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For monthly, saas, products why would the price increase “to reflect value added to our products” since it’s a recurring fee it should always pay for new features to be added.

It’s sad to see the “digital magic economies” of software slowly transform to normal commodity slow price increases to support brands and locked in markets.

I guess it will be a race to suck between Office and Google.

I hope an innovator comes along and provides a software layer on top of cloud storage like Dropbox (that isn’t tied to a particular storage like Dropbox is). Software should cost $100/year for your entire life.

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> For monthly, saas, products why would the price increase “to reflect value added to our products” since it’s a recurring fee it should always pay for new features to be added.

Without commenting on the specific of Google Workspace, in general, this makes sense if you’ve added a bunch of additional value.

In fact, ironically, Slack’s antitrust complaint against MS re: Teams is precisely the fact that they bundled all this additional functionality in without charging extra for it.

I think what your parent is saying (at least how I read it) is in the context of comparing it to boxed software. I buy MS Word 1995 for $100. Then they release added value and box it up as MS Word 1998 for $100. Then they release added value and box it up as MS Word 2000 for $100.

Now we pay $10/mo. If you average it out, it's not too different than just paying for the added value as it grows.

And worse, if I cancel I don't keep to keep using it without the added value. So I'm painted in a corner. It's objectively worse in that sense.

You also pay for hosting of that software service (availability, security, etc.).

There should be a host component and a build component. Unless they increase the rate of development (they didn’t) it shouldn’t be a reason for a price increase.

This seems like they are using a marketing plan from the boxed software days to justify a price increase today. I wonder if there’s a 90s Microsoft person who was tasked with a back strategy after Google decided they wanted higher profits or slower growth or some reason that has nothing to do with reflecting value.

And that’s fair.. but worth pointing out I bought Diablo 2 Resurrected which I almost exclusively play online. Unless they release an expansion then I’m done paying them money.

I think there’s some places where SaaS makes a lot of sense. And storage costs and high data transfer volume…. It makes sense.

There’s a balance. Modern software leans too heavily to subscriptions though.

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