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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>This sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades.

Blame the victim?

We din't get any impression, as we don't set the prices. The companies set those prices.

For example Adobe customers never got or set any impression that "software should be free/low price". They paid 100s to 1000s of dollars for each update or package respectively, and they still got the mandatory subscription (and were some of the first users to be hit with one).

>How do you achieve super cheap products made by people making super high pay? Money doesn’t just materialize out of thin air to make that work.

We don't want "super cheap products", we want reasonably priced products we own after we buy.

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> We don't want "super cheap products", we want reasonably priced products we own after we buy.

I am afraid the ‘we’ here isn’t nearly as large a demographic as you think it is. If it was, we wouldn’t see the mass of advertising supported products we see.

Mainstream consumers do want free / cheap products, despite the many caveats associated with them and the market has adjusted to give them that.

The other follow up is, as a consumer, how do you determine what is a reasonable price for something. You have no visibility into the COGS other than your own experiences which may or may not apply.

Similar to the OP, I am not advocating for high subscriptions with no value or horrible dark patterns around unsubscribing…

Nobody asked for subscriptions. Nobody likes them. People prefer free and second to that a one-time payment model. Maybe that payment only includes a year of patches, but people still prefer it.

Companies prefer subscriptions because it maximizes revenue. It's as simple as that. Zero sum game between company and consumer.

> Nobody likes them.

If that was true, financing wouldn't exist for consumer products. In practice, people pay extra to turn a one-time payment into a subscription.

Except with financing you own the product and one day the payments end. You're saying that home ownership is the same as renting if you don't buy upfront? That's simply not true.

Also, the vast majority of people would prefer to live in a home they own than burn money renting.

Some financing leads to ownership. Leasing a car does not lead to ownership - it is an extended rental.

I am not a fan of products that make it difficult to unsubscribe, but I do like the variable cost aspect of SaaS. Generally quick to start using and quick to stop.

I have not seen it commented on, but my sense is security is easier with a SaaS model. How many pirated versions of software have you come across in your career pre-Saas?

>Nobody asked for subscriptions. Nobody likes them

That's patently false

I, for one, happen to like being able to push costs from capex to opex (and yes, that's true for my own personal use like it is for business use) *for most things) - a subscription price gives me a closer approximation of a given tool's/service's value proposition than does a one-off purchase (most of the time)

Everything from car leases (albeit I typically purchase my cars, leases most definitely have their place for a significant portion of vehicle operators) to Netflix fees come in the form of a "subscription" - follow the terms of the subscription, and you get to use whatever it is as long as you want

Leasing vs. ownership of cars is a great example of having a choice between ownership and a service. About 1/3 of cars are leased rather than owned.

I should say your choice to subscribe should not be taken away. I don't think my choice to own should be taken away.

The example breaks-down (no pun intended) on cars, though: software is likely not usable after 3-5 years (the length of a normal car lease)

Cars are typically usable for well over a decade :)

My Acrobat 9.0 is getting pretty long in the tooth. I still run it on occasion, but there are more issues with DPI scaling and new PDF features.

It looks like Adobe does sell one-time purchases of Acrobat Pro 2020 for $450. I'll cease my cloud-yelling.

> software is likely not usable after 3-5 years

Whoa whoa wait! How did we get to this point? Maybe I’m living in the past, but software should work essentially forever. There are no moving parts. No wear/maintenance items. It doesn't distort like a photocopy when loaded to and from media.

The only thing that should cause working software to fail is some underlying change to its foundation: an incompatible OS or browser change or deprecated API, and so on, and we should hold platform vendors accountable for regressions and breakage. I wish platforms took backward compatibility seriously.

Apart from a cosmic ray flipping a bit somewhere, there is no physics reason software should “wear out.” How did this become a fringe point of view?

>software should work essentially forever

Really? You're still running operating systems that are a decade old on hardware even older?

Why?

The newer versions of OSes aren't supposed to break compatibility, and in fact they really don't.

The really old programs run in emulators. This is how I play 1980s video games. I highly recommend Mario Brothers (not "Super") from 1983. Still works.

But has it worked continuously on contemporary platforms for the entire period of its existence? I reckon there were many years between the retirement of the original platform and your ability to emulate that platform.

