But if you don't feel that a subscription to a service adds value, please don't buy it and voice your concern to the developers. Especially if they're a small shop.
That said, subscriptions can be canceled. For example I needed Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator this month. Got to use those for a fraction of the cost I would have paid five years ago for each program and been stuck with a license. It's more flexible that way. But I understand it doesn't reflect every use case.
Ideally. Assuming you haven't bought into a contract, and assuming the company... you know... stops charging you once you stop using their product and "cancel" using the mechanism they provide. That second problem can be mitigated with single-use credit cards, like what privacy.com offers, but if that gets to be too common, I can imagine companies requiring you not use those as a condition of service.
This is what disputing charges is for. Once you have told them, even once, that you are canceling your subscription, any further charges are fraud and you should respond accordingly.
A random email from an unverified address to the first point of contact you can find with Google is not a reasonable way, for the purposes of this discussion. Nor is a casual ambiguous statement during a long phone call whose meaning clearly wasn't understood, if you don't clarify it at the time but then quote it out of context later.
Personally, I like the rule of thumb that it should be no harder to cancel a subscription than to take one out and you should be able to give that notice via the same channel(s) you could use to sign up in the first place, but no-one on either side is required to go any further than that. It keeps everyone honest, but it's also obviously reasonable and proportionate.
Ultimately, though, they're periodically asking you for money; if you decide to stop giving them money, then things need to work out such they don't get any more of your money.
Agreed, that is the important thing (though it implicitly assumes that you don't have some contractual obligation to continue making payments for whatever reason).
I'm not in any way advocating making legitimate cancellation artificially difficult here. I dislike shady businesses that do that as much as anyone else. I'm just also seeing it from the other side, as someone who has run subscription-based services, because sometimes customers will give ambiguous or conflicting signals and then assume you magically know how to interpret them correctly.
A particularly common one in my experience is a subscriber sending an email to ask how to cancel, receiving a prompt reply from you answering their question, but then not actually doing it. Contractually speaking, there seems to be no doubt at that point that their subscription continues and further charges are legitimate. However, if they just forgot to act on the response, and then they come back six months later claiming that they're still being charged after "they asked to cancel", that's always an awkward situation. It gets more awkward if they really haven't been using your product/service since that time, or if they haven't actively been using it but they do have some sort of data stored in it that would be deleted if their subscription ended. It can get much more awkward if they really did literally ask to cancel, but in an insecure/unverifiable way such as an ad-hoc email, and if you did reply advising them of that and explaining the correct procedure, which they didn't then follow.
Within reason, we tend to refund as a good will gesture in this sort of situation as long as we believe it was an honest mistake by a customer, but I don't think either the law or whatever payment service was used should be imposing any sort of obligation in that case. Insisting on a clearly defined cancellation process does have the advantage of being unambiguous and therefore reducing the risk of that sort of confusion.
And can subscriptions be canceled in practice? If you cancel your Photoshop subscription, your documents suddenly become unopenable. In this way, software subscriptions—at least for software you create with—are like protection money: "Nice documents there. It'd be a shame it anything were to happen to them."
Software is crystallized behavior, which rots when not in symbiosis with a developer.
Software developer holds the software ecosystem hostage, trying to extract the maximum amount of value.
When you put it like that SaaS doesn't sound all that different from ransomware.
And no software vendor would like to categorize bugs as security related or not, or maintain and test all combinations of old releases plus security patches applied. The easiest is if all customers stay on top of tree.
Oh come on. Companies have been in business selling stuff for the longest time. It wasn't exactly wrecking capitalism before subscriptions became the normality in the last decade.
> the effect of a steady revenue stream on any business cannot be dismissed
Really? The effect of a steady revenue stream on any consumers can't be dismissed either, so how about we have those businesses pay us first? Then we can pay them back for their software. Is this how logic works? An effect can't be dismissed, therefore everyone else must dance to produce that effect?
So the logic behind "this model is objectively bad and means life or death for a company" was "well, it's a free country, so if you don't like it, go somewhere else"?
Specifically, I did not say that the subscription model is the only way to make money or stay in business. You're needlessly polarizing the issue and at this point, I'm gonna have to set the troll flag on you, and this conversation has stopped being productive. Bye.
1 - Users have been trained by Apple and Google to expect endless upgrades for $2. When I grew up, Eudora, an email client, retailed for $100-ish, with an incremental $50 for ugprades every couple years. You can make a living on the latter pricing, but require hugely popular software for the former.
1a - as software has moved to mobile devices and web, the OS updates more often. ios does annual releases, android does the same, and chrome has a 6-week-ish update cycle. There's simply more thrashing, and it's no longer good enough to ship to a copy of Windows that updates every 4 years.
2 - There is a lot less end-user only software that just runs on a users device. It's far more common for software to require running servers to provide part of the service, and/or to code against apis that regularly change and require ongoing updates.
