What is the most useless app that you have seen being given as a subscription?
For me, I tried a ‘minimalist’ launcher app for Android that had a 7 day trial or something and they had a yearly subscription based model for it. I was aghast. I would literally expect the app to blow my mind and do everything one can assume to go that way. In a world, where Nova Launcher (Yes, I know it has been acquired by Branch folks but it still is a sturdy one) or Niagara exist plus many alternatives including minimalist ones on F Droid, the dev must be releasing revolutionary stuff to factor in a subscription service.
Second, is a controversial choice, since it’s free tier is quite good and people like it so much. But, Pocketcasts. I checked it’s yearly price the other day, and boy, in my country, I can subscribe to Google Play Pass, YouTube Premium and Spotify and still have money left before I hit the ceiling what Pocketcasts is asking for paid upgrade.
Also, what are your views on one time purchase vs subscriptions? Personally, I find it much easier to purchase, if it’s good enough even if it was piratable, something if it is a one time purchase rather than repetitive.
Apps that provide server time either synchronizing data and storing information or providing an api to bring info to the device.
Data intensive apps like windy can charge whatever they need, now MF like Strava pushing an $79/yr for routes is about BS.deleted by creator
I hope you love OutRun just as much as I loved making it and if you find anything I should improve upon, please let me know.
Tim, the developer.
I like Tim, he seems like a lovely guy.
Microsoft Office.
The subscription service is actually alright for businesses, but for retail users there is no compelling reason for it to be a subscription.
the pricing of ‘365’ is essentially a subscription to cloud storage, whether you use it or not, and getting office ‘free’ with that sub.
Software as a Service is only a value when the service offers you something that the software on its own cannot do; otherwise it’s just rent seeking.
Paying for cloud storage, for continuous content updates (especially news), or a server to process or generate content that can’t be done on my device, all fine. Paying for a messaging service to pass my messages to others, or for a game to maintain servers for multiplayer play? No problem.
But a subscription to remove ads? Your app doesn’t need an external server to do that. That’s rent-seeking. Same with a subscription to unlock widgets or some third-party connection.
A subscription for regular software updates are right on the line for me. In a sane world, the software package you purchase would be provided with some amount of security updates, but you wouldn’t have to pay any extra until you decided to purchase the next version for new features. You know, like it was until Adobe decided to upend the industry. (Incidentally, it’s weird that Adobe has gone from being the poster child for rent seeking in software to one of the more reasonable companies that’s doing software as a service. I still hate that there’s no way to get their software without a subscription, but at least they are providing some form of continuous value in the form of fonts and stock images and such.)
On the other end of the spectrum you have something like Minecraft, where my ($20? I don’t remember) purchase from over a decade ago is still receiving regular content updates for free, multiple times a year, with no subscription needed. I can pay a subscription fee to get an online realm for myself and my family, but I don’t have to because I can also just set up and operate a server myself. More than reasonable.
But a subscription to remove ads? Your app doesn’t need an external server to do that.
This is kind of a bad example because the value proposition is different but still very clear - the default version of the app provides a regular income stream to the developers. If you don’t like that, you can choose to provide an alternative income stream instead.
It is still unfair because the subscription cost is usually many times more than what the ads will earn for a single user - but it’s a matter of quantity at that point, not quality.
The Adobe case is still a much better example, IMO. Yes, they may offer regular content updates worth subscribing for, but their products could still work perfectly well as one-time purchases without access to the content stream. The only reason they didn’t is that they don’t have enough competition to be worried about customers moving away.
This is kind of a bad example because the value proposition is different but still very clear - the default version of the app provides a regular income stream to the developers.
No, I was quite intentional about that example. My assertion remains: if they’re not providing regular value, then I don’t feel obliged to provide them with regular income.
I don’t hope that they go hungry or anything. I just don’t think it’s my responsibility to subsidize them forever just because they made an app for me once. I’ve got bills to pay too.
Ok, yeah, upon reflection I think I agree with you.
Pocket Casts has a server component that makes sense you have to pay for, and for the most part the only things you don’t get with the free version are the server stuff and a little bit of cosmetic stuff. $40/year for 20GB is a little steep, but the fact that they charge for it doesn’t bother me.
With the exception of the folders; that doesn’t make sense to me being a Plus-only thing.
All that being said, I bought the app before it went free, so I am grandfathered in to a lifetime Plus plan; but if that hadn’t been the case I would not be paying for a subscription today.
I bought the app before it went free, so I am grandfathered in to a lifetime Plus plan; but if that hadn’t been the case I would not be paying for a subscription today.
Same, I don’t think I’d be paying for it otherwise
Products aren’t services.
So much bullshit has come from pretending otherwise.
But loans are temporal. That’s all that is happening – you’re renting out software (akin to digital library borrowing), in some sense, not buying a product.
