Subscription is the only way to do software
journal.standardnotes.org
journal.standardnotes.org
My advice is that don't try to push the subscription model everywhere. For some things it simply doesn't work that well and you might make better buck by just selling packages.
I believe a business should have to innovate to keep recurring business. Artificially tying it to a subscription is just milking a cow for more than it's worth. Or in this case, charging for access to an unlimited cow that you sometimes augment.
- In the photography space: Capture One Pro, DxO Optics Pro, ON1.
- In the video space: Avid, DaVinci Resolve, Sony Vegas.
- In the illustration space: Corel, Clip Studio Paint, Painttool SAI.
- In the audio space: ProTools, Ableton, ACID Pro.
- Nearly all video games.
- JetBrains, which has a novel subscription + purchase model where you can cancel your subscription and keep using the software.
I'd argue that the only case where you need a subscription model to stay afloat is when you don't add enough value that your users will be willing to purchase an upgrade.
Have any games development studio attempted a subscription model to games development and release? Not promoting the idea, wondering if it's been considered. Some popular studios with a good track record could certainly entertain the idea.
I hate the segregating of games like COD by DLC pack ownership, and wish they WOULD just do a $10/month subscription, and keep adding maps and singleplayer campaigns instead of dropping all my favorite maps each year. It's a big reason I no longer buy their titles regularly.
You also get early access to new stuff and a discount on new games, friends and I were buying it when Battlefield 1 got released because it was cheap enough that 1 month got you enough savings to make up the $5 price and got you into the beta.
Not a terrible model, but not something I'm excited to pay for in most cases.
A more direct comparison would be the various MMO games, some of which still do use a subscription model, though most have gone "free to play".
The games industry has largely moved to a 1) ship broken/buggy software, 2) charge for content packs, 3) improve game.
Some franchises really buy into this. Battlefield 4 was basically broken on release, but a couple years and season passes later and it finally plays like the game it should have shipped as.
The IP helps as well.
I also bought Moneydance [2], and it's also not a subscription model.
[1]: https://www.arqbackup.com/
[2]: http://moneydance.com/Windows obviously provides a good amount of value, but big upgrades are undermined by the need & expectation for ongoing regular updates, which means <Prior Version Latest Patch> is usually significantly better than <Prior Version RTM>
AVID has a subscription model.
except all MMOs ever.
Comparing a pile of binary to Starbucks is less than stellar. Coffee is an ongoing service. You make coffee for me everyday, fresh. The cup does not last me years. There are a lot of things I pay for once in years, and it costs less than a fresh brew. A pen is a good example. A book is another. And frankly, a book is far more comparable to a copy of binary than Starbucks.
Unless the author buys a book and pays for it every month until he returns it, I won't take his word on selling binary. This advice will just lead to people reverse engineering your binaries and pirating it. Just ask Adobe.
For businesses subscriptions are better; for individual users worse. Why not cover both bases instead of force one way or the other?
I'm also a developer, and I hate subscriptions from that side too. I'm interested in making software, not providing personal support or maintaining servers. Most apps don't need to spend a decade in development; you're just finding new ways of burning valuable programming time. I prefer to release my software and move on while still providing occasional updates, making up for lost repeat business with a polyculture of products.
In my opinion, the way forward is to have a system for collectively funding open source projects of all sizes. Let the software be free, but fairly pay developers for their efforts. (Snowdrift[1] wants to do something like this, but I haven't seen much activity there in the past few years.) Most of my essential day-to-day software now is open source. We need the best talent, from code gurus to UI wizards, working on these applications, because I am convinced it will be the only software still standing a century down the line.
(In fairness, I think Standardnotes is doing it right. Their code is open source and you can host your own instance if you like. This does not apply to closed source software in the midst of the subscription craze like Ulysses, 1Password, TextExpander, etc.)
What you basically just said was: I want to build products, not a business.
Ok, that's fine, but realize that's the freelancer's life, not someone who is actually trying to make a business around their product.
This is a silly statement since the digital depends on the physical for existence, and digital content only makes sense in the context of culture formed by flesh and blood human beings. A massive EMP pulse or collapse of civilization will show just how "real" the digital is.
No, no, no -- not at all.
