Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

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I think the comments criticising the pricing are wrong, you can't compare one generalist tool to another highly specialised tool. But on top of that comparing to Figma, Framer or other VC backed products is a mistake, these products are priced to capture market share and grow rabidly. They are clearly underpriced. I may be wrong but CSS Pro looks like a small bootstrapped product, pricing for market growth doesn't need to be the strategy. This is priced for sustainable development and supporting the developer on a small niche product.

If a developer/designer is using this 1 day in 5 then they can justify the subscription.

To those suggesting this shouldn't be a subscription, keep in mind that CSS is going through a period of rapid improvements, this enables them to add support for new features without having to either eat the cost on a sold product or charge for upgrades multiple times a year.

VC backed business setting low prices for rapid growth has unfortunately damaged the ability for small indie developers to price their products sustainably.

On the subscription side, I think it's an issue as it moves the control away from the consumer when doing those upgrades. With the older, one-time purchase upgrade model, which has since fallen out of favour; I could evaluate once a year whether the updated product was worth the additional cost. With a subscription model, there's a chance I could end up funding the development of features that I neither want nor need.

The old model was tightly coupled to the CD as distribution vector—you got what came on the disk, nothing more. It was easy to understand for everyone involved, and the path of least resistance for the developers

The internet changed that, because people began to expect you to fix bugs in a released product indefinitely. Declaring that you are all done fixing bugs is now not just an obvious necessity given the infeasibility of distributing small updates on CDs, it's now a conscious decision that has to be explained to the customer in sufficiently clear terms that they don't come complaining to you later. Failing that, you just have to plan on supporting a purchase indefinitely, and the easiest way to organize that is as a subscription for a single main release channel.

JetBrains has what could be a good model for products that lend themselves to a regular release cadence—it's a subscription, but you keep the license for the version that was current on the day of your last payment. But not every product lends itself to that kind of regular, predictable release cadence.

You could also just cancel when you realize it's not worth it instead of sinking a large upfront on it only to find it didn't fit into your workflow. I find that a benefit as even very loved and low priced software often just doesn't fit my personal desired ways of working.

I'll try it because of hype/marketing/good Show HN/etc, and then never really adopt it. So my thought is it's better to just make it easy to cancel the subscription otherwise I'd probably never even try it.

And CSS will almost always be backwards-compatible. If you want to keep using older CSS, that should be allowed.

Many investor backed businesses also might increase their pricing over the years. At the moment you reach enough users, especially users which are highly dependent on you, you increase the prices to make shareholders happy.

This is unfortunately a very common strategy, and I rather pay for indie developer bit more than a tech company with a large amount of investors.

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