lot of software are now deliberately blurring the line between local storage and cloud storage, not just Office. When I choose to save a file, I expect to save it locally to my hard disk, in a file that I can find and manipulate, and keep secure. More and more, software is nudging users to save their files in “the cloud.” Non-techie users don’t understand the implication of this: they are uploading their private data to the Internet!

Whenever I read an article about a creeper hacking so-and-so’s cloud storage to download their nude images, I wonder if the victim had any idea they were inadvertently posting their private files to the Internet.

iCloud is one of the worst offenders because it is so seamless and invisible. Apple urges iCloud usage constantly, and once you turn it on, the mechanism to de-iCloud yourself is buried in settings.

Software more and more are hiding the fact that they are either saving your files on the Internet or mirroring copies on the Internet, and this is a terrible trend for user privacy and keeping control of their data.


>I 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

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?


There's a trade off between privacy and security when it comes to backups. For the average user, cloud backup is probably the right choice.


Does this justify harassing users over and over again?

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.


The whole notification center in Mac is just a harrasment tool for me. Difficult to turn off, needs atomic actions for each and every app separately, new ones has the default on for whatever things those want to bother me about, non time sensitive or communication software (e.g. photo editing) send notifications if left on unnecessarily, no option for permanently and explicitly disable but only workarounds and dirty tricks to get rid of if you do not need the whole thing (like you have your own reliable way of processing events not relying on assistance). It is only an annoyance that is forced on me not a helpful feature this way. I have to spend time repeatedly to discard it in useless cases, distracts me from my activities not helping me, it is in the way constantly despite the workaround (without which it would be even more distracting, would be a constant distraction).


Despite the implications of being placed in an opaque internet location I did a test on iCloud not long after its introduction to see if it could be used for non-sensitive things but the very first test scared me away at the point of turning off cloud sync on my Mac, notifying me that 'your local files will be deleted'. Very, very scary that (unknowingly!) I make the primary location into the cloud on setting up iCloud storage and that takes precedence and instead of just breaking link and leave disconnected items in place data loss is forced on me on my premises. To me this is - sorry for the strong word but this is the proper one here - idiotic design.

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.


I don't think it's a separate trend, more of a consequence of the difference between native and web becoming blurry. Non-tech users see and use Facebook as they see and use Office: interfaces with data stored somewhere. They are fine with social media posts not being files on their computer, why would they bother for other apps? Especially if they mainly use tablets and not a desktop computer.

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.


This has gotten so bad, even HP has jumped onboard with their printers. The HP Smart app, which most printers ask for on first connection, now requires an HP cloud account.

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.


You're right about the blurring of the line. But the average user doesn't care as long there is access to the file. Saving the files on your computer require you to backup regularly the files and that's to much of a hassle for the average user in comparison to just saving it to the cloud.


I’m running a super simple translation management system where people can manage, host, auto-translate their translation files. How I supposed to run my app without subscriptions?

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


Not sure to what extent this applies to you?

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.


Many end users do not understand the difference between "standalone piece of software" and something that has an ongoing cost for the developer.


I absolutely see your point. So here is a suggestion that might make it less annoying for users. I don't know if it will help you but for some businesses it should be a great idea (and I will prefer those who follow this model):

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.)


I’d bet that you are the exception that prefers token or metered pricing.

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.


I'm not against subscriptions per se. I subscribe to a number of things.

It just happens to be abused badly, from subscriptions for things that never need to update (I'd almost bet a dollar there is or has been a flashlight app with a subscription somewhere), to subscriptions for things you use a week and then are finished with to a certain alarm clock app that both charges multiple dollars a month and then has the guts to try to track me on top of that.


That sounds very useful. Mind sharing the link to your service? Thanks.


I'm not OP, but I use https://translationhut.com to manage my translations and it works really well. It can also automatically translate the assets for you, although I don't use that myself.

(Full disclosure: I know the guy that makes that service, but am not involved with that project)


"I need to increase my prices" /s

Or start charging in Euro :D


I wonder what charging in Euro does on the psychological price front. Does €79 look less than $85?


