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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

I really, truly don’t mind paying for software, but all of these subscription services cost obscene amounts of money. $10 per month is $120 per year. $120! I might pay that much for boxed software, but it would need to do a heck of a lot more than IFTTT, and I’d expect to get much more than one year of life out of it.

Affinity Photo, for instance, cost $60, and VMware Fusion cost $80, to name two products I purchased recently. Neither needs to be bought again after a year unless an update contains a new feature I want (and probably not even then for Affinity), and both can do a lot more than IFTTT. Neither has a server component, true, but how big a cost can that possibly be for IFTTT?

I’m probably never using IFTTT again. Oh well.

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I'm not, like, a fan of IFTTT, but it's likely that you just aren't the target market for the product; it might be valuable to you, but "people like you" might be a small enough niche that the product can't be made sustainable at a price point you'll swallow. This happens a lot, right?

Would you run this boxed software on your machine? Would you maintain it? How much is your time worth?

> Would you run this boxed software on your machine?

Yes. Would you rather have ice cream or get punched in the face?

> Would you maintain it?

If maintaining it means scheduling updates through my host's package manager or running docker pull, and not "hey it's thursday, time for a new configuration format", then sure.

> How much is your time worth?

Enough to never host Elasticsearch, not enough to go SaaS-only.

Upstream APIs change constantly. How will you pay for the development costs, after your $120 boxed copy 1 year license is up?

They... really don't.

Any service with any level of client integration will a) version their APIs, and b) keep things sufficiently stable so that clients aren't constantly breaking.

For everything but the most high profile platforms, IFTTT expects the service provider to build a custom API made for IFTTT, and pay IFTTT to include the service in their public catalog.

https://platform.ifttt.com/docs/api_reference

My experience has been different.

I currently maintain about 280 different API integrations. I have a team that does constant maintenance. Usually 1-2 API breaking changes per day is what we see after you get past the stable big ones. Even versioned APIs kick you off the old version pretty regularly. In the upcoming months we have 3 scheduled version bumps that are mandatory as they will discontinue the old version completely. Not "use the new version for more features", like completely 100% "we are not supporting v2 any longer. You won't get responses in 60 days. Good luck."

It's easy to say, "they're doing versioning wrong" but it's the reality.

Everyone does oauth wrong. Everyone does versioning wrong. Everyone adds or removes fields that were once critical to someone's workflows. Maybe 25% of our integrations are a joy to work with. Once you get to the smaller players, things start to get weird.

Can you explain a bit more about oAuth being done wrong by most people?

One thing I notice is how some do the constant refresh token and most don’t.

> I currently maintain about 280 different API integrations.

And if I was trying to self-host software that integrated with 280 different APIs, I'd probably have that problem, too.

Most people don't need 280 different APIs. Then need a half dozen? Maybe a dozen? Most of which are likely to be the "stable big ones" that you refer to.

So the rate of breakage in your experience just isn't applicable for anyone doing anything at the hobbyist level.

That's not to say it's maintenance free! But I've been running my own automation with Huginn for a year now, and for what I need, I could not justify $120 per year.

Seen a lot of ppl complaining at the price on Twitter and offering other smaller, unknown services. People rarely think that these aggregators store your access tokens to all services and they pretty much work as passwords. I would look up these services first and look at their investors - are they well known for their security standards and all. I think their price is fair if running these connections is your thing and you care about your information.

I’d rather not host it myself, but, do you think IFTTT’s server costs are a significant contributor to the price? If they are, I have to question why this idea of cloud computing is supposed to make economic sense in general.

IFTTT is just a bunch of web requests chained together. The strength of the product is its UI and the number of services it supports.

You should compare recurring cost with other recurring costs. Otherwise, it will always seem expensive, because you can multiply an arbitrary period of time to the price.

After inspecting my own personal finance, I’ve found that my spent on software subscription is less than 1% of my yearly spent. So, I’ve stopped worrying about it quietly accumulate. Not yet worth optimizing.

Yes, I'm comparing it to the price of a vserver/cloud instance running cronjobs or webhooks.

That's what all technical people I know use ifttt for.

And usually a 3$ one can run hundreds of these sort of automations, unless you're relying on some of these ifttt-ingrained applets.

And before anyone draws the "this takes longer"/labor costs cards.. I only started posting my blog post blurbs to Twitter/Fediverse via cronjob because the ifttt-rss-to-twitter thing was broken at some point.

I agree that in the case of IFTTT, the price doesn’t seem to worth it.

> Otherwise, it will always seem expensive, because you can multiply an arbitrary period of time to the price.

I would frame that the other way—it seems expensive because it is expensive, if you look at the long-term cost. And if you don’t look at the long-term cost, you’re fooling yourself.

You’re right that choosing one year as the time unit is arbitrary, but I actually think it’s an overly-generous choice, because as I mentioned, when I buy non-subscription software I almost always expect to use it for longer than a single year.

I’m increasingly viewing subscriptions as a cheap ploy to trick consumers into paying more. “Oh, that iPhone doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars, it’s just $20 a month for two years. You can pay $20, right?” What bothers me most about the scheme is it appears to be shockingly effective. This is literally grade-school arithmetic!

I’m not suggesting to look at the unit price, either. It’s not about whether it’s one year or one month.

I’m suggesting to put it in the context of other recurring expenses, to get a real sense of how much it affect your finance. A recurring expense has a different impact on your finance than a one-time expense, so it should be evaluated as such.

In fact, $100000 dollar upfront is less affordable than $5000 for 20 months, due to the nature of income and expenses.

Maybe now that it will be payed they will make the product more worth while.

Don't bet on it.

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