Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software

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.<p>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.<p>PS: my comment comes off as advocating for the subscription model. I personally hate it with a passion: I’d rather pay for upgrades&#x2F;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.

A lot of comments are already addressing this horrible trend of moving from standalone native software to “SaaS” but this one is also terrible:<p>&gt; now trying to trick people to use One Drive more<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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’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?<p>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?<p>EDIT:<p>I apologize if this sounds too passive-aggressive, but I&#x27;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&#x2F;mo for a cool app is too much, then okay. You don&#x27;t have to do it, no deal. ¯\_(ツ)\_&#x2F;¯<p>PS Great example of solo-developer is the InkDrop creator. He is working on this note-taking app since ~2016. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inkdrop.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inkdrop.app</a>

This is not a wholly black and white world, though.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Gotta survive somehow, or else we cannot have nice things.

I don&#x27;t think this is fundamentally about subscriptions. They&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>It aligns incentives too: developers are strongly incentivized to keep existing users happy, rather than ignoring them and constantly chasing the next new sale.<p>I do think there&#x27;s a financial&#x2F;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&#x27;d give you complete control and visibility into all your subscriptions in one place, whether the vendor likes it or not.

It&#x27;s actually getting wild &quot;out there&quot;. WordPress was once a really good choice for a blogging platform. Now, majority of the &quot;popular&quot; 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.<p>And yes, it is mostly the cost of convenience. For example, I manage my own server not because it&#x27;s cheaper (which it is), but because I don&#x27;t need to pay extra $50 a month to get a &quot;managed&quot; experience.<p>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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;s a double whammy for the software industry which would have high margins by just using a &quot;sell&quot; model anyway.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whitesourcesoftware.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-saas-loophole-in-gpl-open-source-licenses&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whitesourcesoftware.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-saas-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;11467&#x2F;can-i-use-gpl-software-to-provide-a-commercial-cloud-service" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;11467&#x2F;can-i-u...</a>

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.<p>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.<p>This is a good place to start <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;selfhosted" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;selfhosted</a>

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.<p>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.

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.<p>When you have a $29 a year subscription for a one off use utility app they can fuck off.<p>When you have a $29 a month subscription for storage, music, TV, fitness, games that spans 6 people I’m fine.<p>What has changed is extortion for some products which have dubious or little value and really difficult to exit contracts.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>amazing</i> value.

A conversation needs to be had over subscription humans.<p>The real world today is increasingly run by subscription humans, or “employees.” They are lazy, business-hostile, and rent extracting.<p>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.<p>What has the world come to, where labor has been appropriated and we are left paying rents every month to these business-hostile humans!<p>Why can we not force them to create software for us, for free?<p>&#x2F;s

This is what you get for not supporting FOSS, especially R&amp;D.<p>Imagine if every company took 5-10% of their IT budget to sponsor alternatives to the products they need, <i>even if they were not using it</i>. Take every marketing agency that subscribes to Adobe Suite, and get them to sponsor Gimp&#x2F;Krita&#x2F;Inkscape&#x2F;etc. Every startup using Google Apps&#x2F;Office365&#x2F;Slack&#x2F;Dropbox, get them to donate just $5&#x2F;employee&#x2F;month to Free and Open alternatives.<p>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&#x2F;or innovate.

&gt; Microsoft has used its dominant position to charge for MS Office in perpetuity<p>You can still buy a definitive, noncloud, without subscription of MS Office, and they still release it (there is a 2021 edition).

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:<p>- 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.<p>- Regulatory capture. Big corporations have an advantage because they can use their connections to politicians to change the regulatory environment in their favor.<p>- 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).<p>- Limited liability. Corporations are legal constructs which are not liable for crimes (especially negligence) in the same was as people are. Corporations don&#x27;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.<p>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?<p>I bought MS Office (non-subscription) and honestly Google Docs&#x2F;Sheets (free tier) works for most of my needs.<p>While Apple wants to push subscription apps, you don&#x27;t need to subscribe to them. I don&#x27;t. If the value is there, sure subscribe to them.<p>Apple is pretty in your face with selling their services. I get nagware iCloud storage limit subscription notifications that I can&#x27;t dismiss. They are pushing for Arcade, TV+, Music, etc. sign -ups in their OS settings. I haven&#x27;t paid for them and don&#x27;t intend to.<p>Just because these paid subscriptions exist does not mean they are entitled to your money every month.