It works, because a few times I was surprised that paid in euro instead dollars.


https://simplelocalize.io


I'd love to check out your service if you care to share the name here?


https://simplelocalize.io


Nice landing page - clean design and clear layout. I also like that you include a brief blurb about you and why you created it right on the homepage. So many software companies these days hide who is behind it and/or don’t have an “about us” page, which makes it hard to “invest” in the product as a potential customer…

Bookmarking for a future project!


This is not a wholly black and white world, though.

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.


> once you cancel you can still download and use whatever was the latest version released during your paid period

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...


When you cancel, the fallback license is for the version that was latest 12 months ago.


Was about to mention Jetbrain's perpetual license system which is the best of both worlds. I greatly appreciate their system.


It kind of reflect the model where by subscriptions, you fund the ongoing development. Also a nice move that when you cancel, your installed software doesn't stop working. As far as I remember, they generate a product key that can be used for perpetual licenses and the software won't be phoning home.


I don't think this is fundamentally about subscriptions. They're a different business model, but there are positives too: for example they align what users pay far more closely with the value they get from a product.

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.


This is the kind of thing I'd like to see, I'm not opposed to subscription services by themselves but the predatory and shady practices that often accompany them have made me default to negative assumptions about products and services that use them. I wonder if there are any potential consumer protection laws that could make the situation better, such as:

  - 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 it


Subscription management would be nice, but it’s a bit more complicated than simply blocking transactions; just because a tx doesn’t go through doesn’t mean you opted not to continue with the service, it just means the service provider was unable to collect on your payment. For new tech companies like Netflix, a lapsed subscription goes away easily since it’s prorated so they just stop providing you service, but many companies take the hostile route and send any lapsed subscriptions to collections without blocking access to their services.


If it was possible to subscribe only when you [i]used[/i] the software it would be fine, but even that would be awkward.

I mean, the best case I can think of is Quantrix. It's an innovative spreadsheet progrem that tries to bring back the standards of Lotus Improv. I don't know of any equivalent in OSS. It used to have a perpetual license with small upgrades and while it was quite expensive, it means it could be bought to learn and experiment and if you needed to convince your boss to try it it's not that much of a layout.

Then the company that makes it was bought by a financial services company who re-targeted at that market. They do not list the pricing on their site any more. Want to know what it is? $2000 a year, immediate and total loss on lapse. So basically individuals can't access it anymore, nobody can learn it, and there's very little chance of any company that doesn't already know it or doesn't have money to burn taking it up. Which is a kick in the teeth, because I think many people agree that the standard spreadsheet is a crock, and what was showing signs of being interesting or innovative in that area is now a locked-down rich club. I guess you could write an OSS version if you were up for being sued over spurious software patents by a company whose backers can just manufacture money at will. Yea.

Or how about TheBrain? Their model had the potential for a ton of innovation based on evolving semantic technologies. What was their business model instead? Patent the Plex model to lock out competitors, push everyone's Brains into the cloud, go subscription, and then just sit. The upgrades have become smaller and smaller since the subscription came in.


Ha! You are on to something regarding banks.

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.


> It aligns incentives too: developers are strongly incentivized to keep existing users happy, rather than ignoring them and constantly chasing the next new sale.

Alternately it incentivizes vendor lock-in. If you can't keep users happy, why not keep their data hostage instead?


It's actually getting wild "out there". WordPress was once a really good choice for a blogging platform. Now, majority of the "popular" plugins are strictly businesses. E.g. You can use our API for 100 calls a month, either pay up to use this plugin more or wait another 30 days to get another 100 calls.

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.


Yes. I didn't do much with wordpress for years, but always thought of it as a very open-source-ish community. Recently I find myself taking on a pre-existing wordpress site with a lot of plugins. I was quite surprised by the way so many plugins are available for $$$. It's sort of impressive "professionalisation" of the ecosystem. I can see it's allowing/encouraging glossy presentation, explanatory videos, documentation, and support guarantes, but there's a voice in my head thinking "Nah! These PHP snippets are all supposed to be free aren't they?"


Yep. I used to spend a lot of time working with WordPress sites, maybe 5 or so years ago. I don't have any factual data for this, but I suspect that some of the plugin creators pivoted to a "greedy by design" strategy.

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.


