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Comment by moomoo11 | Hacker News Reader

Subscriptions are great model. If something really gives me value I will keep paying for it in return for newer content/features.

Why would I spend $200 on some software one time when it will become obsolete within a couple years? Or maybe I only use it a few times.

I’d rather pay 10-20 a month for one month. And never use it again. Or keep using it.

In this economy I went ahead and cancelled a few subscriptions and kept some. I feel zero obligations and it’s great.

TLDR if it brings you value use it. If not don’t.

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Subscriptions for simple usage only make sense for a true service with an ongoing cost to the provider; cloud storage, email, movie streaming, etc. A subscription for a general-purpose application is incongruous; you’re purchasing a finished product with no ongoing costs, like a pair of shoes or a book, and it should cost a one-off fee that reflects the cost that went into producing it.

What subscriptions are theoretically paying for is *updates* — the ongoing cost of supporting new technology, fixing bugs, and adding features. Requiring additional payment for additional work is totally fine, and some apps successfully use this model (Agenda (https://agenda.com) and Nova (https://nova.app) are two that come to mind, and I’d be interested to hear of others).

Requiring ongoing payment just for continued usage is predatory and leads to a perverse incentive where developers don’t actually need to provide updates or new features; they’ve got you as long as you still need the app’s basic functionality. It’s rent-seeking behaviour and it will prove to be as toxic in the digital realm as it is in real life.

Paying to rent Photoshop to use it for a task is absolutely no different than paying to rent a tree stump grinder. It all depends on what your needs are as to whether such rentals / subscriptions make sense for you or not. Don't rent the thing in question if it doesn't make sense for your context.

If you need to use Photoshop daily for the next three years, paying monthly might not make sense. If you need it for two months, it might make a lot of sense to rent it instead of buying it.

> Requiring ongoing payment just for continued usage is predatory

No it's not. You're not entitled to their property. If you don't like their payment terms, don't purchase their service. It's no different than purchasing a television one-off; don't pay $5,000 for a TV if you don't agree with the pricing. It doesn't matter if you're paying monthly or one time, the principle is identical. There are available alternatives to just about every type of software.

> Subscriptions are great model.

Not for the user.

I give $0/yr to digital subscription services with zero marginal reproduction cost (SaaS, video, etc.) and somewhere in the range of $250-1000/yr for pay-to-own software.

Reasons:

1. Pay-to-own software is almost universally of a higher quality than rental software

2. I want to host my own software and data, so I'm not instantly screwed if the software company goes under or unilaterally decides to change the way they do business

3. Subscription management is a pain in the ass (in terms of the effort required to track down subscriptions, cancel them, make sure you aren't still getting charged, etc.) whereas pay-to-own requires close to zero mental overhead

The primary risk with pay-to-own software is that it stops being maintained and the OS APIs the software uses gradually go out of date, but this is much easier to address than the corresponding risk for rental software: that the company folds or the product gets cancelled, and you lose everything instantly!

Photoshop used to be a piece of software you could buy once and then use. You could pay to upgrade each year, or you could keep using your current version and not have access to the new features. Not anymore, its keep buying the new features whether you need them or not. Stop paying, and you have to stop using all of it. The consumer doesn't get a choice.

The worst part I think about many subscription models, is that they can force changes on you that actually make the product WORSE. Hey this new version of the software does X, and I hate X. I want to keep using the older version but I can't and I have to pay to get something I don't want.

If you HAD to subscribe to other things like software makes you, like you have to have an office chair subscription and you had to pay for whatever nonsense changes they made to your chair or you get no chair at all, you'd probably find that a bad deal. Especially if all the chair companies operated the same way.

> The consumer doesn't get a choice.

The consumer always has an obvious choice: don't use Photoshop.

It's not a monopoly product. Use something else. Consumers are not entitled to access to Photoshop as a birthright.

What if it is a monopoly product, as more and more products are becoming? It need not even be a monopoly, just a situation where the supplier has vastly more power than the consumer. Are they not allowed to see that its a bad deal and want better? There can be more options than just take or leave it. Suppliers are not entitled to screw over consumers as a birthright.

No, no, no. To a free market apologist, there's no such thing as inelastic demand. Every item is a completely optional luxury item that you can choose to walk away from without consequence. Nothing is ever a Hobson's Choice.