The point is that software should remain usable, but in your example that hasn’t been the case.

No, but that's because it's from 1983. It's only modern machines that have this awesome excess of power.

Apple did Rosetta in 2006. That proves this approach has been _commercially_ viable on top-end machines for at least 15 years. Not 39 years!

I own Lightroom 4.0 from 2012 (that's 10 years ago). It doesn't have the latest features, but it's still a very capable RAW processing software. I don't use it anymore because I've subscribed to the current Lightroom. I've subscribed last year, because (finally!) the new features were compelling enough for me. The old version still works well, even on latest-ish macOS. It still produces great pictures now, as it did 10 years ago.

10 years is not that long ago. In computers and software the difference between 2022 and 2012 is not as big as it was between 1992 and 2002.

>10 years is not that long ago. In computers and software the difference between 2022 and 2012 is not as big as it was between 1992 and 2002.

It's still an immense period of technology time - OS and hardware vendors don't support their products "forever": it's not sane to do so

Run 10-year-old hardware/OS if you want ... but you should expect increasing issues over time

> follow the terms of the subscription, and you get to use whatever it is as long as you want

But you can run software you bought with capex as long as you want and it doesn’t cost more forever. And you don’t have to agree to new terms and conditions.

>But you can run software you bought with capex as long as you want and it doesn’t cost more forever.

...only if you still have hardware and operating systems that support it (or that it supports, depending on your point of view)

Sometimes people think they want things a certain way because

1. They have no idea it can be different

2. They wouldn't know what it would look like if it were different

3. They don't understand, or they resign to accept, the ethical implications of the status quo

Yeah, it's not really about free software; it's about paying salaries. Recurring expenses inevitably result in business models optimized for recurring revenues. That was always the case; it just so happened that the expansion of industrial production of goods was so vast for so long, that this was kinda hidden (and it was hard to justify - there are only so many widgets you can continuously supply to customers).

Now that the internet has removed any friction between business and customer, business is reaching its ideal state: one where the customer pays as long as the business has recurring expenses, where production never stops, and where productivity of labor approaches infinity.

Recurring expenses very often isn't necessary though.

For software the initial costs are big, but after that it can be pretty low maintenance or at least costing much less to develop new features when the foundation is set.

When you start to think about recurring expenses that's when you have to find a way to justify those expenses. And that is usually by adding bloat and unnecessary features that those that already bought it might not even want.

So now you have to pay for features that you don't want to keep using the features that you've already bought? Tough sell...

In the case of local software, I agree. But most users expect connected services nowadays, which mean recurring costs for the developers as well in many cases.

What do you mean by “connected services”? If that’s just a code word for cloud storage, then no, thank you. I’ve got cloud storage, and I don’t need yours. You’re just trying to justify charging me every month.

Only if companies force their users onto “their cloud”. There are plenty of remote storage services; why can’t we use those?

The answer is that it makes it harder to justify perpetual revenue streams then.

For example, 1Password.

I’m happy to pay for a new version if my current version stops working. OS or browser update broke the app? I’ll pay for the new version.

But they are trying to force me to pay every month, therefore they remove my ability to use the app at all unless I pay for their cloud storage which I neither need nor want.

Well, they don't stop working on an improved app and new features while you don't want to update.

You don't only get compatibility with X with the new version but all that as well.

If no one wants those improvements, why should they pay them to keep working on it? Maybe 1pass should start working on something else to sell, and move the old stuff to minimal maintenance.

>If no one wants those improvements, why should they pay them to keep working on it?

They should not pay them, they should use one of the numerous alternatives.

Yep, and in the case of 1pw, I use Bitwarden instead.

Fine. They can work on the app and sell me on the benefits they’ve added.

Password managers are an exception for me. I pay them so they can continually stay ahead with device/browser compatibility, security, and breaches.

Honest question: Why use 1Password rather than a modern browser’s built in password management?

Side note: Daring Fireball has had some discussion recently about 1Password moving to enterprise for employee password management and adopting the SaaS model in order to make this transition, alienating current client base in the process. A ballsy move!

Honest answer: I use more than one browser. If Apple Keychain autofill worked in 3rd-party browsers, it would almost cover my use cases though.

Password sharing.

