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Comment by rcconf | Hacker News Reader

Honestly the comments are a good example on how difficult it is to sell to developers and why startup ideas that target developers are dangerous to bootstrap.

Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money and are spending averse (again, cheap.)

In this case, this tool is $30/mo, or about $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year? The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week and at 52 * 3 or about 156 hours of savings a year. At even 30 an hour, it's saved the developer $4,680, or at 60/hour, close to $10,000, but I can guarantee that 99% of developers will not spend $30/month to make their lives easier.

My only recommendation is try to sell this product to businesses and maybe offer them a deal based on the amount of developers they have. So sell it do a dev shop with 10 developers at $20/developer / per month. Businesses understand the time/money tradeoff and are not cheap.

Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.

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No. Monthly subscriptions suck. Every company wants to "tax" me monthly for something that's feature complete. The ones I already pay, I do so very begrudgingly. There's simply too many SaaS products out there.

Let's go back to perpetual licenses. And I'll gladly pay for upgraded versions, or not if the upgrade isn't worthwhile. When it's not SaaS, I also get to control what version I'm using. The product doesn't own me, I get to own the product.

Nailed it.

I happily pay a lot of money for nice things, but only if I get to own them. I am not cheap, I'm picky. I'm not picky by choice, I'm picky by experience. I already know I can't trust subscriptions.

If you have to make your tool a one-time cost, you might come to realize it's not really worth the amount of money you could've made by selling it for $5/mo, and that's a great illustration of just one reason why developers don't like subscriptions.

They have a one-time pay option. $900. So, if you love to pay for nice things as long as you can own them, they have an option for you.

Exactly! And I do, in fact, I will pay much more than that for a one-time software payment, and I have. However:

> If you have to make your tool a one-time cost, you might come to realize it's not really worth the amount of money you could've made by selling it for $5/mo, and that's a great illustration of just one reason why developers don't like subscriptions.

At $900, it's not so easy of a sell. edit: Especially because, do I own it?

> License for 3 activations

OK. What happens when the activation server goes down? For software I really own, there is no concern here.

I’d love to see software escrow for companies like this - something as simple as “if we stop making the software or go bankrupt or otherwise make it unable to be used, we have the source code and friends escrowed with a company that will then release it under the AGPL.”

I know of two companies that provide this. My experience is with software written for government entities by a third party. Every time we cut a new release, we would have to go through an escrow process to provide the services with a VM image that would allow our clients to build from source our entire software stack along with the ability to host the software either in house or in the cloud. It was a very expensive and time consuming processes and my ex-employer charged a fortune to any clients that wanted it.

https://nationalsoftwareescrow.com/what-is-software-escrow/

https://softwareresilience.nccgroup.com/software-escrow-serv...

Unlikely that this will happen. Companies rarely go bankrupt, they often just float along. Even if it did release the source code, will you really go and make it compile? There's also a lot of credentials involved; for example for getting an app on the App Store, you not only need the source code but all the developer certificates. Releasing them would violate Apple's App Store T&C.

It's just not that simple in practice. Then again, that's not unique to software: imagine being a car company and looking for suppliers. You're not gonna rely on some new unknown company for components that you need in your long-term planning. But if you do, you pay them so that they can survive.

My main gripe with subs is that there's no central place to manage them and it's easy to forget how many you have. That is the one thing that Apple did well in the App Store.

I have expensive useless licenses from multiple defunct software vendors.

It's said that 20% of small businesses fail in their first year, and 50% in the first five.

Central management and ease of cancelling is a huge factor - App Store subscriptions are painless and I'll do them without a second thought, everything else is hell and I avoid them as much as I can.

Right... and an insurance company to cover for the escrow company going belly up.

You're still proving rcconf's bigger point - don't sell tools to developers, because we suck to sell to. This leaves us with shitty free tools, or really expensive ones that tie us to our employers. Want to leave your job? I mean, sure, you can, but on top of needing to find a new job, you'll need to learn a completely different development environment. Which is just life, I suppose.

Problem is this product is worth like $30 in total.

I like how the original comment gave some thoughtful napkin estimates about how this product may be worth several thousand dollars as a function of time saved, and your counter argument is just "nah it's $30 total" with absolutely no reasoning or logic.

Like it or not, this is the kind of response from an engineer that falls into the category of emotionally cheapo.

The idea behind napkin math is you start with something real or reasonable to assume as accurate and then extrapolate.

The original comment did exactly the same thing the person you're replying to did. They just pulled a vague feeling about the product out of their ass. That "3-4hr/week" saving is exactly as founded as this commenter's "$30 total".

That they wrote more and did math with their vague feeling is less logical not more. It's masking an emotional hunch with the sort of language people use when they actually are being logical.

Some of the costs people rarely consider for europeans is VAT (25% extra) and the decreasing price of european currencies. In the last ten years USD is 30% stronger against EUR and about 40% against my local currency. So for me this is more like a $60 dollar product than $30, and that's not just feelings.

The problem here is everyone thinks their product is so damn valuable. I happily pay $20/mo for OpenAI because it genuinely speeds up my work every day. I would easily pay twice that. In terms of saved time this product will maybe save me 20-30 minutes per month? It's individual for everyone, but judging by other responses I'm hardly alone here in this sentiment.

The primary reason the Euro even got so high was the 2008 subprime mortgage fallout. After recovering from that it went to around ~1.1 and seems to remain there with some ups and downs. Considering the current sociopolitical circumstances surrounding the EU it's not strange that it's slightly lower than normal.

You are cheap. You're still basing your decision on the cost of using the product instead of the value it provides you.

This isn't targeting you specifically though, most comments in this thread are stereotypical developers too.

No, I am not basing my decision on the cost of using the product. I'm basing my decision on factors that have nothing to do with money.

I think a perfect example of this for me is IDA Pro, for which I own a license. When Hex-Rays switched over to a subscription model, I did not renew. I still use the old version today, and it works perfectly fine for my needs.

The difference between buying it on subscription and not is whether or not I own it. I really own this copy; it's mine whether or not I'm connected to the Internet, and it will work in perpetuity until the sun burns out. That's how exchanging money for software is supposed to work.

That's how it used to work, back when you could go to MicroCenter and pull a box off a shelf then take it home and hope to hell you had the right drivers installed.

But it's also why when I run across a company that shockingly lets you buy their product outright I fully support their efforts and invest in a purchase. It really is cool to sometimes be off WiFi somewhere and use software to your heart's content.

>you might come to realize it's not really worth the amount of money you could've made by selling it for $5/mo,

I wouldn't have brought this up if you weren't trying to give the impression that money is a factor.

