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Comment by ly3xqhl8g9 | Hacker News Reader

A heuristic for somewhat ethical subscriptions it's probably to decouple subscriptions from the calendar.

Instead of $X/month, which must be paid even if using intensively, barely, or not at all the service, to have $X for Y amount of "no expiration date" minutes of service. Just want to try the service, pay $0.X for 10 minutes. Really like the service, pay $X++ for 1,000 minutes and not worry about it. Of course, the minute counter would stop when going away from keyboard. Maybe even more ethical, instead of paying for minutes to pay for actions per minute, $X for 10K APMs, use them how you deem fit.

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My mobile provider charges a ridiculous amount per mb while the price in a subscription is much cheaper, if you don’t use more nor less of the allocated amount. So even though they provide both options you mentioned, neither feels ethical to me.

Edit: 1 eur per 10mb in the prepaid version vs 13.50 eur per month for 2gb plus other stuff like calls and sms. So I either have to waste money on stuff I don’t use every month or pay 15 times more for the same service

Yes, mobile provider and ethics is generally a contradiction in terms. I suppose the issue in your case is with the pricing, not the subscription model: $10 for never expiring 100 GB is objectively better than $10/month for 100 GB/month, even if in some months you would pay a total of $20, some others months you would pay $0. I was thinking more of compute-intensive software services as photo/video manipulation with a server-side (AI models running remote, etc.)

"1 eur per 10mb in the prepaid version vs 13.50 eur per month for 2gb" is simply speechless pricing, mafiosos have a gentler racket.

I don't understand paying for APMs.

Paying for actions makes sense, do X, get charged Y.

But is paying for APMs only charging you if you do actions faster? Or paying for minutes and you get a certain cap of actions? None of these are intuitive or reasonable.

Was thinking while typing. Yes, probably you don't need the unit of time at all, simply buy for $10 1,000 click actions, Clicks as a Service (somehow sounds more menacing); the unit economics needs to be worked out on a service basis.

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