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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

You've mixed subscription based services (Google storage space) and content (Spotify) with subscription based software.

For services, it might make sense. Even so, what exactly is "getting better all the time" about Spotify the software? It's been the same for like 5 years now.

As for the rest: 1Password declined (turned to Electron shit), Creative Cloud keeps adding bloat while not adressing decades standing issues, IntelliJ is, I guess OK, Figma I don't use so can't tell.

And I know (even use) many more software that turned into subscriptions and now sit on their asses or deliver minimum value - and of course will stop working the moment you had enough with their lack of progress end your subscription.

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IntelliJ has arguably one of the best subscription models for tools. It works offline and they have fallback licenses so if they doubled the price and I cancel I’m still legally entitled to a recent version that I’ll probably be happy enough with until I find the motivation to replace it with something else.

If Adobe worked like that I’d be like 75% pissed off at their products and pricing.

Sketch also used this model for a long time. You pay for a year of updates, and you can keep the last version you got forever.

Recently they started to add more cloud/collaboration services/a web app and switched to a regular old subscription model, but you can bet your ass i'm staying on the legacy model for as long as I can.

arguably... then I'll argue the opposite (even as a subscriber). Jetbrains rolls your subscription back to the version on the day you purchased, not the last version in your subscription. If you purchase and immediately find a bug, you know you're rolling back to that bug unless you pay a renewal next year. Same goes for any fixes you got during that entire year. Poof, gone.

I've been subscribed to IntelliJ close to 8 years now.

The one reason why I tolerate IntelliJ's subscription/pricing model is that unlike Adobe, they actually do deliver constant and worthwhile updates. Their software also rarely crashes, and their universal workflow (across different languages, themes, key bindings, plugins) also works as promised.

If not for the above the subscription would be a very hard sell for me.

Spotify doesn’t need to “get better” - you’re paying the fee for streaming rights to an ever-growing content library. Same with Netflix, etc.

There’s also an unspoken but important accounting detail here - if you run an online software business and offer a one-time, lifetime purchase for your product, you are now contractually on the hook to provide that service to customers forever, even if your business stops growing, which means that the liabilities of your business are not capped. This is bad if you operate with a lot of cloud expenses, and it means that these businesses are unsustainable unless new customers keep coming in, whereas a subscription model scales with utilization.

Not really, support for software, especially games are discontinued publicly all the time.

The real rule is not pissing off your customer base by taking important services offline while they still use that particular product. Doing so would be a PR blunder, and obviously effect sales of future products.

Sorry I think you misunderstood my point - if you want to continue providing a service to customers that runs online, then a one-time payment doesn’t work as a business model. The fact that they have to shut down game servers is a testament to that problem. At some point the costs exceed the revenue and it becomes unprofitable to honor the lifetime purchase.

No. If that were true I could simply use spotify or netflix with any software of my choice.

You are paying for both the content and the software bundled together. And no, you don't get it "for free".

But you can, in the case of spotify: https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot

>for streaming rights to an ever-growing content library

Ever-growing my ass. I've had lots of songs on my playlists removed because they were taken off the platform. And not some obscure acts, for example Westbam's Götterstrasse (which features anybody, from Brian Molko and Iggy Pop to Kanye and Lil' Wayne).

Spotify added over 20M new tracks to its library last year.

Claiming 1Password has declined is unfair at best. They release a steady stream of updates, and when I discovered a UX issue earlier this year their team were on it like a rash.

Yea I don't understand all the recent hate over their new version. I installed the new version on my devices, and while the keyboard shortcuts seemed to change, once I looked them up it worked better than before. I just use the cmd+ shift+space shortcut for everything now.

There are many, many, many issues raised on their support forum with regards to their new version. All of them are ignored.

The most glaring one: search. Which is verifiably worse UX now.

Also the change to force you to store passwords in the cloud. You used to be able to have a vault and keep it on your machines only. I can't see how any company could allow this software storing company passwords on their machines.

The weirdest thing is that they don’t have a Mac App Store version from v8. Most they’ve done is put up this page: https://1password.com/mac-app-store-subscribe/

I sort of like 1password, but I have to admit that on my personal macbook which is from mid 2015, if I am running anything moderately intensive (like a video game) then 1password drops about 20% of my keypresses when entering the master password if I enter it at my full typing speed. This is a huge pain because my password is long and I'm forced to type it slowly to avoid the drops.

Other text entry fields don't seem to suffer from this problem. AFAIK this wasn't a problem before the switch to Electron.

> I just use the cmd+ shift+space shortcut for everything now.

Whoa, I didn't know that one. Was that functionality around in earlier version?

Strongly disagree regarding 1Password, their client is continually improving and it is IMHO by far the best password managing service now, I have tried most of the other ones before it. Really have no issues with their Electron switch, I didn't even notice it, still fast!

Which OS are you on? I am on macOS and it is worse.

macOS here and its better.

Same with me for Electron, I wouldn't know but for the HN comments. They added an SSH agent to their macOS clients a while ago, at least for me that was a pretty big improvement. They also added features for sharing passwords with others who aren't in your 1Password Team/Family/whatever, and that's really slick and useful too. I'm a bit disappointed in their 1password secrets automation thingy since there seems to be no free tier to play with it, but it's good to see them grow into that direction since that may alleviate the pressure to profit squeeze their password manager offering to death.

But I guess you have to keep in mind they are in an ongoing pivot to cloud and that understandably disgruntles those of their customers who have a strong aversion to cloudy products. If you look at 1Password as a standalone app for managing local vaults synced via dropbox, I guess you could argue it's kinda shitty by now and getting worse, and every cloud feature is a net-negative in that view. If I had to guess I'd say most people want a cloud solution these days, but I guess that may be what's behind a lot of the negative sentiment. Or maybe not, but as someone who buys 1Password Family for the cloudy features, has used it a lot at work and doesn't have a single local vault, I'm a very happy customer and I've yet to run into a non-trivial bug with v8.

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