I interpreted it as "I still wouldn't pay $120 because even though it returns more value than that, it isn't worth that."

Edit: (that being said, the one time purchase cost of this for a "lifetime" license is $900, which seems more like a way to push subscriptions than a serious attempt at selling a one time purchase)

Yes, but the qualifier is important.

>just one reason why developers don't like subscriptions.

The truth is that I don't even consider paying for new subscriptions anymore unless there's a good reason for it to be a subscription. I don't want to have to "trust" someone. Will they exist in a year? Will the software get worse and leave me with no choice but to use the "new" version? The test here is that I genuinely don't think I would use software that asked for a $0.05/month subscription either. That's just not how I want to use software.

If we want to talk about money, though, then there are still good reasons to not buy a $5/mo subscription. It sounds like it's a good enough deal, and in fact, I might even agree with you. But there is absolutely nothing that guarantees that this will stay the price forever in perpetuity. In fact, even a literal guarantee that enforces this would be worth toilet paper because if it ever came to a head, if the company went bankrupt, it would take down the activation servers and potentially leave you without your software.

So playing it from the top, let's say you get a new-fangled productivity software. Everything's great and you're only paying $5/mo.

- Then they release a "new" version. The new version breaks all of your workflows and you have to relearn everything. It's now awkward for the way you were using it.

- Then they add new features that are only available on a new $20/mo subscription. Turns out $5/mo wasn't really sustainable after all, so they need to adjust the price. Slowly over time, pressure mounts on the grandfathered old accounts to do something that will push them up to a higher tier.

- Then it all goes badly: Some venture capital and/or acquisitions later, and the software goes broke. Now what? Well, if you own it, nothing. If you don't, tough luck: All of your workflows are broken again, and you have to go back to doing things the old way.

For tools that are core to the stuff I work on, I do not play games like this. I do not care how sure you are that this won't be you. I don't want re-assurances, I want control over it.

Every developer understands how subscriptions work. A product may provide value today, but there’s no guarantee that the payoff will be worth the cost in the long run as the company increases its prices.

With a subscription, you’re agreeing to let a company tax you to do your job in the hope that it pays off instead paying upfront one time for a product.

>but there’s no guarantee that the payoff will be worth the cost in the long run as the company increases its prices.

You can cancel a subscription

It's a problem, though, to become reliant on something and then experience a rugpull. A lot of people seem to think that you pay for a product and then in exchange you get increased productivity, and the only "cost" is, well, the cost. But it's not. Once you start becoming reliant on something to do your job, you orient your workflow around it. There may be alternatives, but it costs your time and effort to switch. It differs per tool: imagine switching text editors though. That's a very non-trivial endeavor for many software developers, even people who use fairly stock editors will have become pretty integrated into how their setup works, with hundreds of hours of muscle memory and re-orienting yourself to the "mental model" it has.

That's exactly why people selling products love subscriptions so much. It's not JUST reliable income. It's sticky. If I own something for real, as in it works offline with no activation garbage needed, I can just not pay for the new version if I don't like it. Maybe the old one becomes obsolete eventually, so it's not risk-free, but nonetheless. But, if a subscription fee increases, my options are typically 1. Go to hell.

Am I exaggerating? Well, yes and no. For one thing, I have really truly experienced the rugpull. It doesn't even have to be malicious, it can be as simple as "company disappears". The more established and trustworthy a company has proven to be, the more willing I am to put up with some loss of control. But monthly subscriptions to random products I see on HN? No thanks.

I'm not even asking for a perpetual lifetime license, which I already find sketchy from a sustainability standpoint. I am fine with the old-school "upgrade license" concept employed by say, VMWare and friends, and the less DRM-heavy the solution is, the better.

I’ve not seen the research but is suspect the average cancelled subscription goes far beyond “when it was no longer worthwhile” before it is cancelled.

Which reminds me I have a few airline card to cancel.

Right, but what if your subscription tool that you want to cancel is pipelined into your workflow in such a way that you’re paying a technical or operational cost to cancel beyond just severing the account itself, i.e. vendor lock-in?

This is why it’s often better as a solo dev to not rely on these tools in case you have to jettison them and break your workflow.

Another way of wording what you just said: "What if cancelling the subscription is more costly than keeping it?"

Uh... then keep it, because that means it's providing value to you.

If the insulation in my building was asbestos, it could be more costly to remove it than to leave it there and pay for regular testing and extra maintenance. But that doesn't mean it would be providing value.

Switching software has a cost. Avoiding that cost is not value.

Then factor in switching costs or find a way to reduce them when initially making a purchase.

Y'all are twisting yourselves into pretzels trying to justify why you can't easily cancel a subscription.

> Then factor in switching costs or find a way to reduce them when initially making a purchase.

That's what people are doing!

They're saying that there are many pieces of software that could be helpful, but with that potential switching cost looming in the distance they won't buy a subscription at any price because it can't be relied on.

They're not saying it's hard to stop paying, they're saying it's hard to stop using, so permanent license or bust.

You have to recognize the incentive of developers working for a large company:

I can either 1) pay for it out of my own pocket, 2) expense it monthly which after wasting time in expense reports basically goes back to 1 where I pay for it myself, or 3) go through the software procurement process. I've done all 3, and none of these really yield a personal benefit. 1+2 are annoying, and 3 takes time away from your main job and it's hard to get the licensing right. And at scale I think game theory does well at modeling behavior for why developers wouldn't want to go through any of these options.

For a freelance developer I'll speculate that for a dev that bills hourly the benefit aren't great, but it's still value passed on to the customer so it might be worthwhile.

If I ran my own freelance business and charged a flat fee I would 100% buy this tool if I did a lot of CSS work.

Are you saying that you don’t have subscriptions at all?

I have not started a new software subscription in ages. The last software subscription I subscribed to is probably Jetbrains Toolbox, and I don't plan on getting any new software subscriptions for the foreseeable future; as far as I can recall, that's the only one I currently have. I have other subscriptions, but they're for services, where the point of the subscription is the constant flow of new things rather than access to something.

I don't think I have any software subscriptions. I used to have a Tweetbot subscription, which was fairly cheap and definitely useful, but I probably don't have to detail what happened to that.

Otherwise I think the only subscription I have left at the moment is Humble Choice. And that's kind of a weird one since you don't need to keep the subscription active to keep the rewards, and you can in fact to choose whether or not to pay month-to-month.