One thing that I think is usually absent from this is the fact that most copyleft licenses are being interpreted by the industry has having a SaaS loophole[1][2], which makes the economics of developing software much more attractive. On one hand you get to use all GPL'ed code for free, so your developers have to build much less things in house, whereas you also exploit the economics of rent vs sell as other commenters have explained. It's a double whammy for the software industry which would have high margins by just using a "sell" model anyway.

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...


It’s less of a loophole and more of a way to make sure software doesn’t collapse overnight, given you’d have to comply with the GPL for using libc or parts of the Linux kernel.


Three months ago I picked up new hobby: Self Hosting. It has been an amazing ride. I learned a lot and I also get peace of mind knowing I am in control of my data.

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


More people need to experience self hosting. It is liberating, and it casts a super nova spotlight on how over priced cloud offerings really are. And if you investigate a bit, you may find you can get Business Internet service to your home; that means you have symmetric upload and download speeds, typically at least 2oo mbps or higher, able to run servers from home and completely experience the joy and power of the Internet at a small fraction of the expense if attempting the same through a cloud provider.


Completely agree. I took the leap hard. Had some steep learning curves, but working well now. Nextcloud, onlyoffice, mattermost, pihole running on a home server. shifted to ubuntu from mac.

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.


This appears to me to be less about subscriptions per se and more about how VC and public markets drive tech companies to dial up the rent extraction to 11 at the first available opportunity.

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.


It starts from day one. Pitch decks that don’t have a subscription revenue model are routinely ignored, so founders find a way to shoehorn subscriptions in somehow even though the product isn’t a “natural” fit for subscriptions.


I blame loose monetary policy.


I don’t mind paying rent for my stuff. What I do mind is paying a lot of rent for not a lot of stuff.

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.


I think the most egregious example I have seen recently was that company charging $30/month to give you a cloud hosted Chrome instance that you view with a stream ala remote desktop... through an electron app[0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26957215


Wow that’s insane.


A conversation needs to be had over subscription humans.

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


This analogy doesn't work. The OP didn't say software should be free, or that people shouldn't be paid.

One-time fees for software were common less than a decade ago. How did those companies manage to make payroll each month?


Yes, I miss the good old days, when you could just pay the one upfront cost for your slave and use them as long as you wanted.

;)


This is what you get for not supporting FOSS, especially R&D.

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.


> Microsoft has used its dominant position to charge for MS Office in perpetuity

You can still buy a definitive, noncloud, without subscription of MS Office, and they still release it (there is a 2021 edition).


Microsoft is still taking away options and raising the price.

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).


So not only are subscriptions "bad", but they are not allowed to raise their prices either?


Their non-cloud/non-subscription license is still the same price, they just removed the discounted option and replaced it with a higher priced subscription option. It looks like they want to dissuade as many people as possible from their non-cloud/non-subscription option.


Yeah, I don't understand their claim around Microsoft either. They're still offering perpetual licenses, and sure, they're integrating OneDrive a lot, but you can still save a document wherever you want on your computer and last I checked, Save As works the same way it always has.


The office Save As dialogs have been butchered to make saving to your local drives take many more clicks off the primary path. It's dark patterns ui to force people to cloud and azure rather than defaulting to local storage.

It's been this way for at least a few years and I think actually near half a dozen.


Actually, having this plus using something like Confluence for internal documents is quite appealing.


If you're willing to pay for a license, why not donate to the document foundation instead? This way you get a great office suite (Libreoffice) and every one gets it too. A win-win situation?


Unfortunately in this case, the UI/UX of LibreOffice not even comes close to MS Office's one.

Some FOSS products are that great, but if you come from MS Office, LibreOffice feels a lot like an early 2000's downgrade.

The compatibility and robustness of LibreOffice is excellent, but the UI/UX and something as simple as the default design templates that come with it, it's just not up to the level of MS Office, and customers do judge by that criteria.

I wish LibreOffice was up that standard, so there would be more consumer choice. I even tried LibreOffice as my daily driver for sometime, and I just couldn't stand it.


> the UI/UX of LibreOffice not even comes close to MS Office's one.

Except 'Import CSV' wizard, it's light years ahead of MSO's one, which didn't changed for two decades. Which is understandable, nobody [from the corporate customers with tens thousands of users] cried loud enough.

