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…
Companies prefer subscriptions because it maximizes revenue. It's as simple as that. Zero sum game between company and consumer.
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
I should say your choice to subscribe should not be taken away. I don't think my choice to own should be taken away.
Cars are typically usable for well over a decade :)
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?
Really? You're still running operating systems that are a decade old on hardware even older?
Why?
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 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.
The point is that software should remain usable, but in your example that hasn’t been the case.
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!
It looks like Adobe does sell one-time purchases of Acrobat Pro 2020 for $450. I'll cease my cloud-yelling.
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.
...only if you still have hardware and operating systems that support it (or that it supports, depending on your point of view)
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.
Also, the vast majority of people would prefer to live in a home they own than burn money renting.
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?
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
You don't only get compatibility with X with the new version but all that as well.
They should not pay them, they should use one of the numerous alternatives.
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!
Written by someone who - probably - doesn't understand how complex software is to write/update/expand/maintain
And the case have previously been that such development is largely paid for by new users.
The answer is that it makes it harder to justify perpetual revenue streams then.
Well, that's on the software maker.
Why pay salaries in perpetuity for something made and sold once?
>Anything sold on Apple platforms, for example, nowadays has to be updated at least once a year just to keep up.
Factually wrong.
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.
Incorrect.
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".
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?
There is nothing stopping Joe-who-only-pays-full-licences to continue using his MS 2007 Office suite, is there?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That sounds like an extension of "you wouldn't download a car".
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
[0]: https://everymac.com/systems/mac-clones/index-mac-clones.htm...
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
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.
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...
I'd fully expect someone to provide this if there is a market for it.
Kinda like how the money and safety provided by monopolies can’t be corrected by market forces either.
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.
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.