I mean, you are taking shit for this comment for some reason, but it is absolutely true! At some point I don't want to have to pay for dozens of apps every month. Just charge me what you need and let me have it. If it is broken when you sold it to me, great, I will update. If you come up with new clever additions, I may or may not want those. But subscriptions take that ability away from you. And I want a tool to use, not a relationship with you forever!

I don't disagree with what you saying, but ...

People seem to forget what the cost of a perpetual license use to be.

Licenses would easily equate to 3-years (36-months) or more, of what a monthly subscription would cost.

Case in point:

$439, you can buy a perpetual license of Microsoft Office

$7/mo, you can get the same functionality + hosting + storage as a monthly subscription

It'd take over 5-years to breakeven.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-profe...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-al...

There has to be a reason all these companies love SaaS vs yearly upgrades and I think it’s because “subscriptions” get forgotten or ignored or “it’s not worth worrying about”.

Yup, I wouldn't mind subscriptions so much if it was a simple "one and done, keep it going if you want" deal. Ask me for $10 per month, not $10 a month, with auto-renewal enabled, impossible to turn off or difficult to find the button due to a million toxic UI patterns trying to trick me into giving up, and 2 or 3 pathetic "pwease don't go!" prompts once I do.

If I buy a month, and never renew, it means I'm done using it or I didn't find it valuable. Don't send me emails reminding me, don't notify me. I'll find out when I open the thing up again and see my sub is gone. If I want it back, I'll buy another month.

The value in a sub for the end user is that I don't have to sign my soul away for a program I'll use once or twice a year. But the common pattern tries to hide that away and fool me out of money. Frankly, it's offensive and gross, hence, fuck subscriptions.

All subscriptions should be the way Apple's store handles them; you can subscribe to Disney+ today, immediately cancel, and have access for the remainder of your subscription time. Then you don't have to remember it, and if you DO find you want it when you go to access it after your subscription is over, you can easily resubscribe.

Usage based pricing?

It sounds like you want usage based pricing where for example, you pay $X for each day you use the tool and then get billed at the end of the month accordingly.

Similar in concept to how AWS bills for most of it's services.

I took it as “let me pay for this month, and if I need it next month I’ll pay then”.

Having predictable revenue is a huge reason.

As opposed to super lumpy revenue due to bursts of revenue coming in after a new version release.

There's also a lot of business risk because if you have a new version people don't like, they don't have to upgrade and now you don't get that burst of revenue your company needs to stay afloat.

EDIT: also, perpetual licenses create the wrong incentives. We've all complained about software bloat before. With a perpetual license, you only get paid on upgrades ... creating a situation where the software vendor jams in more (unneeded) functionality in order to justify creating a new version release.

The first can be solved with “pay over time” setups (which can be relatively easy to setup even if it’s just internal accounting, or you can literally buy appropriate bonds on the open market).

I suspect the second is a bigger driver; companies don’t like people not choking down whatever idiotic change they’ve made in the latest version because it makes whichever exec pushed it look bad. With subscriptions you usually HAVE to keep updating.

Also, just the fact that it is easier to soak a person a little at at time ($7 per month) rather than hit them with a big price all at once ($495).

it’s because it’s easier for the customer to decide to buy, i think obviously

It also saves a ton of $ and resources supporting older versions.

It's less about the number on the end of the invoice, it is more about the personal control of my finances, and _even more_ about the ability to keep on using a version without risking an update breaking stuff because. Sometimes it's perfectly good to not upgrade. Why should I then pay for a version I may not like, a version which may break the workflow I set up and worked great in the previous major release?

Subscription: access the hosted MS Word with a browser installed on a device.

Perpetual: instal MS Word on the device.

“hosting” may supports subscription tech needs but doesn’t affect my experience asside from a new point of failure.

Storage is nice but I already have my HDD, USB key, Google Drive and it’s works great. I understand MS has interests to make me store my stuff in their cloud. I don’t. Bonus point: you own your data in addition to the soft (not with g-drive of course)

This is the most developer response I could've imagined. I love it.

They have perpetual licenses (with perpetual upgrades). If you pay the $900 you don’t have any “tax” to pay.

Doesn’t that option completely remove your concerns with this product?

I don’t like subscriptions because they feel like this never ending ticket that as soon as I complete that task it immediately is recreated +30 days out. Buying items for a whole price allows me to close that task for good.

Also, the additional task of tracking down all the monthly charges when my personal credit card number was compromised yet again and I need to update my payment details

Agree. I use a tool on Windows called Netlimiter. I use it to block out/in going connections per app, rate limit per app or block internet for certain apps.

It's been working, I purchased a license time ago, no updates and it works.

This year they changed the business model and the new licenses expire every 1/2 years in exchange of a feature i don't even care about.

I'll keep using the old version obviously.

Why on earth a complete software had to resume development and charge me yearly?

> Let's go back to perpetual licenses.

There is a perpetual licence listed on a page; Life-time $900

> Monthly subscriptions suck.

They do. But for a SaaS biz that has to pay the bills for infra it is hard to get around it.

900 dollars, lol, what a joke.

Agreed. Value-wise this is a $30 product with one year of free upgrades, not $30/month.

I understand the feeling of not wanting to pay continuously for something feature complete. But, as long as the monthly cost for those tools is less, than the hourly-rate it would take to do it yourself, does it really matter? You are still saving money/time.

It’s the feeling of being taxed for a transaction that is already completed.

It absolutely does. It almost looks like a MLM scheme with at least depth of 1. Let's say you earn $100/hr using my tool. If I as the author/seller of the tool claim $1/hr for tool usage (I understand it is much less than that, but just go with my statement) in the form of subscription, I continue to get the buck as long as you use the tool. As a developer, I am paying the tool author perpetually for the work "I" do. I believe I should have an option to say, NO. This is precisely what is stopped by perpetual license. I am not opposed to subscription, but I MUST have a way to pay it outright and call it a day.

I always like the "lifetime" access when the price is reasonable and makes sense. Also, i assume if you message lots of SaaS startups they will create a payment for a year or something specific...I mean 99% of them use stripe its not complicated option. The more we ask, the more we have options.

Yeah, now do the math how much it costs to keep a company in business, and how much it must land in the bank every single month to pay everyone's salaries and infrastructure.

It might be a pedantic point but when you buy a perpetual license you don’t “own” the product - you “own” a license to use the product, on the terms in the license.

OP “own” the product in the sense “use it as long as he want in the terms defined in the license at the time it’s bought.” Adobe can’t change the license of the Photoshop CS3 cd-rom I bought a while ago. If I’m using their current subscription version I would only use the license to use the product in the time defined by the subscription.

I’m guessing the reason this is brought up is because of the concern about if the license server goes down or the company goes out of business can I still use the product.

