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Comment by chaps | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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 ?

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.

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