The subscription model may be the best way to thrive for certain kinds of software companies, at certain price points. But that doesn't make it a unilateral principle.
For software with one-time or fleeting value (e.g. games), a classic perpetual license (pay up front) is often the best.
For software with real upgrade value in releases (I'm NOT looking at you, Quicken), a perpetual + upgrade charge model may be the best fit. (Which is kind of like a subscription, but users pay when there's real value, not just elapsed time).
And there's the evolving new world of in-app purchases, add-ons and hybrids: for example, you might sell an app up front, but then charge monthly/yearly for a related cloud-based service that has ongoing value (such as backups).
Lightroom for example, it's still the 2015 version. Adobe doesn't seem too interested in modernizing it beyond adding some sync features. If they weren't doing the subscription thing they'd need to focus on it to make it innovative.
In any case, the fact that Lightroom is at least theoretically also still being sold as a standalone non-subscription product should increase the incentive to do a new feature-laden release, not decrease it.
It's highly unlikely your app provides enough value to be worth paying for every single month for most people.
Be honest, you've seen that the best way to monetize someone is to get them to pay you every month without thinking about it. This is we're bombarded with "first month's free, write to us via registered mail to cancel or you'll automatically be paying $100/month" offers. A subscription model is equivalent to a "I know a good number of people don't read their credit card statement every month and will forget to cancel" model.
And that's fine. Attempting to get more money from people who are rich enough to not need to read their credit card statement is probably a more honest way to live than monetizing customers via ads or in app purchases like the rest of the "unicorns".
[edit]
I would like to tone down one sentence. When I say "your" I'm actually not referring to the author of this article, instead I'm referring to "A developer who currently sells his/her app for a one time fee of 0.99-3.99".
Outside some outliers like Office and anti-virus, the majority of consumers won't buy into subscriptions for software, they would rather pirate it.
See what Spotify (and other streaming services) did to illegal downloading for instance.
I believe it is somewhere around
Office 365 Personal (1 PC) - $69.99/yr
Office 365 Home (3 PCs) - $99.99/yr
Office 2016 Home (1 PC) - $149.99/forever
I don't think subscriptions are always negative for consumers; Adobe is probably the poster child here because $800 is a huge price to pay to just try things out, but $20/month is something you can try out, and people keep paying for it because they can't go without it.
I think honest subscription pricing like that can work great if your software is something you expect the user to use and gain value from repeatedly.
While some people would say Spotify is a content business, which is why it can charge a subscription, I think the fact that users keep getting value from it is the more important fact.
Even if you assume it's 10x larger than that number for whatever reason, you're still only at 4% of users.
Then there are the Android and WP sideloaders as well.
It's harder and there are also a lot of free/cheap alternatives out there. If you need a spreadsheet now and then, today it's not a choice between dropping a few hundred dollars, doing without, or pirating a copy of Lotus 1-2-3.
(And, with some exceptions--probably most notably Adobe--even most of the market-leading products that consumers would probably want are relatively cheaper than they used to be.)
Yes, the thought of adding another recurring subscription can be a barrier. But I think people are becoming increasingly more comfortable with that (Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc, etc, have all opened that door).
And when you get into the more expensive software, I would imagine that the subscription model makes it a lot more accessible and increases the number of people actually paying.
Previously, I'd have had to pay $230 for Microsoft Office and $1300 for the Adobe "Design Standard" collection. $1,530 to get up and running is something no non-business user is ever going to swallow. Even if I plan to make money off of the software, $1530 is just a lot of money to come up with at one time.
Under the subscription model, you're just agreeing to have $60 charged to your credit card every month. Anyone who actually needs the software probably won't think twice about that.
None of which matters. Only capitalism and consumer demand for your service.
Imagine if one cup of coffee "worked" for ten years, how much you'd care if Starbucks went out of business?
Consumers aren't there as a substitute welfare state to provide eternal employment for hungry programmers.
Nobody pays a subscription to an author instead of buying a book. "Oh they rewrote chapter one?"
It's just a case of holding information hostage in the cloud because you can.
[Stallmanning intensifies]
And then I decided not to buy that until I actually needed it.
