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Comment by damnesian | Hacker News Reader

> the new "free" software is a sales funnel into the paid subscription, and will also increasingly have that "second-class" feeling as new pro-only things are added to it

There's a plague of this on the entire industry now. Free apps abound, none of them will do exactly what you need, all of them will point you to the shiny unfree thing that will.

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The practice would be easier to tolerate if the unfree thing had reasonable pricing. Alas, it is always subscription-based and the monthly fee is crazy high, in the range of re-buying a traditional download product every four months. I understand that professional users might have more money to spend but it still seems to me that those companies overestimate what potential customers are willing to pay as running costs.

I mean 20+ years ago we called this shareware.

If you get value out of the free part of a tool, great! If not, then you get to choose to pay for the rest or not. Personally I'm happy that it tends to be the feature set I can live without that costs money. Not always, but often enough.

Fair, but shareware was pay-once, which many people find preferable to a subscription-chained model.

You don’t have to keep paying for a subscription. You can stop at any time and still have access to all the non-AI features.

Yes, that's the situation at launch. The fear that's expressed above is that the subscription model incentivizes pushing people towards it as hard as possible. It's the exact opposite of Serif's straightforward model from before. Get ready for most new features (including ones that are unrelated to AI) to become locked to the subscription model. When they think they're not getting enough out of Affinity, they may also start cutting core functionality to force people to subscribe. Maybe, a limit on how many documents you can edit at once, or a layer limit (for the photo part), or an object limit (for the vector/"designer" part). This is how all of these subscriptions go nowadays.

>You don’t have to keep paying for a subscription. You can stop at any time and still have access to all the non-AI features

And if Canva decides that "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further,"[0] what will you do then? Go and rent the Adobe subscription suite instead?

[0] http://www.quickmeme.com/img/32/32b4229145de0a2c1171b9b5757f...

That's a great distinction.

There is a big difference between a one time payment and a recurring payment, especially if the company canceling the product or going out of business means you can no longer use the tool, and I honestly steer clear of those in most cases.

> I mean 20+ years ago we called this shareware.

It's not even close. This is more akin to shareware where Bill Gates shows up at your house to collect a payment every month and formats your hard drive if you don't cough up the money.

Shareware gave you a perpetual license and control that couldn't be taken away, especially before the internet.

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