That would make sense! Could we use today an usb stick (similar to the digital wallet ones) to “validate” the ownership without relying on a server, like cd+license did 15 years ago?

> They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money and are spending averse (again, cheap.)

To slightly counter. I am a developer with a high-ish (average for the industry, i suppose) income. I love paying for my tools. HOWEVER, i expect you'd call me cheap.

Why? Well because i am very averse to subscriptions, and i think this is primarily due to being a developer and being around this culture. This culture which is flooded with startups all wanting X$ per seat, user, etc. I've seen these things scale excessively on loop. It's not 1 $5 sub. It's the 20 tools all vying for subscriptions, tiers of subscriptions, etc.

I happily pay for things i can buy that improve my DX or productivity. However subs have to be exceptionally good to justify because they're in competition, in my head, with every other sub i already manage. Even if it doesn't make sense to have X and Y products "compete" because they're not even remotely related - they are in my head. They're in the list of subscriptions which i obsessively prune because this industry has left me feeling like i need to.

I love "subs" like JetBrains though.

It’s actually incredible how cheap we are. I catch myself doing it, and what makes it even more ridiculous is how much I won’t even think twice about spending on other things that are just hobbies. Why does my brain think it’s fine to spend hundreds of dollars on a microphone or a lens or even a plugin that is actually also software, but $50 for a tool that will help me with my 40 hour a week job is out of the question.

A bit more on topic though, I don’t really see this as a tool aimed at developers. Watching the demo on the site, this isn’t really how I interact with css at all. I don’t need a color wheel or draggable sliders with ultra fine resolution. The real utility, for me, of a tool like this, would be if you could set up essentially an internal style guide that would limit the possible options for all of the values to retain consistency. Then it would be great for finishing touches, sitting beside a designer or something.

If it's helping the job then we ought to (be able to) expense it, there's a much higher bar for getting me to pay personally to help my work - as in it can't just be 'do it faster' (at the end of the day, do/should I care?) it would need to be posture/eye strain improving and not offered by employer, or something like that.

Imagine an embedded engineer personally buying a higher bandwidth 'scope (or whatever) to better debug an issue or QA before release. I don't doubt it happens, but I think it's more clearly unreasonable, and I don't think theres any reason it makes more sense with software.

Especially since software might well have per-device licencing, so you put it on your work machine and then what?

('I have better kit at home, I'm taking the DUT home for the weekend' is still overworking, but probably a lot more common, and I don't think quite the same/as bad as personal spend motivated by work.)

Regarding 'developers are cheap' directly, in my (limited, but spanning large & very small/growing company) experience businesses are cheap: they multiply the per-seat cost by head count and run scared, overlooking completely that it's a rounding error on payroll, or that it's more than covered by the unpaid salaries of open positions that might've been filled. (Obviously there are boring reasons this can be that you don't need to reply to me about. So too are there myriad reasons not to buy something personally beyond being 'cheap'.)

Well for me this would be a hobby purchase. The problem is that while I could justify dropping $150 on something like this to myself, I don't want to pay for it by the month, knowing that most months I won't use it.

> just hobbies

Hobbies are hugely important to a healthy life.

I don't think developers in general are cheap, it's that they are employed somewhere and therefore it doesn't benefit THEM to save time, it benefits their employer. It may even be detrimental to the developer as it put higher expectations on the developer to produce more if the suddenly perform better at a specific task..

It absolutely does benefit me to save time, because writing css by hand is one of the most soul-crushingly boring tasks imaginable. Sure my employer also benefits, but that's only if I use that saved time to write more code. Maybe I use the extra time to walk my dog.

I have a fixed number of working hours in a week regardless of my efficiency, so even if I manage to make myself efficient, I don't reap the benefits.

Most tools like this are priced with the understanding that they'll be billed to the employer in the end, not paid out of pocket by the developer.

They probably need to add org licenses soon in order to better accommodate that.

Yeah, but a lot of employers would still bristle at $180 a year (if you pay in advance) for a souped up version of dev tools. Not to mention that most places that would have a budget for something like this would need to do a security audit of anything like this.

If you’re a consultant or have a lot of client projects, you can absolutely bill the client for this sort of thing. But that’s not the situation for everyone and certainly doesn’t strike me as the audience being targeted by the landing page.

My current employer gives all engineers $1000/year to spend on tooling. We just expense it and it's automatically approved, up to a grand. No arguments the budget, no manager approval required, nothing.

Were way more efficient than any other place I've worked, all because we're empowered to buy little $10/month plugins that save boatloads of time.

Back in the day, we had requested donations for Firebug (which had millions of installs) and the revenue was embarrassingly pathetic. We used it to give contributors in non-western countries some bonuses from time to time.

There you're taking the already high-ish barrier for devs to pay for tools, as discussed elsewhere in this thread, and adding on the really high barrier to get people to donate to things they can use for free.

True, but there was a high barrier to entry to just install it. And for a long time there was little else you could use.

On the other hand, it was free and more important to get people to use it and be more productive then generate revenue.

Not criticizing Firebug, aboslutely. Just speaking to the challenges of trying to run on individual donations.

> In this case, this tool is $30/mo, or about $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year? The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week and at 52 * 3 or about 156 hours of savings a year.

I think you're being unnecessarily harsh.

I can afford lots of things; I don't run out and buy them though.

So this tool might save you maybe 4 hours a week (I cannot really see it saving 4 hours a week, but lets go with your numbers here).

That is not "4 extra hours I get to spend sleeping". It is not "4 extra hours I get to spend with my kids". It is not "4 extra hours I use on my hobbies". It's "4 extra hours that my employee gets from me".

> At even 30 an hour, it's saved the developer $4,680, or at 60/hour, close to $10,000,

Nonsense. It's saved the company $10k. It's saved the developer exactly $0.

> My only recommendation is try to sell this product to businesses

I agree. Businesses get the savings from any tool they purchase for employee use, not employees, so they are more willing to shell out for productivity tools.

> Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.

Well, it seems to be working for them, isn't it? And you're being awfully judgemental about what other people find value in.

This tool, which you say will save 4 hours a week, costs $30/m. ChatGPT 3.5 saves me much more than 4 hours a week, and costs $0/m. Copilot costs $10/m, and saves me more than 4 hours per week.

Git (and things like gitea, etc) provide orders of magnitude more value than this, and you can find someone to provide a hosting plan for it for less than $10/m.

It's all about value delivered, which you seem to be missing. It's a purely rational and economic decision.