It's a great world, living in an Econ 101 textbook.

The hilarious thing is that a core tenet of conservatism used to be that widespread private property ownership is the cornerstone of liberty. Rental models, which keep the maximum number of people in debt in the form of eternally-owed rent, were bad. In today's Ayn Rand-worshipping neoconservative free-market religious dogma, the core tenet is The Supply Side Gets What It Wants, NOW, And It's Your Fault If You Don't Like It. And the ultimate socioeconomic effects, any sort of principled view beyond "If the people it costs the most to don't like it, they can lump it", don't matter anymore.

From a consumer perspective, I disagree.

If a program costs $200 but is something that is used very infrequently and doesn't worth $200 to me - then it's poorly priced or best sold (or re-sold) as a service rather than a program. Subscription here is just a service fee in disguise, so why not make things straight? Let me pay $20 one-time to process whatever I want it to, and be done with it.

And if something works for me today and I don't foresee any need for updates then what exactly I'm paying for? Developers will to continue development, that I may or may not need and may or may not care about? Doesn't sound right to me, unless I feel benevolent and charitable for some reason. I get the subscription model if something needs active regular maintenance. Drivers do (heck, I'd buy that rather than seeing companies "we no longer support shit, go buy our new hardware instead"), financial software does, a weather app does. But, say, a camera or note-taking app would certainly continue to work without any maintenance until I upgrade phone, or OS, or want some new features (and then I can buy an upgrade or figure out how to fix it on my own), so I won't buy a subscription (or very much hate doing so if it's my only option besides simply not having something I need at all).

> Why would I spend $200 on some software one time when it will become obsolete within a couple years? Or maybe I only use it a few times.

I spent 80€ on Strongbox, and I think it was a similar amount for canarymail lifetime.

Strongbox is a keepass2 client, canary is an email client. I expect this software to work without any issues for the next 10 years. Neither keepass2-databases nor imap/smtp will be meaningfully developed in the near future, therefore the maintenance for these apps is probably close to zero.

Okay, actually, canary got Sequoia VC money recently and switched to a subscription model. Since then, they added stuff that is useless to me, but I don't care as long as my lifetime licence still works. The core functions likely won't change.

I've grown weary of subscriptions. But I also think people who don't want to pay monthly would definitely be opposed to paying the equivalent one-time purchase.

Remember, Adobe Photoshop was like $500+ before they made it available via subscription.

When I used it, it was $300 IIRC. And I happily paid that price, knowing it would work for me for years to come.

In the same vain, I paid $200 for Logic Pro X three years ago and it still does what I paid for. I’m about to spend $300 on Final Cut Pro.

If Logic Pro went subscription only at, say, Photoshop prices at $20/mo, that would be the equivalent of $720 so far. Even though Logic is seriously awesome, I would not pay it and just go with something else.

Edit: the $20/mo is the price only if you pay for a whole year. Otherwise it’s actually $31.50 per month. So you are either paying a lump sum of $240 (committing to a full year) or $31.50/month.

I still use Photoshop CS3. It doesn't support retina and the dialogs are super grainy. I pray with each OS update that it continues working.

If you pay $500 for Photoshop, and then never upgrade it, then that's $500. Even if you're using Photoshop 5 from 1998. If it's subscription, and you pay $20/month, you always get the latest version, but you'll hit break even in just over two years. The problem comes when life throws a couple lemons your way, and money gets tight. Something like upgrading Photoshop can be put off until there's money for it, because other things, like food or gas, comes first. If times are tough and the $20 that month means going hungry some nights, that's a rough fucking situation.

I will not do software subscriptions at any price for a number of reasons, but the primary two are: it's good avoid any fixed, recurring expenses wherever possible; and I don't want software that I use heavily to stop working when the company decides to drop it, and I don't want software I use heavily to change without my agreeing to it and it happening on my schedule.

Also, long-term, the subscription costs more.

I would much rather pay $500 for software once than pay an ongoing fee that totals the same amount.

Subscriptions do somewhat align developer and user interests. But it somewhat depends on the application. Some small utility that I use for some task a few times a year? I'll be pretty dis-inclined to buy a subscription for that. Something that's a core part of my workflow (or that I generally get regular utility from)? I'm much more open to a subscription--depending on the pricing of course.

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