Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

It's fair to criticize this, but it's worth noting that this is how subscriptions work in Google / Apple app stores. You really can't do anything else.

View on HN

I have ADHD, so wearing my consumer hat for a moment, I guess I just don’t really care.

It’s their problem to figure out how to present their product to me in a compelling way that I am willing to pay for. I don’t open my wallet just because I feel bad for starving founders.

Yes that's true. But when we're talking about this on Hacker News, it's interesting to talk about the why. Especially when the why is "Google and Apple make more money this way".

Why do you think you can’t do anything else? There’s different trial methods. Shorter subscription periods. OPT-in models.

There are no free trial subscriptions with opt-in "continue paying" as far as I know. I mean, why would Apple and Google build that? They make more money with trial + automatic billing.

I once built such a trial option myself. You could start a free trial (just within the app, no "native trial" involved) and then sign up for the paid plan with native in-app purchases once it ran out.

It got rejected by Apple. They insisted I use the native app store trial which is opt-out.

Of course they support an opt-in model, they can't really choose to not support it. The "free trial" can just be the app giving you all the features for a week, and then the app can prompt you to sign up (opt-in) for a subscription with Apple/Google when that ends. No CC number until after the trial ends.

EDIT: I'm wrong, comment next to mine says Apple has rejected this. Maybe Google wouldn't though?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com