I can afford office 365, but I find myself getting by without that subscription. If I purchased every single devtool subscription, the monthly cost would exceed about half my salary, and all the benefits go to my employer.

If you're using a paid service for work, the company should pay for it.

> If you're using a paid service for work, the company should pay for it.

I said that.

“Should” and “does” are widely different.

They certainly should but it takes time to get a new tool approved and the hassle is rarely worth it.

Unless all your work involves CSS I doubt it saves 3-4 hours / week. Also, saving 3 hours of work doesn't mean you get paid for 3 hours more. It's also a dependency that's not guaranteed to exist as long as the default browser dev tools or available on every machine.

If all you do is css I doubt you have a workflow where this tool would save you 3-4 hours a week. It might even be ~20 minutes/week and 10 minutes/week stumbling while relearning your habits to use (depend on) this tool. And then a year later when you are completely dependent on this tool. Boom. It's now acquired by and part of Atom Text Editor Enterprise Ide where all those who invested too much in Atom went to die.

Couldn't agree with this more. It's always nice to think that some super clean UI beats making quick CSS adjustments alongside HMR or a quick build time but in my experience it probably never does. If I wanted to test different font weights of some text I wouldn't go into the CSS in my browser and adjust it, I'd just change the value in my CSS (helped more-so by CSS frameworks such as Tailwind), and see how the output changed. The upside being that if I like how it looks, I've already made the change to my code. I don't know who this would realistically save any significant amount of time a week for outside of an inexperienced developer who doesn't have a pretty good idea of how slight style differences will impact the final product.

Hello everyone(edited)

Maybe this should have a slightly different audience than developers, namely UX designers, technical product managers (semi-technical folks who know about html and css), etc. so that they can play around with their products, produce prototypes based on the actual product, share design specifications more easily etc.

For example, I am a semi-technical product manager, meaning I know enough about coding to be able to make whatever simple UI changes I want, but leave actual development of the products to the professionals. I would use this tool and maybe recommend to my business paying for it if it genuinely saves some time over making the same changes in dev tools.

For example, the ability to prototype a new UI feature "inside" my existing products, and then share the prototype with someone would be extremely valuable to me. Currently I use the "edit as html" tool in dev tools and then apply some styling to the new elements. Of course, if I hit refresh by mistake, I would lose my changes. Has happened before!

> Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.

30 USD here, 30 USD there, soon enough your bills go in the hundreds or thousands of dollars.

So you mean if after 30 or so such subscriptions you only increase your productivity by 0.1% you still come out ahead?

9 other subscriptions and I only have to work 0 hours a week

I understand your point but $30 more per month to have a web inspector that is slightly nicer in some way but also much more limited in many other ways is expensive. Monthly subscriptions adds up and not everyone has too much money.

Let's say they sells it at $10 / mo. They would need 1,000 customers to make a reasonable wage at $10,000 / month. If they sells it at $30/month, they would need only 300 customers.

Can you imagine how annoying it would be to deal with 1,000 cheap customers that expect the world? Maybe they should sell it at $100/mo and sell it to only 100 people that really care about the problem.

Maybe just sell it to a business for $200/mo for all developers, they would only need 50 businesses to make $10,000/month and they would also remove the annoying, cheap, high expectation developer out of the equation.

Developers and engineers are probably the worst customer to have, insane expectations, complain about everything, criticize everything and use a magnifying glass to point out any issues, black/white thinking etc.

My theory is writing code has all of these expectations in it. You need to be highly critical, black/white (or you would drift into a world of options.) have insane expectations (or your manager gets mad at you.) etc. All great qualities for writing code, but the worst qualities for a customer.

I'm a developer too by the way, so please don't be offended, I've been there and done that, the other side is much nicer. For example, I activated my iCloud to 2TB at $10/mo instead of making a custom backup solution that I can run for $2/mo. Would I have done that years ago? Yes and the result would have been me spending 80 hours building the backup system that can't even get my photos back on my phone properly.

What I'm trying to say is, it's sad to watch developers suffer for a small amount of money per month. I honestly believe it's a failure of the people who manage developers. I may be reaching here, but I think a lot of developers have been treated poorly in general from managers, projects and high expectations. They are rarely rewarded properly which is actual recognition for the work they do. It's not free massages, free lunches and cool workspaces. As a result, I believe developers are the givers and the companies and managers are the takers. The takers siphon the life out of developers and to the point where they're so risk averse they won't even spend $100 to go to a spa to relieve some stress. They're so risk averse they won't even spend $30/month to make their lives easier.

What am I saying? Developers SPEND some money on yourselves. You DESERVE IT for the hard work you do. Stop being so risk averse just because the work you do is so.

Rant over.

We do, just not on every tool and widget.

I think you make a lot of insulting assumptions about other people. I'm sure there are many who are more frugal than me for their personal reasons, but it's not some personal failure not to be persuaded to rent a particular product.

You're clearly trying really hard to market this mediocre overpriced product, so let me give you a tip: repeatedly insulting your target customer base while trying to sell them something might work for your average modern consumer, but it won't really work here on HN.

I just want to be really clear, I have no idea who built this product and I am not associated with it in any way.

You'd be shocked at how many devs have spent big bucks on Apple hardware just to run Linux on it.

We spend. Intelligently.

If this was a $400/$600 (or even into the thousands of USD) lifetime license, they may see wider adoption.

It is. There is a $900 lifetime license available

People don't like subscriptions. And for entirely rational reasons, even if they can't articulate them. If you insist on selling subscriptions for people, they will treat it as predatory pricing (because for them it is) and will antagonize you.

Companies, on the other hand, just love subscriptions. Also for entirely rational reasons.

Now, if you insist on ignoring that fundamental difference, it's a "you" problem, not with your public.

People keep saying there are rational reasons, but I haven’t seen a single response here that doesn’t boil down to “feels”.

They have a perpetual license option, not hidden. I think maybe people have so much feels that they are just bandwagoning here rather than using their noggins and evaluating the value of the product. Disappointing.

Wanting to pay $900 for a product that might stop existing or be outcompeted in a year is not rational.

There are a bunch of good responses here.

1. You don't own the software. Company decides to turn off the license server you're SOL.

2. Managing subscriptions is hard. So hard that multiple companies have popped up that purport to save you money by finding subscriptions you forgot about. I can think of a few that I have that I forget about until I see the invoice every month (and then forget it again).

3. Canceling subscriptions can be hard but it's impossible to know until you try. Some companies let you sign up with 2 clicks but make you call a phone number (that's only open odd hours) to cancel, and other well-known dark patterns. Aversion to that is aversion to subscriptions.