Also it doesn't even look good. MSO would use ClearType (and whatever) and looks good, LO looks like I'm in 1995 looking at 640x480 14" monitor.


Perhaps; I use LibreOffice myself. I was thinking of a business doing that rather than me personally.


Your complains are not about subscriptions really. They are about shady commercial practices.


There are also other things beyond vendor lock-in which facilitate rent-seeking:

- 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...


As a consumer, do you need to participate in these transactions?

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.


Couldn't agree more. I was working in a company that didn't allow local checkouts. You'd have to work in a remote VM. Next step was going to fully remote desktops (i.e. dumb terminals). For security reasons (whatever). I hated every moment of it as it made feedback times longer and for doing anything at all you needed to beg the IT people. But the weirdest part is that other devs didn't seem to mind. (Not to mention all the spyware crap installed on our machines and the whole mentality of security over productivity. All of it -security- sold to us by third parties as a service (nvm how absurd it is to trust N other companies to keep you secure). Anyhow this place was surreal but I'm afraid it's not the only one).

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.


Consumers do not want the subscription model. Consumers never wanted the subscription model. That will strike some here as obvious, but it's the important point in all this.

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.


I think I tend to think of commercial software in two categories: the stuff that realistically needs to have a service component, and the stuff that works entirely independently.

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.


I think it is fair to complain about user-hostile and scammy companies.

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.


A lot of software doesn't have to be a "service", such as Photoshop. Photoshop doesn't need to be connected to the internet and receive constant updates. There was never an issue with Photoshop versions having one-time fees.


You also don't _need_ photoshop at all. Just speak with your wallet. No company as large as Adobe is going to be listening to comments online.

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.


Of course it does. Software and the components are never bug / loop hole free. SW development doesn't simply stop just because a version was released.


If that was the case, then Adobe delivered a defective product and should make the patch available to people who bought the one-time license.

Patches used to be a thing, right?


Software is never ready :) that's the whole point.


But the insurances accumulate the money in the event it has to pay for an event that triggers it.

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.


Isn't getting nothing in return even worse?


It just means that you don't own the software that you run. Always having to have an account and sign in and pay the subscription tax otherwise you lose access to it.

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.)


> It just means that you don't own the software that you run.

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.


And hold your data hostage.


Exactly :-(


Seems to me that there is an inherent contradiction at the heart of SAAS. A service either:

- Has a big enough moat that its immune to competition - in which case you get rent seeking behaviour; or

- It's vulnerable and could disappear / become economically unviable so you wouldn't want to have your business rely on it.

So you essentially have to choose between two unpalatable choices.


I think a large part of the problem is that so much software (like Office) is turning into a service when it doesn’t need to be.


I think a large part of the problem is that so much software (like Office) is turning into a service when it doesn’t need to be.

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.


> 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.

This is undeniably an advantage to the developer, but much less so for users. When a developer releases a terrible update that removes features or does an unnecessary re-design, in the world of non-SaaS, I could simply choose to stay on the older version. Now that choice is gone and the company is in charge of what version I am using. This is a huge step backwards.

I expect when I obtain software, it will continue to work forever, behave the same way forever, until/unless I choose to update it. That fundamental promise is going away quickly.


One funny piece of that is the O365 gives both online and downloaded/local editions of word, excel, powerpoint, etc.

Those two editions often cannot properly render documents made in the other one.


Maybe I’ve been lucky and only worked in well-resourced corporations, but across a ~15 year career in the private sector, I can barely think of any examples where this is the case.

Ironically, a far greater pain point (in my experience) has been poor interchangeability and access to cloud storage solutions between internal and external collaborators.


Well the same is true with any selfhosted office suite. With of course the main difference that Office365 is limited by Microsoft APIs, and downtime is not dictated by your bug usage or infra. Good luck working when Azure is down or your have connectivity problems.


Agreed. I think that part of the problem is that SAAS makes 'bought' software look expensive which has driven down the prices on eg iOS App Store to a level that isn't viable.