Once I needed something for simple image work, I ended up downloading Krita for free and it works just fine. I may still buy the other software, but not until Krita can't do what I need. (To be fair, the other software looks amazing... But so is Photoshop, if you use it daily. Which I don't.)
I don't know, people spent a bunch of man-years making my washing machine, but I don't pay a subscription on it.
If the choice is between $120 up-front or $5 a month, maybe it's worth it (e.g. maybe paying $8/mo is better than paying however much for Photoshop+Lightroom), but I have a feeling that this developer is talking about $2 up-front or $5/mo.
You pay a subscription for the detergent.
Hardware is the washing machine; software is the detergent.
I don't believe anything is "designed" to stop functioning. That's just a happy accident that results from cost cutting measures in the manufacturing process.
The other appliances in the house are LG, too. I believe the previous owners were in the house for ~5 years so I don't think any of the appliances are older than that. If any of them breaks in the next few years, they will be replaced with different brands.
The flip side to this argument is that programmers aren't obligated to continue fixing bugs and adding features to software forever if they aren't being paid. Software subscriptions are the only way I know of to align the incentives properly so that programmers will actually fix things instead of moving on to an entirely new piece of software that they can sell anew and leave the old one to rot, which is a real problem that has plagued small dev shops forever.
>It's just a case of holding information hostage in the cloud because you can.
Or because they have to.
>Consumers aren't there as a substitute welfare state to provide eternal employment for hungry programmers.
Software is expensive. Developers are expensive. I much prefer the upgrade model to the subscription model, but the marketplace in a round about way, decided it would rather pay eternally rather than one version at a time.
Photoshop use to cost around $800 for a license, now it's $20 a month. That works out to 3.33 years until you pay as much as an outright license. I'm fairly certain that the Photoshop upgrade schedule was shorter than 3.33 years, so in the end, you end up paying less, assuming you constantly upgraded.
*The upgrade prices was usually cheaper than the original full license, but I don't know how that works out long term with the subscription model.
If you bought the larger bundles and/or want to keep it up-to-date all the time, CC pricing generally is similar or cheaper.
That's not true at all. You can, at any time, take your FooSoftware 1.x off the store and make a new product called FooSoftware 2.x and charge the new price for it.
If you dust off Photoshop Elements a few times a year? Not so much.
Similarly, with a few exceptions, subscribing to something like a game doesn't really make sense for a buyer. It would be like subscribing to a movie or, as you say, a book. I'm probably going to play it once (or even a few times) and it's going to sit unused.
The flip side of the author's premise is that subscribing to something, even for a very low price, is generally a much higher bar to me than taking a flyer on something at $5-$10. Yes, there's some combination of subscription price vs. purchase price where I'd view the subscription as lower risk but I tend to be pretty conservative about opening up monthly money leaks.
Excluding the most robust embedded systems on spacecraft and nuclear submarines, I don't know any software especially consumer software that would last 10 years without revision.
Maybe a better analogy is having an unlimited refill.
One other thought - the whole app game is basically one of trying to hit it big and getting hundreds of thousands of users so you can either reap the rewards from recurring advertising revenues or the one-time purchase fees. Articles like this exist because app stores are overcrowded with choices and they usually don't tend to fan out evenly in terms of users. Usually there are 1-3 that are heavily used with the rest just being noise in the competition for that type of app. Those publishers get the lion's share of the revenue for their specific app type.
I am doing quite well with my app http://www.ghostnoteapp.com which is a one of purchase.
However I am exploring various services around. At the end of the day though I want people to be able to buy it as a stand alone and then if they feel like they need it and I need to use some sort of server storage/activity I will charge for it.
Already working on one subscription service.
One of the things that I like most is that entitling all your user base to your latest and greatest version software makes many users install the latest version, which is what also happens with freeware. The lack of need to support older versions greatly simplifies support.
Also a good thing of subscriptions is that because the monetary incentive of acquiring a new user is exactly the same as having an existing customer renew, you do not start adding features just for the sake of justifying a major paid upgrade.
Buyers of consumer software want to own it. They use it for own benefit and it frequently has short lifespan. That's why they don't like subscriptions.