Companies are not made of 100% engineers. Production costs are only part of recurring expenses in a business. At the very minimum you have to pay an executive team, a marketing team, a network/security team, a legal team, an accounting team... these guys don't work for free, and want to be paid every year at worst - more often, every month. Even if each "team" is one person in your garage, you have to pay them. And when you scale up, now you have investors to service, and they also would very much like to get regular dividends from their investment (or see constant growth in the value of their share).

Note: I'm not defending the practice (if you dig in my comment history, you'll see pretty incendiary stuff against SaaS abuse very recently), I'm just saying that it's what business naturally tends like - in the same way it naturally tends towards paying people as little as possible, exploiting them, etc etc. This is what the market becomes when left to its own devices. If we don't like it, we need to proactively intervene in law.

>For software the initial costs are big, but after that it can be pretty low maintenance or at least costing much less to develop new features when the foundation is set.

Written by someone who - probably - doesn't understand how complex software is to write/update/expand/maintain

Oh I am. The whole point was that you might not need to write/update/expand as much as you think.

And the case have previously been that such development is largely paid for by new users.

>Yeah, it's not really about free software; it's about paying salaries

Well, that's on the software maker.

Why pay salaries in perpetuity for something made and sold once?

Almost no software these days is "made and sold once" because of network support - even the most "local" apps will have stuff like saving settings or document to remote servers, talking to network peers, receiving updates when new OS versions are released, and so on. Anything sold on Apple platforms, for example, nowadays has to be updated at least once a year just to keep up.

> Anything sold on Apple platforms, for example, nowadays has to be updated at least once a year just to keep up.

Incorrect.

A lot of the "network support" is unwanted BS nobody asked for, that could be sold separately (or be open to other providers to offer). Like the BS "Adobe Cloud" they give you when you subscribe to the CSuite.

>Anything sold on Apple platforms, for example, nowadays has to be updated at least once a year just to keep up.

Factually wrong.

Can confirm. I still use Sparrow for email on MacOS. Yes that Sparrow - the one bought by Google and discontinued a decade ago.

I think the need to update software constantly is sometimes a self fulfilling prophecy with SaaS. Features that need constant maintenance get added because: "Why not? We have a continuous income stream."

Edit:

Another example: I use Transmit on iOS. It hasn't been updated since 2017[1] because of lack of sales. Still works great on the latest iOS/iPhone.

[1] https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-transmit-ios/

Minimal maintenance doesn’t take the same size team as making new features.

This is not blaming the victim as there are no victims. OP’s is wrong that SaaS is rent sending. Software should not be free (in cost), yet always receive new features and updates. Indeed, the alternative is the ad-tech surveillance state.

That's a strawman. Who exactly demanded "free in cost" plus "always receive new features and updates"?

If the software companies (in mobile in particular) had a race to the bottom, it's on them - and on those (hobbyists etc) that undercutted them (though, if hobbyists can undercut your prices, is your product really worth that much, or could it just as well be replaced with a hobbyist-made app?).

Users have since forever paid top dollar for shrink wrapped and then downloaded software like MS Office or Abobe Creative Suite and co, that now is nonetheless "subscription based".

Isn't a big reason for this development precisely that many didn't pay top dollar? There used to be a lot of Photoshop, Windows and Office warez floating around.

I suspect most of the piracy in those apps was among people who were never the target market. Someone who wants to make funny cat pictures, or even edit photos they took with their $300 point-and-shoot camera isn't going to pay $400 for Photoshop.

Professionals who make their living using Photoshop usually don't have much trouble with the cost, whether paid monthly, or occasionally when a new version has a feature they care about.

Being able to bring in some more casual customers with a lower initial cost is just a bonus.

No, since that's orthogonal. You can pirate with or without a subscription.

One could argue that MS Office and Adobe products were always "subscription-based", if companies and professionals never left the update treadmill. After all, if all you need is MS-Office 2000 or Adobe Photoshop 6, no subscription is needed and you can still find licenses around.

One could argue it.

But they would then have to answer why would non-business buyers, that is, users who did "leave the update treadmill" and bought new updates (or skipped them) at their convenience, suffer the subscription model too?