The problem is how to do it otherwise and maintain enough income to ensure continued active development for future updates.
I don’t have a solution to it, and subscriptions aren’t ideal, but that’s the problem at least.
YouTube is a weird one, personally. Why shouldn’t it have a subscription based service like any other streaming network? Because the content is not created by, funded by, or even necessarily supported by YouTube.
It would make more sense for the subscription to be put upon uploaders to host the content, since their business is hosting the files, not really the content itself.
Now, if they had a better or at least more transparent way of giving the creators a truly fair cut of the monetary gains earned through their videos I would have nothing against YouTube Premium aside from hating that a completely free service has to move to a paid service.
I don’t agree with this. It creates a monetary barrier to starting a new channel. If uploading costs money the number of uploads is going to reduce considerably, no one likes to throw money away.
100% onboard with this. Just like imgur before it went shit in like 2014. Free uploaders get basic hosting, limited to 1080p, 5 min videos, max of ~5gb uploads, low-priority authentication/verification/approval, monetization/in-video advertising not allowed.
Subscription for 1hr videos, 50gb storage, streaming (50hrs/mth) monetization allowed.
Premium subscription for 4k, arbitrary length, 500gb (can be increased as required for additional cost)
Except Google is established. Paying a company that has shown complete disregard for users and privacy and ethics doesn’t work.
An upstart? Sure. They don’t have a proven track record of being assholes.
Nope, that would be horrible.
One of the biggest draws of YouTube is that anyone can go and upload their stuff. We literally have youtubers who started out in their rooms with a webcam, and became big because of the quality of their stuff. This would put a barrier of entry for new youtubers to enter.
Wow… lots of people in here bashing the subscription model, but let me point out it’s maybe not as bad as you think…
If you sell a product under a perpetual license model (I.e the one-time purchase model). Once you’ve sold the product, the manufacturer has almost no incentive to offering any support or updates to the product. At best it’s a marketing ploy, you offer support only to get word of mouth advertising of your product which is generally a losing proposition.
Since there’s little incentive to improve the experience for existing customers. Your main income comes from if you can increase your market share which generally means making products bloated often leading to a worse experience for everyone.
If the customer wants support, you need to sell them a support contract. If they want updates you have to make a new version and hope the customer sees enough additional value to be worth upgrading. Either way we’re back to a subscription model with more steps, more risk, and less upside than market expansion so it takes a backseat.
If you want to make a great product without some variation on a subscription. You need to invest heavily upfront in development (which most companies don’t have the capital to do, and investors generally won’t invest in unproven software)
From a product perspective, you don’t know if you’ve hit the mark until people start using your product. The first versions of anything but the most trivial of products is usually terrible, because no matter how good you are, half to three quarters of the ideas you build are going to be crap and not going to be what the customers need.
Perpetual licensing works for a small single purpose application with no expectation of support or updates.
It works for applications with broad market needs like office software.
For most niche applications, subscription models offer a better experience for both the customer and the manufacturer.
The customer isn’t facing a large transition cost to switch to a competitor’s product like they would if they had to buy a perpetual license of it, so you have a lot more incentive to support and improve your product. You also don’t see significant revenue if the customer that drops your service a couple months in… even more reason to focus on improving the product for existing customers.
People ought hate the idea of paying small reoccurring fees for software instead of a few big upfront costs. But from a business model perspective, businesses are way more incentivized to focus on making their products better for you under that model.
This sounds almost identical to the script our former VP of PM parroted. Everyone in engineering was vehemently opposed. But the C suite loved it, so we switched to a subscription model. Guess what, NEMs and govt clients don’t like paying subscriptions. No one does, but these are huge, powerful business entities we’re talking about here. You can’t force their hand. We lost 3 of our 4 biggest clients within 6 months. It took a massive amount of work to reverse course.
Just admit it. Subscriptions are nothing more than a blatant money grab. We (the SW industry) have been successfully releasing software and making fucktonnes of money for decades before some bean counter decided to get too greedy and come up with this bullshit.
I will absolutely give you that transitioning an established mature product to the subscription model is usually a terrible idea. Plenty of examples of that going horribly wrong.
As for subscriptions being a “blatant money grab” that definitely happens sometimes… notably when there’s a mature product with a dominating market share. The company already captured most of the market share, so they can’t get much more revenue from new customers, existing customers are satisfied with the version they have so they’re not buying any updates. Sales go down and someone comes along say just make it a subscription and keep milking the cash cow forever…. Yep, I admit it, that totally happens. The enshitification ensues.
But none of that’s the fault of the subscription model per se.
The same subscription model that becomes the incumbent’s downfall, is what creates a market opportunity for a new competitor.
