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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

If you believe this, then I'll let you know that there are exactly two ways that I'll pay a subscription fee for your software (generally, not aimed at author):

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.

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Standard Note, which the author is talking about, is open-source btw.

Apparently you can self-host Standard File server [1] yourself if you don't want to sync with their server.

  [1]: https://github.com/standardfile

> 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 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.

I don't get #1. Is there a software that doesn't provide a service? Outlook, word, quicken, Norton, all of these are services.

As an aside, it makes me wonder if pay-per-document could work as well. I'm sure that's been tried before

Maybe Spotify is too narrow, but that's what meant to get at. Don't mind paying monthly for Spotify because you aren't really paying for the software, you are paying for the the content which really can't be had without cost.

Well if your argument is that software can be had (copied) without cost, the same is true of music...

Spotify is a lot cheaper than buying all the music in their catalog, and they have necessary ongoing costs to operate the infrastructure providing it, which provides me with a direct value (unlike e.g. slapping cloud sync onto an app where I don't want it, which seems to be a common pattern in the mobile app world)

A comparable offer might be $x/month for access to all one-time-fee apps in an app store.

> It is providing a service (Spotify)

How are you defining what is and isn't a service independent of pricing frequency?

Does it create recurring costs for the developer, or is it something where the costs are single-time?

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)

I think the distinction is something that needs an external third party server to run (streaming, games that use dedicated servers etc) compared to something that's possible to use locally or with your own network.

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