Doesn't explain businesses that had been per-purchase for a long time and are now still switching to subscriptions though. (E.g. photoshop, jetbrains...)
That doesn't mean the rest of your statement, but if that happened then competition in a free market would take care of it. Perhaps you can start the next billion-dollar Adobe?
While it took a community outcry, I think Jetbrains now has the best subscription model, that’s a positive for both users and the company.
They could just let me keep the version I already have and block me from future updates. The way, they set it up right now, they are deliberately causing some disruption when unsubscribing.
It's called a Cash Cow[1] model—you make a one-time purchase, which allows you updates for the next year. At the end of the year, you can either purchase another year of updates, or enjoy the full-featured app you currently have.
The thing keeping me from subscriptions is the fact that if you decide you no longer want to pay, you no longer get access. This encourages devs to continue to ship great updates, while not gimping your software at the end of the payment term.
[1] https://drewmccormack.medium.com/a-cash-cow-is-on-the-agenda...
With cost of living crisis and such, soon enough though it won't be able to last. People are already cancelling one of the biggest main subscriptions they have (netflix).
Also I fear this is really changing society. Many years ago, as you got older you got into a better place in life because you had saved up and bought all the stuff you need and slowly aqquired good equipment and everything you need.
Now our lives are full of tech that needs to be replaced every couple of years, heck even now headphones have gone wireless, your headphones needs replacing every few years and now with more and more things being subscription, it's fine when your are young, but your not able to save so much as your constantly having to replace/buy new stuff, when your older what happens? You don't have the same stuff you would have built up in the past, you need to keep paying for it all.
Your grandfather's wheelbarrow didn't need replacing every 2 years but he also didn't have Netflix. You can easily have your grandfather's lifestyle by buying a future-proof wheelbarrow and cancelling your Netflix subscription.
Software is fixed cost to create and near-free to distribute. Sure there are tiny cloud costs for running things and maybe you need a couple engineers to fix bugs, but the subscription pricing model doesn’t fit this.
To use headphones as an example you can still go get a pair of wired Sony headphones that will have great sound and last for a decade for $50. I just did. (Or you can spend more and get even better.)
I've also bought $15 Chinese Bluetooth earbuds that were janky and dead in less than a year.
Sometimes the simple, older, reliable stuff is better.
You can build a desktop PC that will last you for a decade with occasionally upgrading components. Now you can do it with a Framework laptop too.
Personally I bought a nice i7 laptop about a decade ago and will only get around to retiring it this year, it stopped being my main workhorse several years ago but has been great as a secondary living room entertainment machine.
I don't need the latest greatest, I play a lot of retro and indie games and watch movies at picture qualities that video snobs would sneer at, but that gets back to whether you want to develop expensive tastes or not.
Not that life has fundamentally become unliveably expensive.
There are some places where cost of living really is a serious problem - homes, health care, education.
But a lot of this I feel is really about younger generations having voracious consumer appetites, like an absolutely off-the-charts, record-setting desire for luxury and status. A lot of it is driven by a heightened sense of needing to keep up, look good on Instagram etc. which is a whole other can of worms. Do you really need to keep up with the rat race, the Joneses, the latest fashions etc.? Maybe it's different now, but the Boomers went through their own version of this, they had their big hippie anti-materialism movement in the 60's (and then by the 80's they seemed to have forgotten all about it).
I think a big part of this is just how much better advertising has gotten, basically cementing consumer goods as required to the average person. Add on to that how good high quality laptops are specialized goods for those who spend their lives obsessed with tech (i.e. the framework laptop). If you walk into Walmart or BestBuy, your options will be severely limited to products which aren't built to last. I can't blame anyone for feeling confused when it comes to which products to buy.
Also, capitalism can’t help but lower the quality of products as a way to increase numbers sold. It’s inherent to the system. Companies would be insane to produce for example a phone that lasts 15 years, it would cut into their profit marges.
What this means for the endless, exponential "consumer" ideology is that it isn't sustainable in the long run. This should be blindingly obvious but for some reason many people weren't or aren't seeing it.
Only because you can't afford a subscription won't mean that people will stop trying to upsell. Instead you'll be constantly confronted with all the things you're supposedly missing out on, will be stuck with purposely annoying workflows and generally will feel like constantly using the shareware version of everything. That's not a future I personally look forward to.
more profitable is more likely to be viable in more future situations
This part is absolutely bonkers to me and absurd that we’ve accepted it.
