People Don’t Like Subscriptions | Hacker News Reader

People Don’t Like Subscriptions

38 pointssumizeit54 comments

We have a subscription product. People don’t like paying for subscriptions. If we offer lifetime access, they jump at the chance. What do you do to convince your customers to purchase a subscription?

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When people say they don’t like subscriptions and companies want to push subscriptions, it’s almost always a pricing-vs-value issue at the core.

If you want to sell me a subscription where I have a new Porsche for $1/day, and I can trade it in every 2 years for a new one, I’ll take 3 or 4! If you want to sell me a subscription to heated seats for $1/day, I’ll take zero and take pains to find a way around it and publish that.

It’s not that subscriptions are bad, but rather than overpriced subscriptions are bad, IMO. I’d love to “buy” an underpriced subscription for many of the things that today I own.

I'll add that locking things behind a subscription also means that I lost access if I stop paying. Which puts me in an adversarial position against the company if they keep raising the price to see what the market will tolerate. And at some point people are likely to question if they continue to receive the value that justifies the ever increasing prices

With a one off purchase I don't immediately lose my access if for example, I get laid off and need to cut back on my monthly spending. I may lose support, eventually run into an OS that won't run it, etc, but for the most part I don't lose my data and access.

True, but if the subscription is priced roughly equivalently, you will have enough money still in your pocket to keep paying for that subscription even after you’re laid off, at least for a while.

Yeah, nah, I would start searching for someone who has built an interference module that goes between the cars computer and the heated seats and allows me to manually toggle the heated seats without BMWs permission.

If someone gave me a brand new free BMW I would gladly spend $600 to make sure that I didn't have to send BMW $15/month, but I bet it wouldn't even cost that much.

"Subscribe vs buy" feels like deciding between "rent vs own".

Sure, if I can snag a rent-controlled apartment for well under market price, that would be a good deal. And yes, if I buy a poorly-designed money pit to live in, that could be a bad deal.

But in almost all cases, I would prefer to own the place where I live. The biggest reason to rent is, "I cannot afford to buy", which seems like a reasonable way to restate your framing of subscriptions as a pricing-vs-value proposition.

So, would it be reasonable to conclude that allowing people to buy software like Photoshop or MS Word (or removing add-on subscriptions from paid products) would result in most people being priced out of the market? Could the recent rise in subscription models be seen as a form of software shrinkflation?

I mean, yes, if I negatively value subscriptions, that's a pricing thing, and you can overcome it by choosing a ridiculous example that vastly overcompensates for how much I negatively value subscriptions.

But I still negatively value subscriptions.

I strongly prefer purchases as well*, but it’s still a matter of price vs value. Nearly everyone who today prefers subscriptions and nearly everyone who today prefers perpetual purchases can be flipped based on nothing but changing the price.

For the right price, I’ll give away all of our (totally paid off and perfectly usable) cars and lease cars forever.

* at the currently offered prices for both, of course.

I would point out Adobe's Creative Suite which was a few thousand dollars in the day. I think many people couldn't find that much money in one place but more people can afford $65 a month. That $65 a month is starting to add up, it will be a lot more over the course of ten years, but with the subscription you always have the latest version.

Their $10/month subscription for Lightroom, Photoshop, behance and an online portfolio is actually a good deal. Covers a photographer’s needs very well.

Simple. Justify—in honest, person-to-person language, not marketing bullshit—why you deserve to keep receiving money.

If your product involves continual resource usage—runs on your servers, offers personal support, continually updated info, etc—then yeah, you're providing value in exchange for money. I despise subscriptions, but I have no problem paying for someone else's resources that I'm using.

But if your product runs on my resources, you do not deserve to be paid any more than once. I'm sorry, but it really is that simple. I have no problem paying a fair price, or paying for additional upgrades. I do have a problem paying for you to sit back and do nothing, and that's what software subscriptions essentially are. People don't like greed. That's a feature, not a bug.

If you still want to try to milk people, though, I think the hybrid model is the way to go. When I'm considering an app, the first thing I look at is pricing; if it's a sub, I close the window and never look back. If it's a one-time price, I'll genuinely consider whether the product is worth it. If it's a reasonable price, I might even impulse-buy it.

So I think beyond being unethical, the subware pricing scheme is probably losing you potential customers that you aren't even aware of.

Careful. This perspective lends to [SaaSS][1]. We _could_ give you the software and have it run on your machine, but then we couldn't justify charging a subscription. So, we'll give you a thin client, run the software on our hardware, and be sure to charge you much more than our costs. As a bonus, we can change the behavior of the software at any time without your knowing.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

You really have to ask?

