I really hate how disconnected subscription prices are from actual value delivered. Imagine a world where you're billed proportional to usage! What a halcyon dream.
It discourages experimentation and use. It also adds significant mental overhead when it comes to using something. One can imagine this mental overhead when using Canva or Photoshop. But if evrry app was like that the complexity would rise exponentially.
Metering leads to reaching local optimal states at best, and makes it very difficult to reach a global optimal state.
There is very little marginal cost when software is concerned so metering isn’t even reflective of the costs of using a product.
However, this isn’t currently true of AI. AI has significant marginal costs so metering probably better aligns with the expenses, but metering is so bad for other reasons that most companies are choosing to forgo the “reflective of costs” benefit and just charge flat prices anyways.
Well that's my point, isn't it? Neither are subscriptions. The transaction is presented as for a service, but you're really paying for a workforce that might not be providing any marginal value to you at all.
> Metering leads to reaching local optimal states at best, and makes it very difficult to reach a global optimal state.
I don't see how subscriptions are more likely to get us there. Certainly closed-source software (or paying for access to a closed-source service) makes it much harder to find globally optimal states—we're reinventing the wheel over and over and over again, which is tremendously inefficient and presumably would be a problem you'd expect market forces/technological progression to correct.
> (…)
> I don't see how subscriptions are more likely to get us there.
Your whole response hinges on the assumption that the person you’re replying to is defending subscriptions, yet they haven’t even hinted at that being the case. They explained what they see as the problems with metering and nothing else, nowhere in their response do I see an argument in favour of subscriptions.
I see a world of even more surveillance. One where people frequently install uBlock-like tools to stop the counting and apps install invasive “cheat prevention” DRM mechanisms like some AAA games. A world where someone is billed astronomical amounts because they forgot to close an app, where people are constantly nervous the whole time they use a tool, and unscrupulous companies make programs run just a bit slower to rake in more money.
I don’t like subscriptions either, but that doesn’t sound like the solution to me.