Because they are such an irrelevant part of the market that they basically could disappear and no one would care, and the hobbyist/non-professional people who don't mind using years-old software could as well just use Free/Open alternatives?

There is nothing stopping Joe-who-only-pays-full-licences to continue using his MS 2007 Office suite, is there?

Os support, especially in the Apple world.

Right, which is yet another explanation of why companies moved into subscription-based models: unless you are willing to be frozen in time with all your software tools, you will be in the update treadmill one way or another. Bitrot exists, and someone needs to pay for it. A license you paid 15 years ago does not (and should not) cover that.

It's not merely "especially in the Apple world" - very little in the way of older Windows/DOS software still works today (unless you're also running old/unsupported hardware (subject to its own foibles) and operating systems

Products get deprecated/go out of support all the bloody time - there is nothing wrong with that: should Ford have to "support" the Edsel or Model T today "for free"? Why?

The only thing I don't like about subscription is rent-seeking. I'm fine paying a small amount every month if I expect security updates or small features that won't impede my workflow. If there is a lot of request for additional features, you can always bump up to a new version. If there aren't, that means your product is mature, or you may need to market to a different segment. But I'm not paying you every month just to shuffle the UI around or to be able to access my data.

You don't get to decide what is "small features" and if you start fragmenting software into multiple releases you are going to make it more expensive for everyone, because now the company is supposed to maintain N versions because you are a special snowflake.

Or you can sidestep the whole thing entirely and use/fund/ promote Free Software. Your "small monthly amount" will go a long way and you will be free to pick and choose as you want.

Well if this isn’t the pot calling the kettle black. You raise the statesman that I said people claim software should be both free and maintained indefinitely. I did no such thing. I merely asserted that it should not be.

In the case of Adobe you are paying for near malware Levels of surveillance on your device to use their products.

Like what?

Not true. I prefer paying for upgrades on my own schedule to a subscription any day.

Including skipping upgrades?

Yes. I don't need every upgrade, especially when 9/10 it includes new bugs on essential productivity software.

Plus today it's easier than ever to make updates (or bunches of related updates) selectable and installable on demand.

So you could skip 90% of the BS updates you don't care for and get the 10% you do, as opposed to pay the full update price or maintain a subscription...

In other words, you could get a base product, they keep maintaining, and even release new versions you can update to for free/cheap, but with features you haven't paid for locked. Then, if you paid for a feature, you get to enjoy it for all free/cheap updates of the program.

That's how software used to be before they went SaaS.

> Software should not be free (in cost), yet always receive new features and updates.

That sounds like an extension of "you wouldn't download a car".

How so?

> Indeed, the alternative is the ad-tech surveillance state.

One way to increase recurring revenue when you have a captive audience (i.e. they can't refuse an update) is by adding adware to your software. I think SaaS is the driving force behind the ad-tech surveillance state, not the thing that will save us from it.

Can you give me some examples of SaaS that has ads? Cable TV, Hulu, newspapers. They all do it, but I can’t think of any SaaS providers that also push ads. I suppose cross-promoting s/w from the same vendor is an ad, but those kinds of ads don’t require intrusive surveillance.

> Blame the victim?

I don't think it makes sense to call anyone making an informed decision to overpay for a service a victim. If you don't think the deal is reasonable, then don't accept the deal and use something else.

The exception being profiteering in the case of a shortage, but I don't think this is the case. There is no software shortage being taken advantage of.

>I don't think it makes sense to call anyone making an informed decision to overpay for a service a victim.

No, those I'm calling victims are people like me, who would like to buy the update and own it, but are instead forced in a subscription - which if they ever have to stop paying for whatever reason (e.g. out of a job, medical bills, etc) they lose their access to the programs they've been paying for month over month for years.

A music program called Reason is a good example of the scumbuggery involved. It used to have $129 annual updates - which were already overpriced, as they had minimal changes, and more professional competitors like Steinberg with much bigger update deltas (new features, work involved, etc) charged much less for their annual updates.

Now, they switched to subscription, for $20/month ($240/year) where they give access to some extra plugins to entice you. But to force the user's hands (since they still offer the paid annual updates), they also bumped the annual update price to $200/year (without the extra plugins, the regular, already-overpriced-at-129 update).