Don't force subscriptions! If everything I ran - occasionally - required a subscription, no matter how small, I would drop 99% of it. I have already done this for MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite. I don't need updates and certainly not their online "collaborative" features, which are pretty lame IMO.

Not sure how this works for them. A customer doesn't need services or updates but they disable their SW so, what, the user will come back to them. No, they just force us to find pay once alternatives or stop using the functionality. Because of this baffling practice I no longer consider their formats the standard.

> With a Sumizeit subscription, you have access to an ever-growing library of book summaries, with new books added every day.

I wouldn't pay for this, but it's a fair thing to be a subscription because it's continually updated.

I think this business model suffers more fundamentally from lack of need - I can already find an adequate summary of any book, and AI can pretty much already do it too.

I like subscriptions just fine, for example, I’d rather pay a monthly fee for a streaming service rather than have to buy media individually.

You’ve stated nothing about why you think a subscription would be attractive to your customers, and that’s likely the reason why they aren’t interested. It might be good for you business, but what makes it good for them?

Edit: I looked up your product in your other post. I’m not sure why you are surprised that people would prefer to go with the lifetime subscription. Even at full price, would you seriously think that people wouldn’t just give Spotify $600 one time just to stream music forever from their full library??

If you’re having trouble getting people to sign up for the subscription, it’s probably because the free trial is too limited.

> I’d rather pay a monthly fee for a streaming service rather than have to buy media individually.

Sure, but you end up pay for multiple streaming services because none of them have everything you want.

Personally I'd rather just pay per view (rent) for video and buy music.

Or just buy one or two? I don’t get this narrative that everyone is spinning about having to buy every single streaming service.

Personally I regret that I paid just once for a Plex Pass because Plex decided to go in a direction that I disagreed with completely. (e.g. prioritizing spamming me about off-brand streaming services over reliable access to my own streaming library)

Had they been a subscription product this action could have hurt them in their pocketbook and they would have had a reason to care what I thought.

I bought a Plex pass as well and also dislike the direction they went afterward.

Even with that, the $75 pass in April 2018 was cheaper than any reasonable monthly fee that they’d have charged me over the 57 months since then (or the 40-plus months until they started pushing their own content).

We still use Plex almost daily. 95+% of our use could be done on the free version, but I still feel like the Pass was money well-spent and don’t mind that I supported them directly for something that we’ve used to manage over a thousand hours of entertainment and that the whole family can easily and intuitively use.

I enjoyed Plex until I didn't, then I switched to Jellyfin. I can't say it was a bad value in terms of what I got out of it, but in the sense that so many of us feel out of control of technology I feel like I am part of the problem and not part of the solution when I am involved w/ something like Plex.

I don't run a business so I can't directly answer your question but I can answer it from a consumer stand point.

Assuming I find your product interesting a free trial or cheap (< $10) monthly subscription will get me in the door. After that everything depends on the product and price.

Generally this is how things are in my mind: - I generally want a lifetime license if one is offered even if it is expensive because I want to pay once and never again.

- If a lifetime license is not available, too expensive, or has restrictions like missing features I'll opt for an annual subscription

- If I am going to use the product briefly I'll opt for a monthly subscription and then cancel it when I am done using it.

Some things that will put me off of your product no matter how good it is: - Hard or impossible to cancel subscriptions, if I have to call to cancel you can bet I will call once and never use your product again and I will tell anyone else interested to never use your product.

- Removing features or forcing me to pay more for a better subscription tier after updating, generally unless I can't live without your product I will be canceling rather than upgrading my subscription tier

For me it comes down to whether the company is providing ongoing value with the subscriptions.

Asana as a subscription product makes sense as they provide hosting. The same for paying for backups for something like Obsidian.

However a single player game I play locally should not be a subscription.

Creative Cloud is interesting because they don't really offer ongoing value, but the price for purchasing it used to be so high the cost of "renting" it for a month feels better.

So, are you actually providing an ongoing service that justifies ongoing payment from your customers? On the flip side, are you pricing lifetime access at the true value of the software?

Hard to say about Adobe CC.

For one thing the subscription model enables truly cloud-based products where you are paying for hardware as well as software, such as the new version of Lightroom. (I say "yuck!" I want to like Lightroom Classic but boy I find it is slow when it comes to Sony fully frame RAW files.)

Back in the day you spent a few thousand dollars for a particular version of the creative suite. Today you pay the same kind of money every few years but you always have the latest version. In the time that it has been "CC" there have been some major developments in the product such as the Flash editor being renamed to Animate and being retooled to output video, content for an HTML 5 player, etc.

