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Comment by aceazzameen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.”

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

>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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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”.

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).

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”.

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?

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