Couldn&#x27;t agree more. I was working in a company that didn&#x27;t allow local checkouts. You&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;m afraid it&#x27;s not the only one).<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s kind of runaway I&#x27;m afraid.

Consumers do not want the subscription model. Consumers <i>never</i> wanted the subscription model. That will strike some here as obvious, but it&#x27;s the important point in all this.<p>The root issue is that big tech has too much power. It is thrusting a model onto the public that primarily benefits itself.<p>I&#x27;ll bet <i>some</i> of the people here on HN who argue <i>for</i> the subscription model work at smaller businesses, not for big tech. That seems crazy to me: customers can&#x27;t afford to experiment when it comes to subscriptions. A customer who shells out for &#x27;essential&#x27; subscriptions (ie: Netflix, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc) won&#x27;t have money left to subscribe to your Shopping List app.<p>If a &#x27;conversation&#x27; is needed, its aim should be how to defang (pun intended) big tech. A conversation about &#x27;subscription software&#x27; 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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>Similarly, there are a bunch of mostly-offline apps that I&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>Adobe is the worst at this though – I have <i>literally negative interest</i> in any of the &quot;cloud connectivity&quot; 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.<p>There is little more annoying that wanting to buy something—and I&#x27;m not talking about cheaping out on it either—and having the seller actively refuse to sell it to you. And I think that&#x27;s where the feeling of frustration comes from – the <i>constant feeling of something trying to trick and manipulate you into becoming a more profitable customer for them by making your experience worse</i>.

I think it is fair to complain about user-hostile and scammy companies.<p>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&#x27;s the same with software.<p>btw: the oldest subscription models are insurances. No one is complaining about them.

It just means that you don&#x27;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.<p>Now with games becoming digital, if you break their &#x27;terms of service&#x27; they can lock and ban your account; taking your &#x27;digital&#x27; games away or even locking the console. (Unless you paid for the physical version.)

Seems to me that there is an inherent contradiction at the heart of SAAS. A service either:<p>- Has a big enough moat that its immune to competition - in which case you get rent seeking behaviour; or<p>- It&#x27;s vulnerable and could disappear &#x2F; become economically unviable so you wouldn&#x27;t want to have your business rely on it.<p>So you essentially have to choose between two unpalatable choices.

It takes resources to build, maintain, and operate most SaaS offerings. More competition should drive prices down, theoretically, but in reality there just aren&#x27;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:<p><pre><code> 1. It&#x27;s easier to charge for, holding the software hostage in a way. Also gives a nice excuse &quot;Look! Need to pay for server costs!&quot;. 2. Greater choice in programming language and libraries. If you want to do ML of any kind for example, that&#x27;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. </code></pre> So it&#x27;s pretty clear to me why it&#x27;s happening, but that doesn&#x27;t make it right. Personally, I&#x27;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&#x27;m hoping that I can then sustain the project on smaller revenue streams, since I&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s one thing to host your own instance of a thing; it&#x27;s another ballgame to host many instances of a thing for other people!<p>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!)<p>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&#x2F;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&#x27;m not stuck with a contract, I can (theoretically) switch to Dashlane, iCloud Keychain, or whatever tomorrow if I don&#x27;t like it.<p>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.<p>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?<p>Most likely not. But many hours have been spent on meetings, designs and implementation to ship a new UI to all end users.<p>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.<p>No one wants to declare software as &#x27;done&#x27; or at the very least &#x27;feature complete&#x27;.

I have to disagree. It all depends on the value I receive which some are a bit better than before.<p>For example for Office365 Home you get 5 licenses including 1TB of OneDrive all for $99&#x2F;year.<p>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 $200&#x2F;year for lesser product because it doesn’t even include the value of 1TB OneDrive.<p>Thus 99$&#x2F;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.

Obviously tangential to the main point here, but one thing I&#x27;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.

I&#x27;m a small business owner (20 people). To us Office 365 is one of the best value for money subscription. What&#x27;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&#x27;t automatically make a product, and a product doesn&#x27;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&#x27;re experience via unnecessary UI refreshes. They have control over what version you&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;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 &quot;cemetery_of_paid_apps.txt&quot; it&#x27;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.<p>So far the list:<p>1. Fantastical<p>2. Unread<p>3. Notability<p>4. 1password<p>5. Infuse<p>6. 1blocker<p>7. PocketCast<p>8. Ulysses<p>I&#x27;m well aware that some grandfathered their previous paid licenses after a lot of noise (Notability). But I don&#x27;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&#x27;s a matter of time before they all become a subscription service, so I don&#x27;t even bother anymore buying new apps.