I appreciate the steady stream of improvements made to Photoshop and Illustrator although I hate that it is always popping up windows to advertise itself just when I feel stressed about getting started on some project that's late.

I found Adobe's subscription was more painful in its execution than what actually is.

Back when I had subscription with them, I had to pay monthly but locked to their annual contract, so I had certain period of time I can cancel, and out side of that, they would charge me penalty.

I guess they now have prepaid option which works like most of other services these days, that you can essentially pay up front and if you cancel, would continue to end of the term.

Actually what worse is ones used by many Japanese services -- where payment date is always 1st of the month regardless of the date you established your contract (so if you start your service on the 31st of the month, they would charge for full month for <1 day of service), and the service deactivates at the moment the service is canceled. (You'll get charged for the full month even if you cancel on the early days of the month, for the full month that you don't have access to the service...)

Well maybe the fact that your 1 year subscription is $41.70 and your lifetime subscription is $50 does not help?

It seems like it's a temporary discount, but even then a lot of people will wait for the next time it is discounted. You are setting a precedent that makes it not worth buying the subscription.

Does this hold true if you charge $150 for lifetime license vs $50?

I think you have a pricing problem. This is what I see for you:

Subscription Monthly = $84 / year

Subscription Annual = $50 / year

Lifetime = $50 One Time

If I see myself using this for about half a year, I'm just going to get a lifetime sub.

I own an orchard. My customers don't like buying apples. When I offer them pears, they jump at the chance. What can I do to convince my customers to prefer apples over pears?

You're making an apples to oranges comparison there. Rewritten to be more-similar:

  I own an orchard. My customers don't like our service of getting monthly apples. When I offer them the chance to purchase a lifetime supply of apples, they jump at the offer. What can I do to convince my customers to prefer the monthly apple subscription?

Lifetime is hurtful to our business. We can’t survive if we offer it. Period.

(Yeah, wasn't sure how to rewrite the analogy to make it clear it was about the issue of lifetime. But I thought about it a bit more and edited my post after realizing that offers of a lifetime of apples is an apt analogy because of how crushingly silly of an idea that would be for that business model.)

Either charge more for the lifetime option, or just don't offer it.

It's more that the "lifetime supply of apples" is actually "seeds" or "apple tree".

With the monthly apples, I'm the one caring about weather, illness, bad recolts & so on.

It's not always a bad deal. It all comes down at the pricing point. Which is the point of many other comments.

But yeah, licensing the apple tree that the customer grows himself is just mean.

Wait.. isn't that actually the modern seed business that farmers are complaining about ?

A text editor I use costs 40 (20 after the first year) per year, or $260 lifetime. That's 11 years. I'd wager that makes subscriptions a lot better looking for most users.

Find a middle ground, e.g. offer a three-year license.

I don't want another klingon creeping onto my credit card, and you don't want to make a commitment for the lifetime of your business. So pick a duration in-between that allows both a one-time payment and an acceptable commitment.

I switched from Adobe to Affinity because of subscriptions. I would gladly pay Adobe for a full creative suite if I had the option, but I want neither their subscription where they can remove features at-will, nor do I want any of their horribly buggy cloud offerings where they train their AI on my data. I also don't like the continuous financial liability and the loss of access if I stop paying.

The only subscription I'm paying for software-wise is Jetbrains, where they have steep discounts the more years you have a sub and every update they make is s huge time saver for me. Plus, I get a fallback license if I ever decide to cancel.

It's less that people dislike subscriptions and more that they dislike subscription models transparently designed to take their money.

Jetbrains has the subscription model down to a fine art. Would I pay $500 up front for all of jetbrains' software? No, probably not. But I've been paying $15 a month for their entire catalog for many years and I'm happy about it. The subscription cost goes down over time, you can add products to your subscription at any time and retain your continuity discount and you get perpetual fallback licenses.

If jetbrains suddenly changes their subscription price to something I'm unwilling to pay, I still get to use the software I already paid for. The value of this subscription is immense and everyone who has a jetbrains subscription tells everyone else about it. It's pretty much the best subscription model out there.

On the other hand, a subscription for heated seats is a transparent ploy to just take my money. I'd sooner install a manual switch hooked up to the heater wires than pay monthly for them.

You subscription needs to provide value greater than the cost. You user needs assurance that you won't one day up the price for no reason or remove features/value. Your users want to feel like they're getting something useful out of the arrangement rather than just handing you money.

If your users prefer a perpetual one time license cost over a subscription, then you should think about the value your product provides over time. Is your product worth $15 a month forever or is it worth a single $500 license? Your customers seem to think it's the latter option.

