Hacker News Reader

Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

I utterly despise the current trend towards the subscription-based model. I want to pay upfront and rid myself of the recurring charges.

Developers: you want recurring income? Welcome to the club. Your income is not my problem.

View on HN

Well, I would hope that purchase of a product or service is a mutually beneficial business transaction. So in this sense how the product is priced is the problem/concern of both parties.

Quoting from https://museapp.com/memos/2021-06-pricing/ :

> You might be used to software from growth-at-all-costs startups: free at the start (funded by venture capital) but eventually your attention in monetized with ads, your personal data is monetized by selling to third parties, or the personal product takes a back seat to the “enterprise” product.

> Muse is following a different path: personal software, made for you and your unique tastes and needs, and funded by direct payment from you and other members. Because our funding comes from you, the customer, rather than investors with their sights on mass-market adoption, our incentives are better aligned with yours.

> By paying for Muse, you help us stay niche, opinionated, and focused on your needs over the long term.

I think it's worth thinking about where the products and services we consume in our daily lives come from and how the incentive models work. And that definitely includes software.

What if mine and Muse’a opinions diverge along the way? Then I can’t keep the old version I like. But I either loose access to what I don’t like anymore. Or pay what Forcwhat I don’t like and hope in future I’ll like it again.

Yes, good point. I'd certainly like software where it's easy to run any version you like.

In the Apple ecosystem that's tough because they roll out breaking API changes in the OS every few years. So if you buy a new computer, upgrade your OS, or otherwise try to keep up with a changing world your software will stop working.

My thoughts on software longevity and why it's a problem for our industry: https://museapp.com/podcast/49-software-longevity/

I’m ex-iOS dev so maybe things changed in the last couple years. But Apple was pretty good at keeping old APIs around for a loooong time. Deprecated apis would stay around for quite a while.

New architectures do break old apps once in a while. But even then apps do survive several years without touching. And if someone wants to keep using apps after that… IMO it’s fair to put some burden on user - they have to stick to old OS too.

But if app is subscription, then Even sticking to old OS won’t help…

These are perfectly good arguments, I think somewhat undermined by the usage rather than feature based price segmentation. It ends up feeling artificially nickel-and-dimey, in a local-sync tool.

Yeah, pricing is really tough. I've experimented heavily with feature-based pricing, most notably in Heroku, and people absolutely hate it. When you put your best features behind a paid upgrade, you're preventing people from evaluating the most important part of the software.

Free trials are another solution, but time also ends up being a bit arbitrary.

In the end, storage is a good metric that doesn't require complex feature gates. We borrowed this model from Notion: they had 1000 blocks free in their original product, but once they started getting those sweet enterprise dollars they were able to give more away for free to individuals. Dropbox and GitHub are two other examples.

Our service still does a lot of work proportionate to data size, so in that sense it's still SaaS and has the same cost dynamics at work. But in the end the real cost of software is engineering salaries, not infrastructure, so that whole discussion is sort of a red herring.

Obviously it remains a problem to solve that our industry can't find a pricing model that is both (1) healthy and sustainable for the business and (2) people find amenable.

It's definitely tough and you're right, it's also easy to make feature-based segmentation infuriating. But (as you know and as this thread amply demonstrates) for pro-sumerish apps, it's as much (if not more) about vibes as it is about price. The 'we're simple software artisans asking an honest price for a quality product' vibe just clashes with the nickel-and-dime vibe of that pricing structure, that's all.

Yeah, truly an unsolved problem. Obsidian seems to have found a good path--free for the core product, $10/mo (standard price for prosumer apps) for sync.

But we felt like sync is a core feature and we really want to give it away for free so that people can experience it. Time will tell if that was a good call.

Do most people have multiple devices they're going to use this in? I only have one iPad, I don't need sync!

A core concept is the idea that creative professionals live a multi-device life. Desktop computer for focused productivity, tablet for relaxed reading and thinking, phone for capture and lookup on the go.

https://museapp.com/how/ipadmac/

Users: I'm not paying for a subscription!

Those same users in a year: Where's the support for all these new features in the OS release just announced? Why haven't there been any free updates to this app I paid you 5 dollars for a year ago? This app sucks, I'm switching to something else. 1 star.