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&#x2F;functionality that isn&#x27;t exposed to the users for a long time. This causes two problems:<p>1)Users who would love to have new stuff quickly have to wait, often for years until new version is ready<p>2)You unload everything in one go with the release and that means tons of bug reports&#x2F;feature requests&#x2F;urgent work at this time. This is stressful and counterproductive.<p>Subscription solves those problems and aligns incentives so developers ship new stuff as soon as it&#x27;s ready which is better for everyone. I agree it&#x27;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&#x27;t make business sense.<p>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 &quot;what if they don&#x27;t prolong the subscription for a few months but then want back on it&quot;. What Jet Brains has done wouldn&#x27;t fly in consumer market. It&#x27;s just not an easy problem to solve.<p>My own experience is that a few years ago people were thankful we don&#x27;t offer subscription but these days more ask for it as they don&#x27;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&#x27;t understand the business-and-personal value of a subscription<p>Let&#x27;s take a &quot;traditional&quot; 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 <i>else</i>? Gotta go through the whole song-and-dance circus all over again.<p>Now look at a subscription: you spend T amount of time (and money) to get a customer. They pay you S subscription fee (<i>way</i> lower than the M in the previous example (per unit time)), but <i>includes</i> the fact that they&#x27;re <i>already paying a [small] amount to have your thing. To </i>keep* them, all you have to do is <i>NOT SCREW UP</i>. And if they <i>do</i> want to cancel, you can offer them a time-sensitive&#x2F;-dependent&#x2F;-limited &quot;discount&quot;; if they stay, you - basically - didn&#x27;t lose anything (except a couple bucks for a few months); if they leave, then they&#x27;re gone, and get no more updates, support, etc for whatever they were paying for.<p>It&#x27;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 <i>major</i> cost of acquiring a customer is up-front. Once you <i>have</i> them, it&#x27;s &quot;cheap&quot; 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.<p>While many of us here would prefer the idea of owning and licensing software in perpetuity, the reality is that most users don&#x27;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&#x27;t afford it.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t complain about this since I have a subscription service myself, but don&#x27;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&#x27;t buy subscriptions.<p>As a developer I sell subscriptions.<p>As a business, it&#x27;s repeatable income which makes it easy to calculate how much you&#x27;ll roughly make. I&#x27;m also much more inclined to purchase a subscription as a business: you have more money and generally you&#x27;re buying something trying to save you time or making your more money.<p>I agree that offline software sold as a subscription is ridiculous; I&#x27;d much rather purchase a software and then buy updates if I want to.<p>That&#x27;s the reason I do online SaaS: I don&#x27;t know how I could sell an offline app as a subscription with a straight face.<p>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&#x27;m stuck in version 6 I think. I don&#x27;t want to pay monthly, when I edit photos 4-6 times a year in a bulk.<p>Wait till cars also become like this. Features of infotainment enabled if you pay subscription. Greed, greed everywhere ...

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.<p>It&#x27;s not just something software vendors push, it&#x27;s what many of their clients actually want.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>I used to pay about $900&#x2F;year for a subset of the CS Suite (I don&#x27;t remember what it was called, but had Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and maybe Dreamweaver or InDesign -neither of which I used).<p>The full CS Suite costs me about $600&#x2F;yr, and gives me access to every single one of the apps. I don&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>Users then started asking extra features and down voted my app when I said I didn&#x27;t want to implement them.<p>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.<p>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.<p>How would the world of cars have looked if it had a primarily subscription model (which will probably come in this area as well)?<p>So long story short, I find subscription model bad because it drives down innovation.

May be an unpopular opinion, but I don&#x27;t mind &quot;renting&quot; 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.<p>Some software require APIs that cost money to run. Like collaboration features or some number crunching things.<p>Most software must be updated continuously, because that is the expectation of some users, some platform owners (App Store, the OS, …).<p>In reality, most software has an expiration date and you can calculate the yearly fee from the expected time till EOL.<p>Now, the subscription fee can be higher than a one time fee, or not. Depending on your usage.

