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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

I feel it's the opposite. The incentive is to lock you in and provide as little value as possible for as much money as possible. Get you hooked, take your data hostage, and then jack up the price as much as possible while delivering little to no additional functionality. Bugs? who cares. Broken functionality? No big deal. You are locked in baby!

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It reminds me of the dining hall at my university. The food would always be unbelievably good on parents weekend and any time there were tours that would eat there. Every other time it was mediocre at best. The check for the meal plan money cleared and the goal was to give back the bare minimum.

I don't think that the incentive to "provide as little value as possible for as much money as possible" is in any way unique to the SAAS pricing model. Theoretically, every optimized pricing model will attempt to maximize revenue at a given value level.

And in practice, what does "get you hooked, take your data hostage" mean? I can't think of many SAAS subscriptions in my personal life where this is a real issue.

Transition costs are prohibitive.

Some SaaS platforms bill just enough to stay under the cost of transitioning to a competitor (or building first party) to maximize revenue.

I don't think this is connected with reality. Most companies don't have such strong lock-in, and those that do often have extremely valuable products.

I dunno, this describes my reality pretty accurately. Apple, Figma, and Adobe all try to lock you in with cloud storage and proprietary storage formats: the more you invest in their products, the more you'd lose by not paying them. I used to run some websites off Squarespace, and there's no way to export them and move somewhere else, so you end up paying ~$200 a year to host a static web page, else recreate it from scratch. Gmail has me locked in by having all my emails from the last twenty years. Slack owns my conversation history with my friends. And so on...

> those that do often have extremely valuable products.

I agree with that. All those products above are valuable and useful to me. But, the price is not commensurate with the value of the product alone. The price only makes sense when you add both the value I get from using the product and the pain I would experience by not using the product anymore. The product developers work hard not only to make the product useful, but also to punish you if you leave. That's the gross part.

You can connect an IMAP client to Gmail and retrieve all your emails.

Which is something everybody should do before they remove that feature.

What exactly is the difference from paying up front?

There there's even less incentives to fix bugs, fix broken functionality and god forbid new functionality.

The difference is that with upfront payment developers are forced to actually add features that provide more utility. Otherwise customers don’t upgrade. With SAAS you have to keep paying, even with if the software is completely static with no new features or bug fixes.

As for bug fixes, do you think I am more or less likely to recommend your software to my friends if it is full of bugs and you don’t fix them?

You buy what is offered (and a support period in most cases). Not a promise. No one buys a consumer car and expects it to run on water the next month.

People totally buy Tesla and expects them to be self-driving next month. Every month since 7 years.

In the case of Sage, the difference was about 500% cost increase for each of my two small businesses.

With SAAS, if the software is barely usable but lacks competition, vendor gets paid even if they don't fix bugs or broken functionality. When paying up-front, there always is competition - your own old version; so the vendor has strong financial motivation to make improvements since the recurring "maintenance" upgrade revenue is conditional on them, unlike in SAAS.

Where have you experienced data lockin? That sounds like poor SaaS strategies from the 2000s.

Fusion 360 is one example off the top of my head.

I think I would agree for large traditional software companies like Autodesk or Adobe that charged large sums for software versions you typically don't update yearly (Creative Cloud), that a flat subscription model seems to be a bad fit.

Probably less so for software you use daily or make your living off of.

I use a text editor daily. I see no revolutionary methods being added to text editing that could ever justify me paying monthly. Even something as simple as a calorie counter has a monthly charge for features that never change (MyFitnessPal).

I pay for Bear.app. It amounts to something like $14 dollars a year. But it's a beautifully crafted app and while it uses a database instead of files, it has good export capabilities. I consider that a donation at this point.

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