These need not be the only two options. App developers could charge money for updates made i.e. new versions while the old versions keep working as advertised.

Instead of "cloud storage" which might incur ongoing charges, apps can very well hook onto my GDrive/OneDrive to persist data. Also, games have done this "free updates to this app I paid" for years now.

Yes, "pay for a major new version" was the industry model for many years. Office, Photoshop, etc. In the end you're sort of forced to upgrade by file compatibility every two or three years, so it's a subscription with a slightly uneven payment schedule.

There are still some apps that do this, Things is a good example. But that creates all kinds of other challenges when a big part of the product is a service (like ours) if you want to support all versions of the client in perpetuity.

Charge for update. If I like new features, I’ll pay. If not, I’ll stick to old version.

Why would maker take away old version from me if I don’t like the new version?

It's a service, so there's a substantial maintenance cost to maintaining multiple versions. Curious if you also feel this way about Figma or Notion? Or for that matter, auto-updating software like Chrome or iOS?

Why not use iCloud and structure schema to let old versions survive? Solves both issues.

I don’t know what Figma or Notion is. But I dropped beloved Tower git client when they went subscription-only. I still sometimes use their last purchasable version though.

Regarding iOS, It’s possible to refuse updates. I also used iPhone 6 for a looong time and went several years without upgrading OS. I also still use old iPad 4 that receives no updates for years. What can I say… it was a good stable ride!

I don’t care about novelty for the sake of novelty. Once I find a tool I like, I’ll use it as long as possible.

And I’m happy to pay through the nose for quality tools. Be it kitchen utensils or gardening tools or electronics.

You might want to read the original post--a core feature you're paying for is local-first sync, which is explicitly designed to solve a lot of the problems with iCloud.

I do want to see a world where there is a generic syncing service (maybe AWS can run one, but open standards / open source) similar to Dropbox or iCloud. I can pay one lump sum for all my storage and all my apps will connect through it. But so far no such thing exists outside of the crude file-based syncing of Dropbox, and that's not suitable for building realtime apps on top of.

Okay, then maybe that local-first sync can easily support multiple schemes and let old versions run without overhead to devs?

Personally I'm fed up with syncing both as a user and as a developer.

As a developer, I don't want to deal with infrastructure for an app. It's a massive headache to have 24/7/365 responsive system. I want to make apps, not be on-call sysadmin.

As a user, I don't want to worry who is going to sell my data after going bankrupt. And I'd prefer small dev shops don't waste their time on keeping network infrastructure up and running with security patches.

> local-first sync can easily support multiple schemes and let old versions run without overhead to devs

I'd love that. Ink & Switch has done extensive research on how to enable this with p2p technology etc. Our industry isn't there yet... but lots of good folks are working on it. The Muse sync setup is a step in that direction.

> As a developer, I don't want to deal with infrastructure for an app. It's a massive headache to have 24/7/365 responsive system. I want to make apps, not be on-call sysadmin.

Oh yes. I spent many years carrying a pager for Heroku's infrastructure. Part of the appeal of local-first is the sync infrastructure is necessary to transmit data between devices, not for every single keystroke or gesture the user makes.

The model can and has been done successfully, see jet brains for a great example.

Well yes and no. It is your problem if the only options for the software you want are subscription based. To some extent, Photoshop and Lightroom might be examples of this. If I'm not mistaken, Adobe stopped selling one-off licenses for these products quite a while ago. While there are a number of alternatives both paid and free, Adobe's products still capture a considerable portion of the market. Not because people like recurring payments, but because there's whole industries full of people who know how to use those products to produce and deliver quality work. To put another way, I fully understand that you want one upfront payment, it makes sense and I feel the same way, but what if there's no one willing to sell it to you?

I also hate the subscription-based model. I see it as a race to the bottom that devs can't avoid, unfortunately. Your competition can go freemium and pick up casual users and then charge for subs, making your product less attractive initially (why pay a fee to try out an app when another one is free to try?). Most people don't want to pay $40 or $100 for an app. Additionally, users expect features that require cloud services and you need to pay your own fees to keep those lights on, so naturally you want to charge users a subscription fee as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com