A new competitor can coming in with a new product that was built with a subscription model from the start. The competitors product is cheap to try for a month, cheap to switch to with no big upfront costs. The newcomers can generally react much faster to customers needs than the incumbent. (Not because of the model, they can because they’re smaller)
Established software companies doing blatant money grabs happen all the time. Hell most of us are here using Lemmy because Spez attempted a blatant money grab on Reddit. Had nothing to do with the model.
Subscription model gets a lot of hate because greedy companies tried to use it as a blatant money grab exactly as you described. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Subscription models make it easier for newcomers entering a space, which is good for consumers. It’s more compatible with agile development methodologies because you don’t need wait until you’ve bundled enough features together to market it as a new version worth upgrading to. It’s in your best interest to ship new features immediately as they’re developed.
It’s totally fair of you don’t like the model.
But the model itself isn’t the problem.
Shitty companies being greedy will always happen.
Fair enough. I think us and everyone else on this thread can definitely agree on that last point, at the very least. 🫡
I don’t want or need continuous updates.
I want to buy something and have it be left alone without trying to steal more money from me for the thing I already bought.
The only possible valid excuse for a subscription to software is services that cannot possibly exist without meaningful spending on server infrastructure. If that’s cloud storage as the core of the purchase of the app, computations that are literally impossible to do locally or rely on data that’s expensive to maintain, a subscription is legitimate.
If it’s anything else it’s shitty and you’re a shitty person for doing it. Sell actual upgrades when they’re actually upgrades, without stealing access to what people bought. It’s the only acceptable model.
Lots of words and lots of assumptions. You can improve a product and release another version with a paid upgrade, while the old version remains completely functional. If your works have made the software substantially better, people will be happy to pay for a new version. If you aren’t adding real value, having the last version should not be necessary.
Updates can both add real value, but not be worth piecemealing out as separate purchases.
Totally fair if you don’t like the subscription model.
But I am genuinely curious what you think I’m making assumptions about.
Your biggest assumption is that you don’t have the drive to better a product if you don’t have a subscription model. It’s simply not true. You can and in fact must work to better your product if you want to stay relevant in the market and drive your customer to pay for a new version of your software.
Then, you proceed by describing the positives of a subscription model. While you’re not wrong about those points, you are leaving out the negatives and forgetting that every business model would have symmetrical points to be made.
There are some context in which subscription model are suited for or in fact even necessary, but the harsh reality is that now every software is turning into a subscription model only for two reason: you can extract 10x 100x more money for your customer, and you can lock-in them in order to keep them paying. This has proven to be detrimental for the quality of the softwares too: software loose interoperability and compatibility, updates are so frequent and gimmicky that they can be a problem, etc etc.
Filebot, I like and use the app but it shouldn’t be a subscription. You can buy a lifetime license for $48 but it’s too expensive for what it is.
Filebot is wildly useful. U cray
I’m with you here. I figure I’ll buy the year when I need it. I did the math and figured the lifetime was about 10 years worth. I figured if I end up paying for 10 years worth eventually, they’ve earned it. Likely something free will come out and I won’t need it anymore.
I’ve mostly stopped using it because I have had no more issues with plex recognizing files now.
I’m going to go with the unpopular opinion, that all apps should have the subscription support model.
Especially open source apps!
Ideally the code is open, and under GPL or a GPL.
Unless you have a device completely disconnected from the internet, there needs to be constant development, to update libraries, to get security updates, to fix rare but critical bugs. Nobody, and I mean nobody, should be running a binary that never gets updates from 10 years ago, on a device connected to the internet.
I seen a variety of approaches to supporting app development, I think a lot of the pricing is targeted towards the richest people, ignoring the vast majority of the world. For open source apps having the app itself with a nag screen, or a supported version of the app that is just a recurring donation maybe a dollar a month.
All that being said, when the subscription ends, the app should still work at the last version, and the user just assumes the risk of running older software un maintained.
(I’m aware there’s ways to mitigate the risk of unmaintained software, running in a very highly protected VM for example…)
Most users can’t name a single reason why their programs should update.
They don’t see risks in running unmaintained software. The developer does. I could get behind your all-subscriptions ideal, but if the user terminates the subscripition, he should be made unable to keep using the software. Hence why this cannot be the norm with Free software.
If the app doesn’t have network access, though, the OS sandbox should be more than sufficient to keep it secure.
A calculator app should be safe to run without updates at least until the OS APIs undergo a breaking changes (which should take several years at least).
As long as somebody is maintaining the software, it really doesn’t matter if it’s the original developers. If somebody takes the code and rebuilds the software, they are de facto responsible / maintaining it.
Software such as signal, and Molly, mostly because they talk to a central server have minimum version requirements. So if you go too far without updating you can no longer participate.