I’m an amateur music producer. Many producers I know, even pros, use headphones that are years old, some even decades old. Most of the bestselling models haven’t changed at all in decades. You can use them for years and the only parts you need to replace are the ear cushions and cable. Most manufacturers even build them with replaceability in mind with detachable cups and cables.
The fact that so many companies are moving to the subscription model shows that it works better than others.
Want to run an ad? Prices have gone way up because you're the only one that's clinging to the old model. Want to pay premium to hire someone better? You can't, your competitor can because they have turned to subscriptions. In many cases your hand is forced.
Customers vote with their wallets and social shares. If you find a product that it a one time purchase, then you should share it, post about it since you will be rewarding the company, for they sure are not able to compete on customer acquisition.
Jetbrains is a great example, because with a steadily growing ecosystem of third party developer tools that they must integrate with, their maintenance cost is probably high and rising. We expect our IDE’s to support everything under the sun but balk at paying for the never-ending work needed to support that. Something’s gotta give in that equation.
However, there are a bazillion other applications -- password managers, note taking applications, Git clients, you name it, for which this is not true. I made a very niche-specific GUI application in 2010-2012 (a search application for Dutch treebanks), written with Qt. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It's effectively abandonware or just done (depending on your perspective). I have released updates since then to make sure it keeps running on the latest OS versions. It takes me, maybe 2-4 hours per year? (Typically replacing some deprecated Qt APIs and I there was one libxml2 API change.)
I think a lot of software companies just want to get on the gravy train. Usually, their yearly price is close to what a perpetual license used to cost. So if you successfully switch to a subscription model, you have much more income than before.
The primarily loser here is the user. You are poorer after an application switches to a subscription model. If a company goes bankrupt or decides to pull the plug, better hope that your data is not in a proprietary format (while I can still run some old WordStar in DOSBox and open old files).
Had a subscription model been used, those software might have benefited from 30 years worth of usability updates...or they might still be garbage, looking at SAP.
For example, Adobe is the largest SaaS by revenue:
https://www.mikesonders.com/largest-saas-companies/
— Model clearly works if you look at Abobe’s revenue per year since 2004:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266399/revenue-of-adobe-...
— Here’s a detailed history of Abobe, if you’re interested in the SaaS part, just search for “SaaS” on the page:
Even if for some reason you didn't need all of this, IDE 1.0 would eventually stop getting updated and the bugs would stop getting fixed, so you would naturally need to update.
Considering people naturally want the latest and greatest, and devs hate maintaining legacy stuff, a subscription makes sense in this case.
> Considering people naturally want the latest and greatest
They often don't. Especially with updates, those are often far more in the interests of the developers than of the users. That's why so much development effort has gone into auto-updating schemes.
Remember how much effort Microsoft had to invest to get people off Windows XP. A large part of their userbase would have been perfectly fine with staying on XP for all eternity. It was Microsoft who wanted them to update to Vista, not the users.
Source: I run a SaaS business.
A related observation: we have unrealistic expectations of how cheap software should be. Software development is very expensive and has been becoming more expensive over the years, as system complexity grows and the pace of OS/platform updates increases. There are very few "mainstream" apps that can take advantage of economies of scale, and yet we still expect to be able to use hundreds of apps for cheap one-time payments. That leads to unsustainable business models and app churn.
Myself, I'd rather have a small number of expensive (subscription-based) good applications that are sustainably developed and maintained over many years.
"Greedy" as a criticism of a for-profit business makes about as much sense as "predatory" does as a criticism of a cat.
So a for-profit business is greedy by nature, so we need to regulate its natural impulses since it can’t control them itself, much like the cat.
If we assume that not all people (as it is people who drive these organisations) are greedy, we can also assume that greed is not baked into every profitable org.
Infinite support or updates and a one-time-payment is unrealistic, yeah, ruling out cloud-based SaaS. But for common desktop apps and on-prem stuff, that just isn't neccessary. Drop support at some (previously announced) point and the customer can decide if they want to upgrade. Adobe CS6 still runs fine.
Devs have it do easy now, that many are so abstracted away from DB, OS, network stack, persistence, that they literally have no idea how anything really works.
This is desired of course, devs today are in short supply, just like the bow vs the crossbow, years of practise turns into months.
But the point is, it is indeed far far far easier to deploy software today.
(why the 0 and now double u usage in place of w with auus?
I suspect auus, n0de, c0mposer dependant entities, such as auus,spend time defending their business model. I want honest discussion, not "omg, defend n0de" discussion, which latches on mention of such tech and pulls in the army)
I think systems nowadays are larger and more integrated, more complex.
Deployments sometimes are simpler, whilst other things instead are harder. Software will always be pushing the limits.