It&#x27;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&#x27;t get paid per hour for fixing your own stuff anymore. I guess it&#x27;s leaking into b2c, where is has some nice uses, but indeed it&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t require support or further development may not need subscriptions though.

I have no problem paying for SaaS rather than one time when:<p>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<p>2. When there is ongoing, regular feature or service improvement.<p>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).<p>At least, that&#x27;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&#x27;s any other option.<p>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.

&gt;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!<p>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 <i>your</i> 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, <i>interchangeable</i> parts.<p>Eventually, the market saturated, and his competitors shifted to fashion based sales, with model years, etc. Ford resisted, but eventually gave in.<p>---<p>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).<p>Nobody expects to get next year&#x27;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.<p>---<p>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.<p>It seems reasonable to want any manufacturing defects to be corrected for no additional cost to the customer.<p>---<p>It does NOT seem reasonable for a manufacturer to be able to <i>force</i> the rental of a product instead of selling it. IBM was forced out of the exclusively rental business of its hardware for good reasons.<p>If someone wants to offer their software as a rental, to run on the customer&#x27;s premises, that&#x27;s fine, as long as purchase is also an option at a reasonable price.<p><i>If software manufacturers don&#x27;t want to offer a reasonable price purchase, they should be forced out of the rental business by government fiat</i>.

You don&#x27;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&#x27;s exactly what we&#x27;re seeing.<p>To be blunt, you seem like you&#x27;re ranting and your conjecture is not wrong but just, opinionated.

&quot;Did he have hands? Did he have a face? Yes? Then it wasn&#x27;t us.&quot;[0]<p>Are you old enough to have had a chance to use your eyes and look and see what&#x27;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&#x27;s rare.<p>What&#x27;s happened to games is happening to most other parts of software. There are exceptions of course, but they&#x27;re rare at scale. If you don&#x27;t want to pay for exploitative software don&#x27;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 &quot;data is the new oil&quot;[1] and did an &quot;orly?&quot; and now they&#x27;re here addicting grandmothers into squashing candy.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZNDBo3spnwg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZNDBo3spnwg</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;theeconomist&#x2F;status&#x2F;860135249552003073" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;theeconomist&#x2F;status&#x2F;860135249552003073</a>

Nah.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t really share OP&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;s a model which lets you sustainably sell software and keep working on it, delivering updates, etc.<p>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&#x27;s mostly fixed by the subscription model.<p>I don&#x27;t see how these are user hostile.<p>Yeah, subscriptions that are hard to cancel are bad. But that&#x27;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 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 &quot;appropriated&quot;. You still have the option to use free software, or only use software that charges an initial fee. The people <i>building</i> the software you use (not &quot;appropriating&quot;) are also free to offer their software on whatever terms they deem appropriate.<p>Economically, if you&#x27;re receiving ongoing value from software, it is not illogical that you&#x27;d pay ongoing cost for that software. We don&#x27;t do this with most physical goods because it&#x27;s logistically difficult to accomplish. But that doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s an inherent evil. I really don&#x27;t see the problem here.

If you think some product has too high price, then that&#x27;s a market opportunity. Grab it or let&#x27;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?

&gt; 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!<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t prevent admins from earning money

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&#x27;t take us right back to where we are now.

In general I do share your negative view on subscription business.<p>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&#x27;re interested.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trive-studio.medium.com&#x2F;do-you-hate-subscriptions-the-sucker-or-saviour-of-capitalism-faa01c5f1b9a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trive-studio.medium.com&#x2F;do-you-hate-subscriptions-th...</a>

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&#x27;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: &quot;we are forest people now.&quot;<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>It took a while, but eventually people realized that the forest, while it was most assuredly the &quot;best&quot; 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.<p>But we could live with these negatives, it was still the best possible world.<p>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: &quot;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&quot;. Others started to be angry that the forest had so many trees, and started saying: &quot;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.&quot;<p>Others started saying: &quot;Why is it that wherever we go in the forest, the forest bugs follow us, the bears still come and eat us?&quot; Some people try to explain: &quot;That is just what a forest is! You can&#x27;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&#x27;t blame the forest, we are the ones that moved in here in the first place.&quot;<p>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&#x27;s fault, and its not any one person in the forest that is causing the issues. It&#x27;s just a forest, there is always bugs and bears in the forest.

I&#x27;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&#x27;s days.

I won&#x27;t subscribe to software anymore. People that encourage subscriptions are all devs looking to make money that is all.<p>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?