There were plenty of reasons on the threads here if you look for it. Just because somebody is mostly talking about emotions doesn't mean the argument are not rational.

Anyway, people have different risk profiles than companies. Interest-rate based present day adjustments are meaningless, because they don't have the same opportunities on monetary markets; existential risks are well, really existential, instead of what they are for companies; power relations are extremely important, because people don't get any power; and so on.

Again, if you insist on fixing it, it's a "you" problem that will lead to well deserve failures.

Subscriptions have ruined software development by introducing a ton of external SaaS dependencies.

For example, I have Java projects that are old enough to use the pre-subscription versions of IntelliJ IDEA. I can still install (ex:) IDEA v8, check out the project, and work on it immediately. That took some work because the Gradle wrapper needs to pull Gradle from a local server, I made a build task to pull in a project JDK, all the dependency artifacts need to be available locally, etc..

When I set that stuff up, I thought development environments would evolve to do that kind of thing automatically. For example, using a modern analogy, I run 'docker compose run dev' and get a project specific development environment that's from an exact point in time, even if it's 10+ years old.

Instead, we got subscriptions where I need to deal with a ton of continually changing SaaS dependencies that could disappear tomorrow. If you let a project idle for a year there's a decent chance it won't work when you go back to it.

I also disagree with the mentality that costs (to me) should be judged by how much value I get while being completely divorced from the costs (to them) of operating. By that logic, you should sign your entire paycheck over to the grocery store, right?

I don't have a problem with ongoing costs if they're providing value to me, but I'm not willing to pay forever, even when I'm idle, for someone else to control part of my workflow. The loss of control alone is a bad deal.

The introduction of the iPhone in 2008 is about the time I think things started changing. We went from developers that were concerned about maintaining control of their workflows, build systems, distribution, etc. to a new group of developers that are happy to become dependent on rent seeking SaaS middlemen while telling everyone else they're getting good value.

Even Jetbrains is turning their products into something you can't rely on via Jetbrains Space. If a critical mass of developers buy into that, I'd be willing to bet the standalone editors get dropped at some point.

>Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.

>but I can guarantee that 99% of developers will not spend $30/month to make their lives easier.

Your post is insulting and it really seems like it is an ad for this product.

It is insulting, but sometimes the shoe fits. Developer tools is notoriously difficult because engineers (and their managers, and the teams) are very cheap.

If a dev thinks they could build it themselves, they won’t pay. You have to cross a line where the dev does not want to even entertain the idea of building it. So backends for front end engineers, for example.

Yeah, this makes sense to me.

I’m sure if you asked a trained chef if they’d buy some overpriced gourmet food at a chic place, they’d say no. They’re making exactly the same choice as a developer when it comes to visualising how much effort it takes to make a similar tool/food.

Since developers know (broadly) how the sausage is made, it’s going to be hard to get them to spring for basic sausage dressed well and slickly presented.

* This tool may increase my time spent rather than save time. I need to spend time to find out. So I don’t buy every one of the million tools because I am too cheap. I don’t have time to evaluate all of them.

* I have no way of cashing in saved time anyway

* Developers can affect spending decisions at work worth $1000s to one SaaS at the expense of another or in addition. If we can save a hire through $50k/y in SaaS bills we will.

I think it’s the monthly subscription for a offline product is what makes the devs to loose their interest, and I get it.

I don’t own the product when subscribing, I am only leasing it for as long as I pay. I don’t like that, I prefer to own my products.

Everything is slowly turning into a subscription, sure this is only 30$ a month, but if all my products were subscription based, I would go bankrupt.

I have a theory that a lot of us became developers after being poor teenagers who downloaded warez for $0 in the olden days.

For that reason, where software is concerned, for us the distance between $0 and $1 is even wider than the already wide distance it is for the general population.

> stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.

How many times have you been sold on the idea that X tool is gonna make life easier without any tradeoffs only to be disappointed? It’s happened so many times to me, I’ve lost count.

Developers understand the inherent complexity involved with adding dependencies because we are paid to understand and manage that complexity in our jobs.

I pay for lots of software as an engineer, but I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve purchased a subscription that only did 80% of what I needed, which ultimately led me to churn as a customer.

> The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week

Seriously? Half a day a week?? As a professional FE dev there is no way this would save me 4hrs a week, every week. The existing dev tools are familiar, and while not perfect, get the job done. This tool is sugar on top of that, I can't see how it would save me so much time.

I think regular folk, and non front-end engineers could find it easier and more approachable than dev tools, but I can see why target audience engineers won't put up $30/m for it.

Edit: If this tool could demonstrably show a 3-4hr a week time saving go and show it to managers, they'll snap it up. Fact is corps are cheaper than ICs at the coal face. This is if you class "cheap" as being extremely efficient with your resources.

Just because engineers are well paid doesn't mean they should stop being efficient with their income. I'd rather spend $30 a month on lunch than on another magic tool.

Spending money is one thing. I don’t think most devs are opposed to doing that, especially for things that are central to your work. But I’m hard-pressed to see how a browser extension that will improve but not demonstrable change how browser dev tools work is worth $30 a month. This reminds me of Mighty, the $30 a month web browser that promised to be a lot faster and better (it ran off of cloud servers), but was absolutely not worth $30 a month (and I tried it and gave it an honest shot and it wasn’t). Mighty failed and now I think is trying to pivot to some sort of AI generative art thing.

Pricing too high will kill your business the same way pricing too low will. It has nothing to do with people being cheap, it has to do with value proposition, especially relative to other tools.

I’m responding to this more because of the change to Kaleidoscope (MacOS diff tool) from one-time to subscription pricing.

I have paid for Kaleidoscope at least four times and each time was more expensive (I think the total I spent was about US$300—probably closer to CA$450). I justified it because it was the best-in-class Mac-assed Mac app for its purpose and it really did and does save me time or frustration.

I’d have happily paid another US$150 (~CA$200 today) for an upgrade to Kaleidoscope 4. I’m just not sure that I want to pay a variable amount per month amounting to US$96 (~CA$115) annually, because I already have subscriptions that I’m paying for which I don’t use enough (WebSequenceDiagrams is a good example; I happily pay, because when I need it I really need it and there’s nothing quite as good IMO).

I know it’s hard, but subscriptions are the wrong choice most of the time, unless you can review and manage them in one place like you can with the Apple App Store. Because otherwise, you have to trust the company to not only (a) keep the subscription price fair without surprise increases but also (b) not use Adobe-level or NYT-level dark patterns for cancellation.

I’m not cheap, but I am far more price sensitive to subscriptions than I am to one-off purchases. The bar for getting me to subscribe rather than buy is ten to twenty times higher, and most subscription software isn’t that much better.