Maybe you don't want the comment to be found by search engines
In general, I do think software should be cheaper than ever. The main reason it isn't is the crazy pace of changes in platforms. I maintain a web app, which helps me keep my sanity, but I'm not even considering writing mobile apps: there is no way for me to keep up with the pace of changes and updates that vendors make there. It's just way too expensive.
That's the other extreme though.
There's a middle ground that http://reaper.fm/ uses. You buy the current x and x+1 versions. Then you pay for the license again for x+2, x+3 if you want to. The price is very reasonable and there's no subscription as such. If you're happy with the old major version, you can use it as long as it continues to work.
It is of course necessary to make ends meet and plenty of software shops do just fine with the business model of making a good product and charge for upgrades.
> You can stay on Windows XP to avoid that, would you?
People do. But realistically either you'd upgrade your computer since XP was sold and get a new license included, or just pay for the update once in almost 2 decades. I don't get the issue you're trying to point out.
You get all of whatever version you start on (Even if you start at x.99), plus the next, and then your license is done unless you renew it. So no matter what, I don't get updates after 6.99 unless I renew.
Most of what I do music-wise nowadays is making songs live in Ableton Live on Twitch, and I rarely bother to take them to a "produced" state, so what I have in the current Reaper is plenty. I probably won't upgrade, but I'll keep recommending it.
No it's not. This is very realistic: pay once for a license to use the software, and then you pay a maintenance fee every year to get the updates and new versions. You stop paying, you stop getting the updates, but whatever you have already still works. There's no shortage of examples but I'll give a shout-out to one of my favorite software products, PRTG: https://shop.paessler.com/shop/prtg/new/?preselected_license...
I think the model's seen as being more lucrative, so even businesses that don't inherently need it so much try to find a way to adopt it.
We can pretend it will work for a while, but I do not think this is realistic.
Support is not something you can ignore: people will request support, post negative reviews and opinions, and you will need to deal with that.
My point is that we should all stop pretending and just accept that apps cannot be used without regular maintenance anymore.
With a one-off purchase, you can sell the same thing to a customer multiple times, you can sell upgrades, and you "magically" remove churn.
You own a SaaS, how long do your customers stay customers? If it's 8 months, sell a one-off purchase for the cost of 16 months. Bam, you've made more than you ever would from an average customer, and you don't have to hunt them down and try to get them to stay a customer. You can just focus on building an awesome product and not worry about churn at all. In a year or so, think about a new feature or two that increases the value of your product, sell that new feature (eg, discounted) to existing customers and increase the price for new purchases.
One of my ideas is that we should package manage solutions to problems at a level higher than just code and subscribe to them. We all depend on BSD sockets due to history. BSD sockets Just Works™ and people don't really evolve the BSD socket API over time. If only the rest of the software stack was as feature complete as BSD sockets.
Imagine a labour market that was also a package manager.
When library "xyz" upgrades from version 1.2.0 to 1.3.0 there's an interface change that breaks everybody. If there's 1,000 dependents of "xyz" and it takes 1 hour to upgrade and 1 hour to pass all QA tests and get into production, then that upgrade takes 1,000 man hours + 1,000 hours automated testing.
If we don't depend on library "xyz" throughout our codebase, we reduce the number of callsites to change. If we use a facade, they're all in one place. If we use a Service Provider Interface, we isolate ourselves even more and add flexibility of implementation.
If our facade or SPI is in escrow on a labour market, someone can fix it for us for a cost of their time. Ideally the software maintainer fixes it so they don't break so many people.
Are there enough of them? Many services seems like they can only exist because many people forget to cancel their subscription.
I think of this illegitimate money as seed funding, by large companies, who certainly hope that we’ll reach the feature level of IBM’s products. Given they spend a million a year for IBM’s products, I think they’re doing good by seeding startups like us, even if we fail (which we won’t).
I have subscriptions that remain active despite not actively using the product: I could save money by unsubscribing and resubscribing but the money saved isn’t worth the effort to re-subscribe each time I want to use it.
The effort needed to un-/resubscribe is something that the service can directly control though.
Tying the ability to run with a subscription model means we can't use it for anything business critical (as per legal, regulatory, or just common sense reasons).
And calendars...smh. It would be great if MS and Google both followed some standard perfectly, but based on what I've seen from various calendar apps, they do not. Otherwise, the apps would not have such a hard time dealing with multiple calendars.
HN of all places is one I wouldn't think would assume software maintenance is easy. But, it's where I saw people complain about the Uber app size until an Uber engineer showed up and explained the many screens for payments alone.