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Comment by Bishonen88 | Hacker News Reader

Most apps rationale for subscriptions is "Ongoing development" without an option like jetbrains etc. to fall back to a perpetual license. In practice, regardless of whether an app needs ongoing development or not, this is the best way to try to guarantee continuous income and make a living off of a project I guess.

Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.

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One-time purchase software would become dramatically more sustainable if platform churn could be ground to a halt. Most types of software achieved peak usability and functionality somewhere between 5 and 25 years ago and there wouldn't be much reason for anybody to upgrade if their one-time purchases continued to work in perpetuity. A substantial number even prefer e.g. Word 2000 or Photoshop CS1 over their modern incarnations but can't use those for either technical or legal reasons.

Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.

Maybe we should just freeze development in lots of designated areas and declare victory (I know this isn't a practical suggestion, but still...).

Eg in desktop OS's. Apple for example makes everyone miserable by re-breaking macOS every year. To what point?

Apple certainly churns APIs quite often. And now my Tahoe install has broken window management, one of the most core features of a modern OS

Cmd-tilde and shift-cmd-tilde have been broken for a decade and a half. Cycle through open windows. Close one. Cycle agin. They now reverse the direction. It’s maddening and it’ll never get fixed.

nvi hasn't meaningfully changed in almost 20 years. It's OK for software to be finished.

Yesterday's submission explained the choice of subscription precisely due to the need if ongoing development: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46716385

Part will be for new features, but no doubt that another big part will be for platform support over time. There's just too little backwards compatibility guarantees nowadays from the big players. We need more Microsofts in that sense!

> Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.

... Even for desktop Linux users? I can't say I've felt it. I switched almost 4 years ago and it just keeps feeling better and better (in a "Luigi wins by doing nothing" kind of way).

Linux desktops (not the kernel) are actually among the worst when it comes to platform churn. It's one of the reasons why Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, etc require relatively complex machinery and runtimes and whatnot to function. The churn is just masked by package managers.

It's come across to me so far that this just results from application developers targeting a specific DE and not really thinking about compatibility, or even really whether they need specific functionality provided a specific way.

Would be nice to see the XDG stuff like portals etc. better respected, though, yeah.

> It's come across to me so far that this just results from application developers targeting a specific DE and not really thinking about compatibility, or even really whether they need specific functionality provided a specific way.

They are, but it's not their fault - Wayland removes so much functionality that X had, and delegates that to the WM/DE.

I tried to do a small personal app last year for myself that intercepted and injected events for keyboard and mouse. Not possible in Wayland (so I switched to X instead) - that is delegated to the WM/DE.

There's hundreds of these tiny little cuts that cause friction for app devs.

DE stuff is part of the picture, but there’s churn outside of those too. glibc, which is used in practically everything, is the classic example but across the whole of the Linux desktop sphere, it’s unusual for libraries to maintain compatibility.

The only reason why Linux desktops work at all is thanks to package managers and their maintainers doing the heavy lifting of keeping applications and the libraries they use in lockstep. If it weren’t for that random programs would be breaking every other update.

if snaps were masked by apt, there wouldn't be such an objection to them.

It is not irrational on the part of the developer -- I've definitely felt this too. The problem comes from the fact that practically everyone has subscription fatigue these days, and each of us probably has only a few pieces of software we truly care about enough to want to support them out of the goodness of our hearts.

But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.

> But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.

And so few actually deliver $10/mo worth of value. If 1password and Fastmail - the two most important services that control my digital life - are each $60/year, that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do. The ones that do are like NextDNS where they cost $20-30 per year because the people running them aren't greedy lemmings trying to pay back VC.

> And so few actually deliver $10/mo worth of value. If 1password and Fastmail

Funny you mention Fastmail. I was happy most of the past decade until this week. I just had my email blown up by their new Paddle billing system with a ton of billing invoices since they decided it was no longer ok that I pay them a lump sump every 2 years, and that I must go onto monthly now. Initially I thought they were hacked but nope, just terrible communication.

I emailed them a few days ago and they only confirmed that Paddle is their merchant of record and they have been migrating accounts over slowly.

Tonight the CEO sent out a blast saying resellers need to be on monthly billing with their new system at new pricing.

Sorry Fastmail, I paid for 2 years back in October (I think this is my 3rd cycle with them). If you want me on monthly billing then you will wait until October 2027. That is a ‘you’ problem not a ‘me’ problem if you undersold the subscription this cycle.

All bootstrapping founders should read the above post to understand why you should never build B2C.

> that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do.

Of course it isn't. Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. They can be anything from good value, to average value to low value.

And products / services are of course not comparable just because they are subscription based, or used on a digital device.

Gas has a fantastic value, one liter can transport me and my things a long way in short time. So does that mean that I can never buy a bottle of wine or some coffee outside of my home? They are after all liquids, and neither coffee nor wine can compare with the great value of gas.

> Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value.

Sorry, but no. If they're worse value than my email and password providers which my digital life revolves around and who only charge me $5/mo each, then yes those products are a bad value.

I pay $3,000/yr for Altium, $200/mo for Claude Max, $60+/mo for ad-free streaming, and begrudgingly $50/mo for Adobe so I'm not against paying thousands a year in nice fat profit margins if they provide actual value, like a shit ton of GPU compute time or a well made piece of professional software. "Value" here is obviously subjective relative to the beholder, but IMO the vast majority of SaaS I look at are hardly worth two bucks a month, let alone tens.

> If they're worse value than my... password providers... who only charge me $5/mo

In that case, people who run Bitwarden for free are screwed. In fact, looking at how much I use the web browser Chrome, and how much I get out of that, and the fact that I pay $0 to Google to use it (inb4 I'm the product because I'm not paying for it), paying money for anything digital is terrible value!