That is the central point of subscriptions, of course. They make people totally misjudge how much they pay for something. And that then enables $5 instead of $50 software. $5 is cheaper than $50, isn't it? Of course, no, it isn't, but that's the point.

Microsoft office used to be $80, now it's $5 per month. And you can bet that's a price rise, since MBAs are thoroughly in control at MS.

And if you calculate:

* At $5 per seat the formula for "can this software exist?" is something like $months_of_work * 10k / 5. Which translates to 1 month of work per 2000 paying customers.

* At $5 subscription per seat, avg retention 1 yr, you get one month of work per 167 paying customers, or about 12 times more pay. That justifies a lot more software.

> Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap.

We're not all making 100k+/yr, $30/mo is a significant amount.

> Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo

Personal anecdote:

Long time ago when still working in a physical office building, the co-workers and me would each amass significant amounts of empty returnable bottles by the end of each week on one's desk. This irked me because it looked rather unprofessional, cost desk- or foot space and came with recurrent noise of someone knocking over the whole assortment.

I then bought me a potato sack to just place my bottles in it in order to give the place a more hipsteresque feel and to give me more dignity carrying those bottles away.

So what do you think my high income comrades did? Yes, they did buy potato sacks as well... after studying customer reviews for multiple potato sacks on Amazon for a week (Goes without saying that they bought them all regardless of the week-long study effort to try them out and send the "non-performant" ones back to get refunded).

> stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier

if I wanted to make my life easier I'd stop using emacs and arch linux

and no I won't

I'd like to point out that developers are likely exposed to more subscription costs than most average people. This or that tool is $5/m, hosting is $80 (or you run your own server, of which the electricity usage is constant), GitHub is $5-$15/m, Jet brains is close to $20.

Calling us cheap I think overlooks the enormity of tools and businesses that chose this model and calculated that they're the only ones doing it. Subscription costs are charged whether you use the tool or not, and if you stop subscribing you lose any previous versions you've paid for. It's a uniquely grimey model.

Or perhaps I don't want to get fleeced and/or locked in to a model where if I stop paying, I lose access to an offline program that costs the app developer NOTHING extra for my use

After seeing the demo, I was really stoked about this product and was ready to buy but then I was turned off from the recurring monthly price.

FWIW, if it were a 1-time price I would have paid probably $50 - $99 for that.

Here's a good interview with Adam Wathan from Tailwind about lifetime pricing:

https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is...

Congrats on making it to the homepage of HN!

On the other hand there are thousands of things that will make my life easier and you're right I will not spend 30,000 dollars a month to make my life easier.

At any rate I'm not sure if I think this thing would actually make my life easier. Arguments:

1. For all the whining CSS is actually one of the easiest parts of the stack, when there is a CSS bug it is generally something like - a thing is slightly off position on this screen size or the color is a bit wrong not it is possible to access another customer's account if you know what day they signed up and their email (not real bug that I've ever encountered)

2. I'm relatively good at CSS so probably this will produce worse CSS than I would do myself - although nowadays the libraries that are most popular tend to hide the 'complexity' of CSS in a JavaScript layer that produces the actual crap CSS for you so whatever.

3. I have to click and point on things etc. I hate that. That makes things slower for me. I write text in files. quick.

This is actually probably not for a developer - but for a designer who can have a design view of what the developer did and tweak a few things with this tool, hopefully make a PR and so forth.

Yes it should be bought by a company because then - tax deductible and designer is using with developer so on team.

I think your lumping developers all in the same category, but either way there's not much value in a subscription for a developer.

If your a developer business owner(not hourly freelancer) than absolutely makes financial sense.

If your an hourly freelancer your customers probably aren't going to offer you more money for your time.

If you work for someone else they should pay for it.

If you are fixed bid or some variation on that then probably makes sense because your time is money.

It's actually $180/year (works out to $15/month), not $360/year

And I was definitely interested in trying it out; however, I don't see a free trial.

Also, does it make you more money if you have an employer? There's a good chance your employer will pay you the same whether or not you use this tool.

If it saves the employer money or makes you more productive, then the employer should pay for it right?

But as a developer, I'd usually have to be the one advocating for it, then the employer would have to assess and approve the expense. All so I can start using a tool that costs money, which I won't be able to take with me to a different employer.

When I'm assessing the tools I might invest my time in, I generally prefer tools which are portable. The only way something like CSS Pro makes sense to me, is if I'm self-employed or freelancing; in that case I can either raise my rates or bill the same amount while working a bit less. But even for freelancers, many wouldn't consider it without a trial.

> $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year

Nice of you to assume we're all cheap, when many of us are scraping by and have to be pretty cautious where we spend our money. $360 US is nearly what I spend on food in a month.

edit: I tried playing with it in the page, and it's incredibly limiting. Tailwind and hot reloading make things so much easier faster. With this tool, I can't really position elements, I can't add new DOM nodes and delete others. Or I couldn't figure out how to anyway. This is definitely not the tool for me, but might be useful for a non-technical designer who is just starting to learn CSS or doesn't know CSS

> Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap.

That also comes down to many it being difficult for some organizations to purchase software on for their devs, either as a policy of the organization or the software not making this simple. Some companies make this a laborious approval process but then some vendors will make it nearly impossible to pay in bulk, or have easy delegated payment options. Developer tools oughta be as easy as possible to get your employer to pay for given how much of a force-multiplier a good dev tool can be for them.

> 360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year?

Either that math is wrong, or we're eating different dinners.

It’s not just about the price. It’s also about how it’s pitched and what the on ramp looks like.

In this case, without a free trial, there is a much bigger gap to traverse to go from “not a customer” to “paying monthly”.

It’s also harder if you are not the one paying the bills and need to pitch/sell such a tool internally.

The problem is not a single subscription. The problem is that today everything is a subscription. So you end up paying 600 euros per month from 20 subscriptions of "just 30 euros" and if you don't pay attention, you can even pay more.

Do I not know how to write CSS? Why is someone else's opinionated GUI generating CSS for me adding value?

Devs aren't cheap, tools like this are useless. "Don't write code - use our GUI!" has been a winning proposition almost never.

Add to that most of the time GUI is just so much more work then writing code.

I don’t have to click around to change small thing I can jump to place in file and have it changed with 2-3 moves and GUI always is open some panel find another option open pop up etc.