I don't think you are a victim because you don't agree with the the terms of an offer. As you said, the actual changes are minimal. You can just reject the deal and stick to your old version, if you don't think it's worth it.

>You can just reject the deal and stick to your old version, if you don't think it's worth it.

Which gets incompatible and can't run with changes to OS, plugin SDKs, and so on.

Victim here doesn't mean "they put a gun on your head".

It means they removed a specific update model and replaced with a shitty one, while doubling the prices, and fucking you over if you want to continue using the platform.

The other model that works well is the open source one, with the maintainer having "another job"; e.g. academics doing scientific research (CERN!) or corporations who use the project internally. Unfortunately, the fact that the latter vastly outnumber the former means that the largest open-source projects are arguably corporate middleware or those of benefit to large corporations rather than users per se. People like me who use linux a lot are free software zealots. I wish Apple was more open on this -- they could quite easily be a hardware company and charge for services and yet make the code free -- but for whatever reason they've always kept the code close to their chest.

Subscriptions may make more sense as B2B software where the needs change over time, businesses tend to like having a two-way conversation more and a well-defined bill at the end of each year isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a private consumer though, selling a subscription is a surefire way to make me say no -- I'm not doing it.

A problem with open and free projects (to oversimplify the ideological differences) is the source of time and purpose.

The production cost is subsidized as a Hobbie not as a profession, so it's hard to expect a 'consumer product'. When you put external money and corporate interest in your hobbies, something breaks.

Not saying open products don't have to exist, we all love them. They cover different creative needs, and usually are a gift for the community.

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211229 - The Gift of It's your problem now

That's a FANTASTIC blog post!

If Apple open sourced their software, they'd go back to the same spot they were when they allowed other companies to produce Mac clones[0]. It's not going to happen.

[0]: https://everymac.com/systems/mac-clones/index-mac-clones.htm...

>we want reasonably priced products we own after we buy

That has [effectively] never been the case

You don't "own" software once you buy it

You own a license to use it (with some level of constraints around how/when/where you use it)

Even if that license happens to let you use it as much as you want anywhere you want, that doesn't mean it will continue to work "forever"

So many people don't understand that digital products are nothing at all like physical ones (except that you pay for both) - you own a paper book (albeit with restrictions on what you can do with it (can't make infinite/excessive copies of parts or all of it, etc), you have a license to an ebook; you don't own a copy of Microsoft Office - you have purchased permission to use it on X-many devices running Y operating system(s)

Even if you "own" some copy of a public domain or freeware tool, it's still constrained by the system(s) it will run on

>You own a license to use it (with some level of constraints around how/when/where you use it)

That's neither here, nor there. I didn't argue we buy and then own software like a shoe or a tire. People bought software before and we know the semantic and legal differences between it and buying physical products.

But that's irrelevant, the discussion is about software-bought (with the license and all it entails) vs software subscription -- not about the semantics of bought software vs bought physical stuff.

I, mostly, don't want products. I want to be able to communicate or veg out with a movie or have CI run. I generally don't care about the how. I just want the results. And I want to not think about it much beyond that. I, like everyone else, assume that's what everyone wants.

My scribble on the HN wall that you're reading right now involved thinking about something more than I thought it deserved.

>My scribble on the HN wall that you're reading right now involved thinking about something more than I thought it deserved.

Well, you might not care or what to think about the market, but the market cares and thinks about you.

And if you don't pay attention, you can easily get taken for a sucker, overcharged, forced in abusive rent-seeking relationships and so on...

> We don't want "super cheap products", we want reasonably priced products we own after we buy.

I'd fully expect someone to provide this if there is a market for it.

The problem is that the money and safety (which investors love) provided by “recurring sources of revenue” are too strong to counter with market forces alone.

Kinda like how the money and safety provided by monopolies can’t be corrected by market forces either.

> The problem is that the money and safety (which investors love) provided by “recurring sources of revenue” are too strong to counter with market forces alone.

There are two markets: the market of customers who might buy your product and the market of VCs who might want to fund your startup. Lately the latter has been making most of the decisions. It's nearly impossible for a bootstrapped startup to compete against products sold at a loss with VC backing.

That's so quaint, it's like it's 1950s, and people still believe there's a free market and open competition...

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