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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

This is because there is very little code required to write one.

That's why I laugh when I see they want to charge a subscription for this. It's easy enough for any competent developer to take available open source tools and crank out something to meet their needs in an afternoon.

Before UTM came out I was using xhyve with a little custom scripting. Not a solution for the masses but good enough for me.

That's the "I could implement dropbox with sftp and rsync in an afternoon" response. It's nice not to have to, and people can be forgiven for exchanging money for time.

In case you aren't aware, UTM is a full featured VM solution for Apple Silicon machines which is freely available and easy to use.

It’s $10, so they’re clearly also not unaware of the effort needed to support software. It’s fine for different people to have different takes on a common concept and let the market sort it out.

It's only $10 if purchase it from the app store, the official website offers a free download.

I have the skills to build it myself from source and sideload (mostly dealing with Apple's obnoxious code signing certificate infrastructure), but will gladly pay the $10 to fund the development. Too bad the iOS version of UTM is not available on the iOS App Store and forces sideloading. I might get around to installing it on my iPad one day (there is the excellent QEMU-based iSH on the App Store, however).

Yes, I’m aware: the context was that there is a non-trivial effort to maintain things.

One of my favorite comments on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

That comment has been unfairly misinterpreted over the years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37265112

I’m so fed up of paying for software subscriptions. If I can choose between a single payment and a subscription service, I go for the one-shot every time. I don’t even know how to describe it, but it just nauseates me at this point. I’ve also cancelled Netflix and Amazon Prime is not going to be renewed either. I know it’s irrational but I’ve just been pushed to the brink.

Subscription is a psychology hack.

As an average Joe, if I see a one-off fee of $60, it seems like a lot of money upfront and makes the decision hard and may be if I stall a but, I will forget about the whole thing by next weekend.

Compare that to $5/month, doesn’t look so bad, I spend that amount for a good coffee and donut daily… let me enter my credit-card there… eventually I forget about this in one week but am continued being charged and there are too many little charges for me to go over and figure out where my money is going.

This subscription model is a psychology hack to reduce the resistance of general people and not targeted at us, who try to be extra cautious about the value proposition over long term.

P.S. I attended some marketing fluff seminar from big honcho sales people as part of business trip, thought I’d share it about where this sudden rise of subscription model came from.

That's not typically where the software industry sets the one-time purchase though. 18-30 months is more typical. In your example that would be $5/mo for software costing between perhaps $100-150.

If it's set correctly, and the software is actually valuable enough to be worth something, there's a more balanced tradeoff between the risk of overpaying and underpaying and the benefit of the subscription acting like an inexpensive trial that will likely convert to a one-time purchase if the buyer is budget-minded.

(That said, it's certainly true that you can approach the same pricing strategies fairly or greedily; I've overheard both.)

Basically it’s a dark pattern.

Yeah, I refuse to buy any product that requires a subscript simply to be able to use it. A subscription should bring new value every month, like a magazine. I'm OK with subscribing to streaming video services as long as they keep updating the content.

I mostly run open source at this point because I'm also tire of everything commercial having telemetry built in.

Yeah that’s a good point: if substantial value is added every month (as in a streaming service), a subscription model is not quite so offensive. Subscription models for software that remains essentially static (aside from bug-fixes and occasional features) is just a rip-off. And yes, I understand that these folks need a constant revenue stream to pay their bills… but so does everybody else, including the mom & pop grocery stores that have to get by with whatever margin they make on the goods they sell and don’t have the option of charging for a monthly membership just to have the privilege of walking through their door.

This crap has to stop. I’ve stopped paying for subscriptions. Hopefully I’m not the only one and revenues will be impacted enough for developers to react.

I’m sure I’ll draw substantial ire from developers here who depend on the subscription model but I don’t really care. You have monthly expenses for your AWS services? Mom & pop pay for rent. Unlike them you can probably re-architect your app to rely on on-device processing. I’m through with this crap.

Afternoon of a competent developer is a cost of $500-2000. If the subscription is $4.99 a month, in the cheapest scenario you would need 8 years to accrue $500. It's very unlikely that a developer is going to spend 8 years at one company, so spending afternoon on this is a false economy. Unless you want to learn something and perhaps start selling similar product on the side...

$2000 seems very expensive for an afternoon unless you’re making $1M/year. The other thing missing from your calculus to consider is that it’s a learning opportunity which offsets the actual time for creating it.

Also, plenty of people have hobbies. That’s why we have OSS.

$2000 a day is a standard rate for a short term assignment, I know people who charge this much for software development services.

That being said it's more likely you would look at $500.

> The other thing missing from your calculus to consider is that it’s a learning opportunity which offsets the actual time for creating it.

You are also learning while you are being paid for doing it.

> Also, plenty of people have hobbies. That’s why we have OSS.

OSS is being popularised by big corporations because it saves them money on R&D in the long run. Otherwise they would have to pay for a lot of development of projects that would not necessarily be a success within the company. Instead they can pick and choose from projects already "preselected" for them by the community and written by gullible developers who are unlikely going to get even a tiny fraction of money made on their software.

Don't get me wrong OSS is great, but it should be illegal for businesses to use it without paying royalties, otherwise it's just a pure exploitation.

For some reason there is this notion "if it is a someone's hobby then they shouldn't charge money for it". In my country you have to at least pay someone a minimum wage.

There's a command line tool on github; https://github.com/mrchoke/RunLinuxVM

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