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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really surprised. The profitability of services are why everything ships with a service these days. Users obviously prefer "pay once and use forever" for things like heated seats on their car, but there is just too much money left on the table to offer that as an option. Depressing, but that's market forces for you.

Apple definitely got me on services with E2E encryption. I am happy to pay $0.99 a month to keep all my data in their cloud. I suppose I would be even happier if it was included for the life of my iPhone for free, though.

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Keeping all your data on their cloud at least costs them every month, and cannot be feasibly offered as a lifetime purchase. A heated seat though?

Automotive leasing is basically “personal mobility-aaS” and it’s wildly popular.

Decomposing that lease cost into a bunch of small feature pieces is really about better price discrimination + fewer “SKUs”.

It's actually possible to do this. There's a thing which is called perpetual bonds, i.e. bonds which pay a fixed sum ad infinitum. Not surprisingly, they have a non infinite cost. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_bond)

If you add a perpetual bonds with a coupon equal to the service charge, and the service price doesn't increase, you could create a perpetual "free" iCloud offering. However, I think the main problem there aren't that many people who are willing to pay for it.

It’s not possible because the point of services is that you can jack up the pricing any time.

Perpetuities are only possible because of non negative interest rates but inflation tends to be higher so they don’t pay out constant in terms of purchasing power

Just because you have a perpetual bond to pay for something doesn’t mean you have to stick with it. In fact, 100% of your capital is still there, so you can either migrate or go on-prem with what you still have.

You can also engineer your fund to generate enough to reinvest for inflation. Your fund, and your ability to pay more as prices increase, will grow, so you can absorb reasonable price increases and maintain a readiness to bail.

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