Indeed, this is one of the bigger problems. Big Tech have normalised a situation where free (but you pay for it in other ways) or misleading SaaS (total cost much higher, although cheaper in the short run) are dominant and smaller developers struggle to compete against this


The value I get from and the price I pay for O365 are more closely aligned than when I used to buy shrink-wrapped software. “This software costs $299 in months 0 and some unknown month in the future, probably between 25 and 42, and is free in all the other months.” is how things used to work.

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.


The moat is the sorry state of GUI for stand alone apps.


It takes resources to build, maintain, and operate most SaaS offerings. More competition should drive prices down, theoretically, but in reality there just aren't enough software engineers in the world who can build and maintain effective alternatives to many SaaS offerings.


I think there are several factors why server-side software has taken over:

  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.
So it's pretty clear to me why it's happening, but that doesn't make it right. Personally, I'm going for a client-side-as-much-as-possible approach for my own project. This should allow me to scale a mostly free product to as many users possible without incurring much marginal cost. I'm hoping that I can then sustain the project on smaller revenue streams, since I'm not really interested in more than replacing a regular salary.


Interestingly enough, my business makes more money with offering one time payments. I set the one time price to how much the subscription would cost over 2 years. Because my SMB customers were churning after just a couple of months, this switch 6x-ed my revenue per customer, but reduced my number of new customers by around 3 times. So in total 2x more revenue with 3x less work :) [Setting up new customers took manual work, so not 100% SaaS]


Personally, I _love_ SaaS software.

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.


Companies are creating costs for the sake of creating costs.

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'.


I have to disagree. It all depends on the value I receive which some are a bit better than before.

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.


It's not worth it when you consider Office 2013 was available as a single $99 purchase for 5 machines, forever.

For a business however Office 365 w/Outlook makes sense because maintaining your own email server is way too much hassle these days.


Yeah, MS offer great value. I was with Dropbox, and they increased their prices to $99 for just storage. And I cancelled it, as I get 1Tb storage + Ms Office for that amount.


Obviously tangential to the main point here, but one thing I'm grateful for is my bank (Monzo) allowing me to set up virtual cards. I no longer have any anxiety about speculative subscriptions because I can unilaterally cancel anything.


This obviously depends on T&C but failed payment usually doesn't mean cancelled subscription.

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.


It’s really only a last resort in “disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard‘“ situations, but they’re welcome to fight me.


Are you cancelling the service? Or are you just stopping paying? If they’re still providing the service you just aren’t paying then I don’t know if that puts you in the wrong.


I'm a small business owner (20 people). To us Office 365 is one of the best value for money subscription. What's comparatively egregious is any single-product startup believing they can charge 10-12$ per user*month. That trend (pushed by VC-backed economics) has no long-term future IMHO. No wonder Slack had to sell. A feature doesn't automatically make a product, and a product doesn't lead to a sustainable stand-alone business. Hopefully there will be plenty of innovative startups capable of developing interesting things outside the typical 10$ sub business model.


My biggest problem with SaaS is how much control it gives a corporation over a user. They have control over you're experience via unnecessary UI refreshes. They have control over what version you're allowed to use. They have control of your data via surveillance of your devices. They have control over your files via file formats which can become inaccessible unless you continue to subscribe. And they control how much you should be taxed for all of the above.

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.


I keep a personal txt file named "cemetery_of_paid_apps.txt" it's where I hold all the apps that I paid and latter became subscription based as a reminder of how stupid I was of paying for apps.

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.


PocketCasts actually granted previous purchasers a free Pro subscription in perpetuity because of community backlash. That one really annoys me because I would happily pay $5 for Pro PocketCasts functionality for a year or two, but I'm not going to pay a recurring fee every month since I don't care about any cloud storage or sync functionality.

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.


Where exactly is my pro pocket cast subscription? I bought the iOS app and, before that, the android app. And they still ask me to pay for the pro.


If you bought it before, you should see your premium lifetime subscription on login: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/19/20873611/pocket-casts-plu...

And again... if it works, but you don't want it, let me know :)


It seems like it’s only for those who purchased the windows(web?) app. If you purchased the iOS and/or android apps (like me) you’re out of luck.

Doesn’t matter, I barely use pocket cast nowadays.


