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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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