I'm aware no eng is owed a living, but if they can't make a living, the software becomes unavailable: either not written or not maintained.
see eg Sketch's rationale for not building an ipad app. https://www.designernews.co/comments/173706 quoted in case the link disappears:
> We don't have plans for an iPad pro version at the moment. Yes, it has a beautiful screen, but there's more to consider, such as how to adapt the UI for touch without compromising the experience.
>But the biggest problem is the platform. Apps on iOS sell for unsustainably low prices due to the lack of trials. We cannot port Sketch to the iPad if we have no reasonable expectation of earning back on our investment. Maintaining an application on two different platforms and provide one of them for a 10th of it's value won't work, and iPad volumes are low enough to disqualify the "make it up in volume" argument.
In contrast, I can easily name dozens of companies in other fields that have been around for 50 years or more, including some small ones that have stayed small yet successful.
Lugaru Software [1] (Epsilon Editor) has been around since 1984
There are more but...
Adobe (1982), Intuit (1983), Electronic Arts (1982), Activision (1979), Symantec (1982), McAfee (1987)
Nintendo should probably be on that list with EA & Activision as well. The only reason they still exist is due to their consumer software business. They've shipped an enormous amount of consumer software.
Microsoft hasn't been a pure-play software company in a very long time. So I would also include Apple and IBM on that list, as both have shipped huge volumes of consumer software at various points (Apple is both still alive and still ships consumer software; IBM still exists, but no longer ships consumer software).
Just down the road from me is Frontier, which was founded by David Braben. He was working on the original Elite back in the early 80s, and although Frontier didn't come along until a decade or so later and doesn't strictly meet your condition, I'd argue that it's a good example of a successful consumer software business and has got there by producing a sustained track record of successful products. A few years ago it was listed on the stock market, but by then it had already managed almost two decades as an independent and grown to hundreds of people.
Others have, but Microsoft always been primarily B2B/Enterprise, not primarily consumer.
For that kind of company from the 1980s or earlier, MicroFocus.
> In contrast, I can easily name dozens of companies in other fields that have been around for 50 years or more
In any one field, though? And one as young as software?
Office 365 is a support nightmare but it does have security patches.
[0] https://products.office.com/en-us/office-2007-end-of-support
Especially considering that so many people get extremely high quality software for free (open source, free software, apple style "comes with hardware purchase", etc) these days.
That was the old business model. It worked well for a while. Then most small software companies that sold general purpose software went out of business doing just that. And with App Stores basically stealing 30% of all your sales, its become even more harder to do that. A lot of major software companies have since moved to the subscription model and have seen a bump in revenue and profit. For me, its not a bad value proposition for things like Office or Photoshop where I appreciate the updates.
>I don’t want to pay your software team over and over so they can keep changing it on me over and over. Just make it once, sell it, then go make something else!
Interestingly, after Photoshop moved to the subscription model, Serif released their Affinity Photo software that was a one-time-payment-no-subscription software to compete with Photoshop and to cash in on the discontent. I bought it to support their efforts, but I kept using Photoshop because its just a better software and I'm more familiar with it. It will be interesting to see if Serif is still around in 5-10 years..
I’ve never understood that argument. Physical media production, packaging and shelf space was way more expensive than 30%. Not trying to justify the Apple’s Premium here, just pointing out that it’s a lot cheaper than physical retail used to be.
> I kept using Photoshop because its just a better software...
In some ways it is, in others it is not.
And of course you only get 100% if you have zero fraud, zero hassles, no fees, no awkward cases.
I think its just the same bullshit as Walmart and Target selling toxic toys and then shifting blame onto the original supplier. Not sure what happened to the lawsuit though..
Agree to your second point on fraud/hassles,etc...
If you buy an annual subscription, you are paying for 12 months up front, so you immediately get a fallback license for the version that is available at the time you start or renew the subscription.
If you buy a monthly subscription, then after you've paid for 12 months you get a fallback license for the version that was available at the beginning of your subscription. If you then keep your subscription active and later cancel, you get a fallback license for the version that was available 12 months before you canceled.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
Jetbrains has a price in mind for what they want to sell their software for, $X. You can buy it whenever you want for $X. To demonstrate that you may want to buy the next version of their software, they'll let you use the most recent version of their software for 12 months after your purchase, at which point they will stop and you will have to use the version you purchased.
Alternatively, as a different service, you can subscribe to the most up-to-date version of their software for a monthly fee. In an example of great customer service, Jetbrains will treat you at the end of each rolling 12 month period of subscription as though you had bought their product 12 months ago, and they will give you a free copy of that product!
If you're bothered that you can't subscribe to their latest-version service and then end your subscription and keep using the product, that's just silly. The price of the product is not $X/12, it's $X, and if you want it you can freely pay $X for it.