I do not like the 'give us your charge card and we will bill you'. As it requires me to remember to cancel.

I see subscriptions as more of a scam as companies expect people to forget. Or have a hard time canceling. I recall one company where you first had to go online and try to cancel to be given a phone number to dial. They tried to convince you to stay, then ask you a dozen questions about why. Finally they give you another number to call, customer care (LOL customer retention), who then makes all kinds of offers to get you to stay. Why would I intentionally sign up for that abuse?

If a company really wants more subscribers? Make the effort to cancel near zero. Or even Zero. If a company AUTO cancel, when a person does not use the service for a month. Then at least the company would get my respect, but likely also my money, if the service is something I want.

For me, it's a lot of things.

- It's about trust. I pay once, and I get to "keep" it for as long as I want. Same reason I will never buy anything that is web/cloud based. I like paying once and getting a binary file that I can keep on my hard disk. I see plenty of serious photographers using Photoshop CS6, and some even Photoshop 7.0. I would like to own the file.

- Company might just increase subscriptions price in the future. With one-time pay, that's not a problem.

- A lot of companies just set subscription prices by converting from Dollar/Euro. That doesn’t make sende where I live. The ideal way would be take the Purchase-Power-Parity into account.

As an individual, subscriptions bothers me because nowni have to remember every month or every year about making sure money is on my debit card.

Last time i bought a piece pf software (SecureCRT) i just paid it in full, and it’s mine forever.

For me as individual it gets less and less interesting to own things that I will throw away.

Owning a flat or a house is ok. Car is disputable to own.

Software I don’t care.

Well data I do care. So if I buy instance of software and it stops working because I switch OS - I lost access to my data. Which is really bad.

The recurring cost is a real problem.

Not just financially. We all desperately want to feel some sense of agency over our future, and subscriptions force us to frequently reckon with our existential lack of control.

I acknowledge that might be how you feel, but that’s not my case.

I don’t even consider subscriptions I can’t afford, and that doesn’t bother me. I can afford many things and many more I can’t, it’s fine.

But it really bothers me that now i have one more think to look after, no matter how small, each month.

Also, many services will bill on different days of the month so potentially you could have a different thing bother you each day.

I really prefer to pay 1k$ to get a full time license, instead of 10$ per month.

No you don't.

$1000 is more than 8 years of subscription. And that's without counting the 26.69% of inflation that the US had in the last 8 years, making it actually more than 10 years.

Not only is this a long time to keep using the same software, you also have good chances that the company has gone bankrupt by then.

> No you don't... good chances that the company has gone bankrupt by then.

You do see the inherent tension in your reasoning here, don't you?

If your threat model is that the company might go bankrupt, how could that possibly weigh in favor of procuring software in a way that requires the company to remain in business for the software to continue running?

(Also, you deeply misunderstand how inflation works. High inflation makes future outlays higher in nominative terms, not lower.)

Having a lifetime license does not remove whatever DRM they have in place...

You don't get to just assume that one of the drawbacks of subscription software applies just as often to non-subscription software. While some non-subscription software has DRM, it is (a) a much smaller proportion, and (b) not nearly as often of the phone-home, you-must-still-have-a-server-running type.

I think subscriptions make sense when you use a product that requires maintenance, support and other things. If you buy something that you can use as is and not need additional support etc except may be during purchase/installation process, then one time makes sense.

Most SaaS these days are subscription because it makes sense. Companies like BMW trying to charge for heated seat subscription is bullshit. I have an Acura TL 2010 with amazing heated seats all paid for once when I bought the car. Still runs amazing in 2023.

I think iA has a insightful article "How Much Would You Charge for iA Presenter?" [1] about how to properly set the price between subscription / lifetime purchase pricing.

[1]: https://ia.net/topics/how-much-would-you-charge-for-ia-prese...

How about mining for recurring revenue by selling support? Those who are content with the version they purchased can continue using it in perpetuity. While others who want the latest version can pay a yearly fee.

In the B2B world support is commonly priced at 20% of the initial license fee.

I'm sorry. Your company is a knock off of Blinkist with a logo you swiped from Summly?

My exposure to the word subscription in real world is you keep what you have received and get new magazine. I do not mind if I have to run a vm to use old software but totally gone … and all my asset in there gone as well …

Just not right.

make the subscription super cheap at the start and lifetime access should have the opposite: unreasonably high price. subscription will look like a value deal in comparison.

When validating a product it can make sense to gauge initial interest by offering a lifetime deal. If your product is valuable enough, having stable MRR is better.

What about yearly subscription, non recurring

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