One big problem with one time payment model is that you at some point after shipping and fixing bugs need to start doing other things (next paid version or another product). In this period you will accumulate a lot of new features/functionality that isn't exposed to the users for a long time. This causes two problems:

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.


Sounds like OP doesn't understand the business-and-personal value of a subscription

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.


The software world today is also very different. SaaS has become the norm because the typical user experience for software products spans multiple devices and is a far more connected experience that relies on services carried over the Internet. When you add server-side services into the mix, you have a much-increased variable cost to delivering software that is more difficult to absorb in a once-off price.

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.


Don’t mind apps charging subscriptions per se — business models are good. Annoying when I buy special-purpose hardware though, and it requires a recurring subscription to use the software features it comes with. See Tesla Autopilot, Eight Sleep mattress, Hero pill machine, etc. Two different things imo and the latter is abusive.


Yes ugh, The App store is basically unusable right now because nearly every app requires a subscription. Maybe I shouldn't complain about this since I have a subscription service myself, but don't really know what alternatives I have since the service requires fixed costs. But still ugh.


I agree with you, as a user I simply don't buy subscriptions.

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.


I hate it. I use Adobe Lightroom often. I'm stuck in version 6 I think. I don't want to pay monthly, when I edit photos 4-6 times a year in a bulk.

Wait till cars also become like this. Features of infotainment enabled if you pay subscription. Greed, greed everywhere ...


Cars are already like this, sadly.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-...


Lots of business users actually prefer monthly subscription over a fixed license. This lets them move the costs from capital costs (CAPEX) to operational costs (OPEX) which finance departments like more.

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 had the same opinion as the OP, when this started, but I have come to be OK with it (in my limited use case).

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.


Assuming there is a large demand for more user-friendly pricing models, shouldn't companies start popping up that offer similar services with a better pricing model. As mentioned here, JetBrains has a model that more or less supports both.


In the past I developed a mobile app that was standalone and users had to pay only once.

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?


The main problem I see with this business model is not the primary characteristics of this model which sound like a rent. But I have a feeling that having such a model does decrease the drive to innovate. In a pay-once model you always need to entice the customer with new features or open up entirely new markets. With subscription, the customer will basically pay for maintenance.

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.


May be an unpopular opinion, but I don't mind "renting" software, as long as I can cancel whenever I want. I guess in B2B land contract periods are more likely and sometimes essential.


All software has an expiration date. Because realistically, you can’t run software bought for Windows XP, because Windows XP is at end of life.

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'm not so sure.

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?


It's often preferred for b2b because updates, predictable cost (opex vs capex) and support. It also provides the right incentives: Suppliers work hard to prevent outages because you won't get paid per hour for fixing your own stuff anymore. I guess it's leaking into b2c, where is has some nice uses, but indeed it's getting pretty out of hand. What does help is a bank (app) that lists all your subscriptions, would be even nicer if I could cancel from there.


Software is made and supported by software developers and the developers want a recurring pay. Basically they want their employers to subscribe to their services. No wonder the employers transfer the subscription model up the value chain.

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.


It's gone too far obviously. Software like Photoshop should be available to buy, if you don't want the latest features you don't pay for this year's update.


You have a point with Photoshop. Indeed, in some cases, a software application is so saturated with features that no new features are significantly interesting to the users, or the vendor can't figure out how to keep adding value. Microsoft Word is another good example. Demanding recurrent subscription for such software doesn't look fair and the vendor may abuse its market power and dominance. Although, I don't think there is any good solution for this issue except competition.


I have no problem paying for SaaS rather than one time when:

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.


SAAS, concerned billing, is a desktop application with the optional support fee that became mandatory ( in many cases).

At least, that's how I perceive it.


I have a solution! I subscribe to Spotify and a spelling practice app for my children. Anything else, I buy outright or use free software. I will not pay for a subscription when there's any other option.

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.


>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!

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.


Ok. What is the solution? I see the list of complaints, and empathise with most, but what is the solution? It’s been pointed out elsewhere in this thread that FOSS devs are complaining about not being paid, so clearly that model is broken too. What is your solution?


When automobiles came out, Henry Ford (on his 3rd try) managed to perfect mass production. He lowered the cost of production by at least an order of magnitude below that of traditional manufacturers, while producing quality, interchangeable parts.