Buyers of enterprise software want to create added value from it, so it's not about owning it's about leveraging. Like with any other business expenses, software expenses don't really matter as long as they generate more value than cost. Also, subscription model suits corporate better as it doesn't require pulling large amounts of money out from working capital.
That's basically the thesis.
And that's bullshit. If I buy something, I want it to work for eternity. The subscription model costs a massive amount of money for the customer, and is just further rent-seeking, bankrupting customers and transferring wealth.
No thanks.
If you want me to pay continually money, you should continually provide something in return for that. Just to continue using something I already paid for is not a good enough justification.
If I buy something, I want it to work for eternity
And I can emulate the old environment.
And of course I am okay with MMORPGs or cloud services charging continually, as they have server costs.
But I don't want to pay just to keep using a product I already paid for.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nobel-economist-takes-aim-a...
i think the app store and ad-supported software really devalued a lot of forms of software for most lay people. my wife still gasps when i spend a buck on software
Mandating that my software stops working unless I pay more for it is a surefire way to make me go somewhere else for software.
I used to buy Adobe Photoshop, and have since moved to Affinity Photo ($50, one-time, does everything I used Photoshop for) since they moved to subscription-only. I outright will never have "Office 365", and strongly recommend to anyone who asks to buy the full retail editions instead. If Microsoft ever switches to 365-only, no big deal, open source software is more than adequate in this area.
Do you want your old software to keep working with new OS upgrades? In the case of iOS:
- If you bought an app that was created before the iPhone 4, do you want higher resolution images?
- If you bought an app that was created before the iPhone 5 do you want the app to take advantage of the full display?
--If you bought an app before the 5s that was 32 bit, do you want the app to keep working with iOS 11?
--If you bought an iPad app do you want it to take advantage of larger iPad sizes? The new multitasking features? The new drag and drop features?
Either you pay a subscription or you pay for new versions.
Used to buy new phones to get Series 30, Series 40 and Symbian updates as well.
No, it is not how things should be.
We should be able to get at least security updates during the warranty period (2 years in Europe) and no mobile phone should cost more than a laptop/desktop system.
These are apps that I use every day. I need them to work. I don't need new fancy flashy features that bring in new users. I need reliability, maintenance, minor improvements, constant optimizations. This is not possible without subscriptions.
I'd much rather pay regularly for a small number of good, well-maintained apps, than have hundreds of crappy cheap one-shot apps that get released and then slowly fall into disrepair.
But Microsoft needs money, so they force the upgrade to 2007 by, among other things, inventing the docx format. And then 2010, and then 2013, and then 2017. Logical conclusion is Office 365, where you are forced to pay 100$ every year.
Is it a stable source of income for the company, better, than selling box copies? Yes. Is it in customer's best interests? No.
1. It is providing a service (Spotify).
2. It is open source.
You might not want to try to or know how to monetize the second option, but I'm not paying you a monthly fee for closed source software that you or your company are going to inevitably neglect/abandon/sell to someone who cares even less.
I'm happy to pay a monthly fee so you can make your open software better, though.
Welcome to the way this was always going to play out; the only way it could have played out.
Indeed.
Apparently you can self-host Standard File server [1] yourself if you don't want to sync with their server.
[1]: https://github.com/standardfileI am, sometimes it is just the best choice in an imperfect world. Of course I would prefer to pay for open source but no such offers exist.
How are you defining what is and isn't a service independent of pricing frequency?
I won't pay subscription for a software I install locally with no online features that never gets updates and has no support. (Even though Adobe thinks I should)
As an aside, it makes me wonder if pay-per-document could work as well. I'm sure that's been tried before
A comparable offer might be $x/month for access to all one-time-fee apps in an app store.
It's probably not more widely used even in the SaaS world because people generally don't like the thought of there being a meter ticking while they're using something. Which in turn discourages use and that in turn means that users don't get as much value out of a product or service than they otherwise would.
sleep(500);
Say again?
sleep(500);
Takes twenty seconds to load? I'll look into it. Just enable debug logging, +10% runtime overhead...
There are also no rules against plugging a product in a post. Again, it's extremely common on HN.
OP's user account was created 1339 days ago. I don't think his intention is suddenly to spam at all nor do I believe the post is "just a spam piece to advertise his app".