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Comment by DavideNL | Hacker News Reader

A little off-topic, but really wondering; am i the only one annoyed by the fact that 9 out of 10 apps these days are:

1. cloud based/harvesting as much data as possible and/or 2. subscriptions

I prefer apps like for example Omnifocus [1], that give you:

1. the ability to client-side encrypt your data so your data won't be sold/misused, and 2. instead of making profit of selling your data, simply let you pay a larger amount upfront for it instead. Thus, you also know exactly what features you're paying for - as opposed to subscriptions...

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/omnifocus-3/id1346190318?mt=...

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When it comes down to ad-based revenue versus subscription-based revenue, I'll choose the subscription (almost) every time. I'd much rather pay (some amount) for a high-quality product than not pay for a subpar product (assuming, as I do, that ads detract from an app's experience in most cases).

I'd also prefer that service be the one "mining" my data (to provide a better service to me) than being a middleman ferrying my data off to advertisers and third parties. Honestly, if the app/service can really make use of my data, I'd usually prefer handing it all over to them so they can do their job better over having some kind of offline experience for the misguided sake of trying to protect my privacy. Give me the option to give you data and show/tell me what you're going to do with it, and I'll happily give it to you 9 out of 10 times.

My ideal price is somewhere between a subscription and a one-off payment for something for most things, with no ads in either and some kind of cloud-based storage/backup/assistance in both. Obviously there's a lot of context left out here like how one-off payments don't work when you're paying server fees each month, etc.

I actually signed up for Standard Note yesterday and have been evaluating Todoist due to those privacy concerns.

My SO and I used Wunderlist for a number of years. After my wife noticed a very unexpected advertisement on Facebook, I read the privacy policy. At that point, I didn't feel comfortable putting even basic groceries in anymore.

https://standardnotes.org/

Standard Notes is great for desktop but on mobile it's not really there yet.

You basically can't format notes at all on mobile and changing a note on mobile for me just borked the desktop formatting.

Will be great all-rounder when that is sorted though.

What does a subscription business model have to do with selling of data? That would be correlated with an ad model.

Presumably if selling the software direct to the consumer then you don't need to monitize off of eyeballs, ie: ads, data-resale

disclaimer: working on something similar to putz but way more sophisticated.

my webapp is cloud (old style webapp, not that much cloud if you ask me) but for the simple reason that I allow users to cooperate (couples, families). I'm going for the subscriptions model because I'd like my customers to be those who actually use the app and not some effing corporation leeching more profits from my users.

I did wonder though about the hyper-sensitive users who prefer running the app and data themselves. To be honest, the answer is to use a different, ideally open source, software like gnucash, ledger/hledger, or beancount (I used the first two myself). which all come with their own limitations.

Would there be a market for me to offer my rails/mongodb/... app as a docker container that you deploy wherever you like? I'd not even bother about DRM.

You might like Buckets: www.budgetwithbuckets.com (I'm the developer)

Nobody wants to pay upfront. This is antithetical to what customers prefer.

You also pay upfront for subscriptions, although there’s usually a trial which is also a thing with non-subscription apps.

You often pay much less upfront for a subscription than you do e.g. purchasing an app "full price".

You might pay more over the lifetime of your subscription than you would paying full price for something, but in terms of your parent's comment, that is why a subscription is seen as preferred over paying for something upfront.

For example, $7/mo is a lot more palatable than buying some software for $80, especially when you're in the stage of "I don't know if I'll use this or not".

Not me. I loved paying $50 for YNAB4 for life. Or I could have say a year of YNAB cloud access for an inferior product.

So you enjoy paying less? Obviously upfront costs need to be vastly lowered in order to get any customers.

Well this is the game being played. If you run a business you don't want customers like me who seek value and privacy. You'll make a lot more money from those with plenty of disposable cash who don't mind adding yet another $10/m SaaS to their monthly expenses.

I thought about creating a budget SaaS but what puts me off is

(i) Your target money is in a budgeting mindframe and so yeah they are going to be looking for the cheapest option.

(ii) There are so many budget apps and they are good and fairly cheap.

YNAB4 is the best as far as I am concerned, unless you need full double-entry accounting. The user interface is superb. It is going to be hard to come close. My ideal budget app is YNAB4 but with some of the opinionated envelope-based budgeting calculations being more flexible for those who do have some cashflow buffer.

I'd literally keep a Windows 10 VM for the next 20 years to run it :-) unless something with a better UI comes out which I doubt.

You're certainly offering a good value but you don't have a good business. I guess you can jump around from app to app but you'll just get outcompeted by people who have better revs and more resources to plow into r&d or distribution.

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