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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I've been a paid presenter for a bunch of years, and switching to online presentations in 2020 was a huge chore. You're absolutely right about OBS being hard to work with.

This solves pretty much every problem I encountered. I would buy this in a second.

But I have to ask, why a subscription? Why can't I download this software like I do with all my other presentation software? What value does a subscription buy me?

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The typical answer is it funds ongoing development, support, and maintenance. The alternative is new versions requiring repurchase of a new license to fund ongoing development. As a developer I would much prefer reoccurring revenue as an incentive to keep developing vs having to build large shrink wrapped releases and managing LTS etc.

Whether $120/year is reasonable or not is debatable though. Seems steep for the casual user but for people that professionally do presentations, these sorts of things can be extremely pricey even on purchased licenses.

There are lots of pieces of software where that makes sense, but presentation software is not one of them. Specifically, adoption of new features in presentation software is rare and slow because you don't want to be fiddling with unfamiliar things while trying to give a presentation.

I would be extra upset if a feature changed or the interface changed between practicing and giving a presentation for example.

I want my presentation software to have a set of features and then never change until I make a very deliberate act of upgrading to a new version while still having the old one around in case I get stuck.

A subscription to auto-updating software is about the worst thing I can think of presentation software in particular.

These are excellent arguments.

This is probably underused in user interface: the new version can include new features but give the user the choice of when to add the new feature as a new control on their screen or when to replace an old behavior with a new behavior. That would be a useful feature in itself.

By contrast usually, the publisher acts like they know better - all the way to auto-updating (with a new user interface, sure, why not) at the exact wrong moment. For example, you launch Zoom to join a meeting that started 3 minutes ago and what do you get: minutes of auto-update which you can't even override.

“Hold tight! We’re optimizing your experience!”

I don’t remember which online meeting software told me that once in the “oh shit I’m 5 minutes late” situation you’re describing but… man did that not sit well.

> I want my presentation software to have a set of features and then never change until I make a very deliberate act of upgrading to a new version while still having the old one around in case I get stuck.

Note that I'm not using the App Store for distribution, I'm using Sparkle, which means that it never updates without you allowing it to.

Also , if it's a dealbreaker for a lot of people, it would be trivial for me to make older versions available for download! (I keep them all, and this has come in very useful on some recent support calls).

I've been thinking about this and while it's true that I have been trying to find a viable subscription model for my business over the last couple of years, that's not really important for you.

But it does benefit you in a very real way.

I work alone. I'm very good at spinning up features in a few hours. With a subscription model I can release these changes continuously, so you get new features and improvements on a weekly or monthly basis.

If I had to come up with a release schedule I'd have to make a lot of decisions about cordoning off different features, coming up with names, marketing materials, deciding what goes where. This is a huge mental and technical overhead. I'd be juggling git branches across multiple pieces of software, the website, and beyond. I'd be incentivised to put more and more things behind the next paywall and I'd be getting less and less real work done.

I don't have the marketing clout of Apple or Microsoft. They can take a different approach. I've tried a few and now I'm trying this!

One more thing, I do plan on adding some more cloud-based features as time goes on. I'm already managing a Chat GPT integration, and in future I'm picturing an online content library and search to let teams quickly access decks and slides for demos. But that's future stuff, so not relevant to your question just now.

Short answer: it lets me, as a solo developer, give you more cool stuff.

becausr they want to make money from you forever not just once.

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