I think from the internet health perspective, a nag pop up when a software hasn’t been updated in it’s a 6 months, saying this software is out of date and proposes a security risk, should be sufficient. This could be done by the app store, the operating system, or even the app itself
All of them
This seems to be the model I’ve witnessed with many apps over the years. Free at first to get traction and users, then ads, then pay one time fee to get rid of ads, then subscription to keep using the app.
Then there are those that wouldn’t even pay a single fee and get upset at the thought as everything should be free.
The part that is upsetting is the contributions the early community made is monetized when they were
theythere for the benefit of the community.I do see there are costs to maintaining and updating these apps so I can understand a need to keep revenue flowing for these future costs. The one time payment is a hell of a deal for years with updates to accommodate the revisions needed for each system update let alone functionality improvements.
In the old days we would buy software for our PC and that was it. There wasn’t really any updates or further support for newer versions of Windows. The software would become very insecure or just stop functioning altogether with enough changes to windows.
It’s hard to find the right balance. I know I only want to pay once, or heck never, but I want these upgrades and updates too.
It’s hard to find the right balance. I know I only want to pay once, or heck never, but I want these upgrades and updates too.
Personally, I’d love a “buy this version” option, where you can just pay once, and get a version that doesn’t recieve updates, and I could then choose to subscribe to the “live” version from there.
Of course, this would just blow back in company’s faces when it comes to the “average” user, who would be a total fucking idiot and harass support about not getting updates they didn’t pay for
There’s actually quite a lot of software that monetises similarly to what you’re proposing. DxO and Ableton, just off the top of my head. Millions of happy users between those 2.
You get minor version updates for “free” (included in the one-time purchase). Upgrades to the next major version are discounted. Don’t need the features in the next major version? Stick with what you have for however long it works for you.
It’s by far my favourite model because it allows the developers to get paid, whilst not squeezing my neck. Everyone’s happy.
I generally have little need for paid software since I don’t (or more accurately, can’t) do any work at home, so it figures I wasn’t aware of what’s out there lol. The closest thing I use is cracked office. Because yeah, that payment type sounds pretty good, so long as releases are priced reasonably.
I figure a big difficulty is deciding on “major releases” vs rolling incremental development. If they’re going to sell major releases, they actually need to be able to consistently make pretty sizable upgrades, and not just “streamlined a couple menus, big fixes” type updates.
they actually need to be able to consistently make pretty sizeable upgrades
Precisely! It keeps them honest. Furthermore, it forces closing the feedback loop with users. Developers need to understand what features users want most, and what bugs or usability issues need to be prioritised. Not listening to feedback means no future revenue, simple as that.
The subscription model does none of that. It’s just a greedy money-grab.
I disagree that major version updates equates to keeping them honest. Not everything needs major overhauls every few years. You can have a perfectly closed feedback loop, and still fail to sell people on buying 5.0.0 when 4.7.12 is still good enough, and recieved the little things that matter.
You fail to sell when you fail to timely implement desirable features. And you fail to prioritise properly when you disregard or misinterpret feedback.
None of this is better mitigated by subscription models.
Are you just talking to hear yourself speak?
I have a photography program, that is a “buy once” model, but if you bought it, you can get a subscription for updates on-top. Once you unsubscribe the updates stop, but aren’t retracted. I find that to be a very reasonable solution.
Enshittification :(
No app should be a subscription
Keeping an app up to date takes time and work. Especially if it needs cloud services (e.g. multiplayer games).
Good luck trying to maintain an app forever if people just pay it once.
Then you’re paying for your user account with the cloud services, not the client apps (which you may not even use, e.g. if there is a Web version or a third party client).
A subtle distinction, I know, but it matters.
A subscription to a mobile game that gives more gold when buying gold
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Beside mentions of Jetbrains license model, I would like to mention the license model of a note taking app called Agenda[1].
It has a subscription wherein the customer retains the software and all of its functionality even after the subscription expires. One may resume the subscription down the line if they see a new feature worth having.
The creators of the app liken it to a magazine subscription wherein the customer retains the magazines even after the subscription lapses.
From my own experience of using it, I purchased the license for a year back in 2021 and let it lapse as I did not find the any of the new features to be worthwhile. I still keep an eye on their updates as it is my daily driver.
I second that this kind of licence seems very reasonable.
I find subscription licences to be frustrating but kind of reasonable, because those let the developers to focus on improving the product rather than making stuff broken on purpose to make the user pay for an upgrade. But that’s really controversial even in my own mind, don’t know if there’s a good solution but “magazine subscription” licence looks really good
Indeed, it is very reasonable.
It strikes a balance between subscriptions and perpetual licences.
Wow, I wouldn’t ever expect this, what a great license model
I too was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled upon the app a few years back. The licence model was a major factor in choosing the app over the rest.