Eventually, the market saturated, and his competitors shifted to fashion based sales, with model years, etc. Ford resisted, but eventually gave in.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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 clarify, this is for software running on my computer, not software as a service running in the cloud.


You don't need to use these product or services, the choice is yours. If you derive value, you should assign that value a cost and that's exactly what we're seeing.

To be blunt, you seem like you're ranting and your conjecture is not wrong but just, opinionated.


"Did he have hands? Did he have a face? Yes? Then it wasn't us."[0]

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


Nah.

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.


In an era when interest rates are so low perpetuities are worth an absolute fortune.


I believe usage-based subscriptions are going to be replacing tiered subscriptions.


It's not a rise in subscriptions, but a rise in software services. Much of the software we use today is a cloud-based continuous service. In the past, software was mostly an unchanging application run locally.


I don't really share OP's impressions. I think the move to the subscription model is one of the best things that happened to our industry in the recent years.

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.


> I don't see how these are user hostile.

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


> 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.

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.


I do agree… since adobe started they their subscription service I was finally able to afford photoshop!


I think it’s a function of how useful it’s become in daily work. I pay for an annual pycharm subscription. It’s only a few hundred bucks a year and the alternatives are not as good. Not even close.


I think that pricing based on usage will be a positive step - you only pay for what you use, it ties your spending on your incomes as well. Not sure if its applicable for consumer products.


Technology has not been "appropriated". You still have the option to use free software, or only use software that charges an initial fee. The people building the software you use (not "appropriating") are also free to offer their software on whatever terms they deem appropriate.

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.


If you think some product has too high price, then that's a market opportunity. Grab it or let's talk about it more!


Using trustpilot as evidence of quality of a company is really strange. First and foremost trustpilot is 100% scam.


Dear Abhinav2000, since you are proposing to get software (which in some cases requires years of work to develop and huge investments up-front) free of charge, do you mind me asking you if you provide software which you developed (over several years) free of charge?


> 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!

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


This +10 (if I could). Modern Corporate / Wall Street capitalism will brutally optimize for whatever schemes squeeze the most money out of the victims. Oops, sorry! - I meant customers.

(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.)


> 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.


Talk is cheap. If you have a better idea, build it.


Dump these sorts of products and use FOSS replacements instead, preferably ones licensed under the AGPL so that SaaS-ification doesn't take us right back to where we are now.


Okay, I'll bite:

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?


Red Hat, Grafana, and Nextcloud all seem to be doing fine.


As usual, a couple of behemoths are presented as an example, completely ignoring everything else.

Should I remind you what RH is a subscription service?

What about all other, non-GPL software (and companies which developed it) which would be extinct, because "everyone moved to *GPL-like"?


> As usual, a couple of behemoths are presented as an example, completely ignoring everything else.

Are there any examples of going with AGPL having the opposite outcome?

> Should I remind you what RH is a subscription service?

If all subscription software were like Red Hat's, then a conversation wouldn't need to be had about it.

> What about all other, non-GPL software (and companies which developed it) which would be extinct, because "everyone moved to *GPL-like"?

It doesn't need to go extinct. It could be relicensed to GPL too.


In general I do share your negative view on subscription business.

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...


Around 200 years ago, we all decided to move into the forest, instead of continuing to take our chances on the plains. It was not one person's decision, and unfolded naturally from the fact that (1) the forest provided benefits like shade from the sun, plentiful foraging, and privacy, and (2) we had invented things like strong rope and canvas, allowing us to better use the forest to make houses, and other resources. It started with one family, and then another. It took a long time, but eventually the elder councils proclaimed: "we are forest people now."

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.


I'm happy to sell a perpetual licence of my niche desktop software for 300 euros, but nobody will lay for that. Anything less, and I cannot promise updates and development time. So it will be 5 euro a month licencing until the end of it's days.


I won't subscribe to software anymore. People that encourage subscriptions are all devs looking to make money that is all.

Is greed wrong? No. But it will definitely shorten the lifespan of your startup. Most of these SaaS offerings are trash.


Do I miss something shutterstock also offers on demand bundles?


So does Office, Either "home & Student" or "Home & Business" depending on if you need commercial usage or not.

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.




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