I have no idea what you do (and what startup idea you tried before and got burned) but your generalization is not accurate. You can also say that developers are extremely particular about what they want to pay for. Developers spend hours to automate something that takes 5 minutes every week is because it's fun. Obviously my previous two statements don't apply to every developer, hence the generalization is wrong. Some are cheap, some are particular, and some are even more particular. Just like every other field I suppose, who would've thought!

You act like 3 dinners for 2 people in a year is nothing.

Some of us only eat out once a week because we have debts, or we have children, or we live in an expensive place. Some people eat out even less than that.

Would I sacrifice ~6% of my meals out for this tool that (no disrespect to the developer, is a glorified color palette picker)? Definitely not, and it's not a matter of being "cheap."

Not to mention, I think you're grossly overestimating how much time a tool like this would save. If I truly spend 200 hours a year picking colors, I likely would memorize a few by that point.

It’s long been this way, even in the days when we had to (gasp) spend money for compilers. I remember feeling like the typical user on Usenet back in the day would rather smelt sand to make a microchip than spend money on computer stuff.

It’s also why I spend my own money on subscriptions to IntelliJ and CLion. I spend a lot of time in those tools and it’s worth it to me to pay to see them advance. Likewise, I just signed up to pay for Mimestream email because that’s something else that I always use.

> The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week

This is the main flaw in your argument. For any developer who will actually save 3-4 hours a week with this tool, there are a thousand developers who will only save 3-4 hours a year.

As a potential user, how do you know which group you’ll be on?

And as business, how do you make the decision to only target one in a thousand potential users?

I'd be very surprised there's any developer that spends more than 4 hrs per week to tweak CSS to begin with, I just don't see the savings that you outlined.

I also think that you might be misunderstanding developers, we'll pay for lots of things to save time, but not when we either don't need it or can do it ourselves. I wrote my own cron jobs that saved countless hours - I don't need to buy that.

If you're starting your own project, sure. But most people are paid hourly or salary and not paid based on completion of tasks, so I don't really care if it saves me hours at work - I'll be given more work to do. If the company is paying for it, I'd be happy to use it, but then your cost-effectiveness comparison goes out the window.

While true, this comment is entirely US centric. $30 USD a month is not a joke to a good chunk of the world.

Just because developers in US in San Fran make $350k a year doesn't mean everyone does. And it's incredibly short sighted to assume that.

But ignoring all of that, your only recommendation is to sell it cheaper B2B... doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of keeping the $30 price?

It's incredible how American centric you are. 360 $ is a whole month of food for two people in Europe. Not joking.

Developers in general aren't cheap.

Developers who spend their time commenting about how something is too expensives are cheap.

After subscribing to absolutely everything and wondering where your paycheck is going every pay period, you sort of learn to just stop subscribing to anything at all. It's not cheap, you just learn the hard way you'll just make your paycheck evaporate otherwise.

$360 is only 3 dinners for 2 people?

Developers are cheap and the loudest are the most privileged living in SV earning insane wages can be true at the same time

I think what I'm getting at is that the OP is really out of touch with reality if they think that $120 per meal for a couple is normal

Agreed. $120 per dinner?

Not all of us, thankfully.

I have a job to do and can't afford to create the computing world from scratch just to be cheappy.

Likewise I want the folks that provide the tools I enjoy using, to also afford the same lifestyle I can enjoy having.

Also there is an inherent 'I can do this way better myself' as part of the developer psyche. Though no one gets around to actually doing it.

1000% agree. Don’t sell to devs, always sell to their employers. I now see how keeping your price hidden could be beneficial. The person you’re selling to isn’t the person who should be interested in the price!

You should talk to real estate, especially commercial real estate people. They are just as cheap, even though a commission could be $100k net or a new deal could yield $1M in profit in the next 5 years

It’s not about being cheap, it’s about not wanting a company to own your workflow and not wanting to limit your knowledge and skill to a proprietary product.

I have opened myself up for more subscription services over the last couple of years. I freelance. My income is generally 'high', but irregular. Monthly subscriptions aren't irregular.

Having a need for a tool for 2 months on a project, then... maybe needing it 4 months from now means I have to keep subscribing to the service even when I don't use it. I've kept things around at $30/month for months longer than I needed to because there wasn't a good way to export the data, then reimport it later if I needed it again in that tool. Taking time to determine the impact of stopping a subscription isn't always simple.

I'm paying for 2 services that do something similar. Tried the second one that said "oh, we can import your data from the other service!". It can't, but I didn't try soon enough, and now I have setups in two services. My own fault for not trying soon enough, but taking time to manually move from svc 1 to 2 (or 2 to 1) will take a lot more than than any 'savings' I might get from these.

I've paid for jetbrains for years, and I pay for some hosting/cloud services (linode, DO, AWS, etc). I've paid for copilot. I've paid for some other IDE helper/services. I've got clients who pay for dropbox/similar.

Average of $25/month, but times... say 8 on average (monthly or yearly external services I use)... That's not nothing to me. I can live with it, but half of these I'm not using regularly, but am somewhat held hostage because cancelling the service will lose my data which I may want to use on another project in the near future. So.. I keep holding on to things I'm not using in the hopes that I'll "save 2 hours/week!" 4 months from now.

Some of these services don't play nicely with sharing - many bootstrapped services don't give me ways to share my account with someone else, or transfer my data to a client, for example. (some do, but not all). Even if I want that feature, and I'm a paying customer, if I'm in the minority, I won't get that feature.

I understand your sentiment about "stop being cheap" but... even once I got past that, and got comfortable paying for more services, it's not always a good ROI (short term, usually yes, long term... no).

"to make your lives easier". My life would be easier if I could use the service for a time, export all my data, cancel, then resume service by bringing my data in again later. OR... let me 'pause' monthly rebilling for a few months. An account 'freeze' feature - suspend service and billing for X months, Y times per year - would let me feel I'm getting more value when I need it. Yes, it would disrupt projected cash flow, but it would "make my life easier".

My gym lets me do this. I can 'freeze' my membership for up to 4 months at a time per calendar year. I've done it when I know I'm going to be out of town for a few weeks - no way I'm going to use for the next 6 weeks. I'll freeze for the next month, then resume.

the way you calculate savings is not really true in reality. even if I can now do my work 4 hours a week faster. I'm not immediately getting a pay bump, my boss just gives me 4hours of extra work.

It won't give me 4 hours a week back, because my boss still reserves my time for those 4 hours.

My household won't have an extra 30 euro a month to spend on those dinners. actually it will directly have 30 euro less to spend on dinners. so yeah all those considerations make me cautious paying for more subscriptions.

Conversely, what personas have a higher marginal propensity to spend, IT folk? Sales?

you sound like someone with an sf salary.

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