Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by alain_gilbert | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

alain_gilbert

I don't think subscription is that bad.

Development and support is never ending.

Single purchase, you also get "single development", and then it dies.

At some point the market is not infinite.

View on HN

“ Single purchase, you also get "single development", and then it dies.”

This is a lie perpetuated by the saas industry. If you compare saas companies shutting down “services” to prior product companies stopping updating versions you don’t see much difference.

Also, sw engineers used to care about designing something well. So when you used something the first time it was occasionally delightful. Now it’s just “launch and we’ll worry about that in our next sprint”.

I'm not saying the product can or cannot be good on first release...

But the world is ever changing. Let say you build a UI for database. In a few years, a new version of mysql or postgresql will be released, and you have to update your software as well to use the new features.

What I'm saying is that almost whatever you are building, the development will never be done.

It's not relevant, because then the developer can release a new major version and require a new payment. The user will know exactly what changes this new major version has, and can decide whether he wants to pay for it or not.

With subscriptions however, this all becomes hidden/vague. You're always paying, but it's no longer transparent what exactly it is you're paying for. Which is obviously very bad for the user.

(Of course it's a an entirely different story for services like Netflix, AppleTv+, Spotify, etc.)

I don't know about the other platforms, but I do know that on iOS if you have a non-trivial app you have to update it every year, otherwise things stop working. That's work!

I think companies should use something like what Jetbrains does with its IDEs. You get a lifetime access to the version you paid a year subscription for. Keep the yearly subscription up, and you are getting updates, getting a more recent lifetime access, and the sub gets cheaper.

I really like their model as well.

Yes, this is also what Sketch does, and it's great!

That's what Omni does.

Yeah, I think that's pretty much the perfect model and I wish most companies would adopt it. It supports both types of customers: people who always want the latest updates and features, and those who want the most stable software.

I am firmly in the second group, but get why so many people prefer the first. I like that those users can get all of the updates they want, while I don't have to constantly burn mental energy figuring out UI changes and new bugs.

Often you don't need more than you have, and its nice to have fixed costs. An example - you buy Photoshop or Lightroom, and they cover 100% of your needs. As long as you can run it, you are happy with what they provide. Well apparently that didn't generate enough cash for Adobe but that's a long story.

Tons of businesses uses commercial software with little need of support in form of some patches. Usually toolsuites are mature and they don't try to hack every last bit of it.

That's right.

Now let say you make photoshop, it's great, people loves it. And most of your customers got it for a fixed price, and they are happy with it.

Now, You want to improve the software and add features that some professionals need.

But most of your customers are happy with previous version. you no longer have a lot of money coming in.

Repeat that a couple times, and now most of your market is happy, and you don't have any money coming in.

And then you close shop. And people wonder why.

People give adobe a lot of grief for moving to subscription model, but I think they managed it the best they could. I used to pay ~$100/year for just the LR software. Now I pay ~$120/year for the software + 1TB of storage + the mobile apps. They at least attempted to add value for the subscription fee, and I love having my 500gb+ of photos always available/editable on all my devices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com