What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends.

Life is not an optimization problem. You can optimize for value, but then you'll find yourself in Walmart at 1am realizing that the 3-pack is cheaper per-roll than the 30-pack that night for some reason, and getting angry over that.

> What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends.

It's just common-sense though - if the market is willing to pay me $100/widget, why would I sell it for `($10 cost to manufacture + 35% markup)`?

The new lower bound for simple side-hustle apps now is virtually zero. All you need is a computer, electricity, internet and (optionally) $20.

That's not at all how I think products are priced. That sound's like something you'd tell a kindergartner to shut them up.

> You can optimize for value, but then you'll find yourself in Walmart at 1am realizing that the 3-pack is cheaper per-roll than the 30-pack that night for some reason, and getting angry over that.

I have never found myself in a Walmart at 1am* nor have I ever gotten angry at toilet paper (I get the Charmin ultra from Costco like a normal person). You need to re-calibrate because you sound like an Inland Empire methhead. Pro tip: you want to shoplift the detergent. That tends to trade better with the other methheads.

* Not entirely true, but that's just because the Reno Walmart stocks up on Burning Man supplies and Gerlach only sells shitty playa bikes.

I think you need to recalibrate because charmin is fucking lol

Who am I to argue about toilet paper with a user named goopypoop!

I assume you use vintage fire hoses from the Birmingham campaign to clean down there?

well it's hard to find quality chamois these days, but tbf since i joined the human centipede i haven't looked back

Not valid here, Sorry:

>I pay $3,000/yr for Altium,

You are definitely a professional/industryspecialist - so its quite obvious why you pay for this, same as a mechanic is paying for very important and expensive tools.

This mindest is not possible for "non-professionals" :-)

Then you cannot ever buy a cup of coffee, because it's also very bad value compared to Fastmail. Or a beer.

> The vast majority of SaaS I look at are hardly worth two bucks a month, let alone tens.

Then why are you looking at them,

Availability is a big thing.

I don't order a coffee to my house because I can make coffee at home.

But if I'm at another city, then paying for a coffee beats not having it.

I don’t buy cups of coffee unless it’s on vacation, brewed by a great barista with years of experience. Instead I have a $600 roaster, a $100 burr grinder, and a $10 Turkish coffee pot that have produced many thousands of good cups of coffee over more than a decade. Including the cost of bulk beans, I probably spend about as much on my caffeine addiction as 1password and Fastmail combined. Seems like a decent value to me?

I think your value system is completely broken if you think I can’t have a beer just because they cost more than fastmail. Some beers are better value than others but I enjoy having a beer. I don’t enjoy logging into some overpriced SaaS to do something that Claude can do for me now instead.

> Then why are you looking at them,

How can I evaluate their value if I don’t even look at them?

> How can I evaluate their value if I don’t even look at them?

There are no subscription services which can beat Fastmail, iCloud, Kagi or YouTube in value for your dollar. So you can stop looking.

There are many subscription services which offer good or even great value, or mediocre. But since you demand that value has to be better or equal than the great value Fastmail gives you for you to be interested, then I'm telling you that you're not going to find it.

> "Value" here is obviously subjective relative to the beholder

Agreed, but the confusing part is that you don't seem to be saying "to me, those services only provide X amount of value, and I'd rather have $Y than that" -- you seem to be saying that if 1password and Fastmail were more expensive, you might be willing to pay the asking price for some of those services you currently consider bad value.

You’re absolutely right! If Fastmail or 1password charged more for their services, the bar for what I consider good value would be different. Those two services are _absolutely_ worth more to me than they currently charge and I’d be happy to pay.

But they don’t, which is why I use them as my baseline. If my email provider and password manager - two services with damn near infinite vendor lockin - can do it, no one has any excuse.

Which is your choice, obviously, but you can see why people would find it strange -- it seems like you're potentially just leaving value on the table for an arbitrary reason. The price of Fastmail doesn't affect the value you would get from some unrelated product, so surely that other product is either worth the asking price or not worth it regardless of how much Fastmail is charging.

What do you mean infinite vendor lock in? Just export your vault and import it in another password manager and switching email provider is not that hard either (assuming you use your own domain).

It certainly was when the options were pirate or buy, and the prices per year were much higher than $10/mo gets you.

The BIG difference is that we didn't felt entitled to use everything that is fashionable or switch apps every couple of months.

We would do a research across several magazines, local computer clubs, and the few lucky ones that had online access, some BBS or Usenet groups, then buy that one package and live with it for a couple of years, regardless of their limitations.

And so the solution is… paying Anthropic $200/mo…

All of the projects OP mentioned could be vibe coded for <$10 worth of GLM-4.7

The inference is cheap, but the context window costs for iteratively debugging architecture issues add up fast. Things like state management or migrations usually require feeding the whole stack back in multiple times, which blows past that budget pretty quickly in my experience.

"Man, it kind of sucks that LLM only does one thing and that my compiled applications stop working after I turn off my LLM service"

37Signals tried that with once.com . Given they're now giving those away for free and haven't said a thing about it suggests it was an abject failure. What you're paying for with SaaS is outsourcing - deployment, maintenance, security, reliability etc are someone else's problem.

The code is the easy part but there's ongoing humans needed to make it work. If Agents get to the point they can genuinely autonomously SRE & patch a service everything changes but that still seems a long way off.

>> Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.

How would the economics of this work universally? Jetbrains is a bit of an oddity in terms of SaaS. For the most part, it's desktop or on-premises software that was sold with a perpetual license. If you've bought a subscription and canceled, they've generated some revenue. Maintaining a subscription generates more revenue for them, but they can slow or stop development without stopping you from using the product.

SaaS is typically some server software hosted by someone else which most often doesn't have an on-premises version. They can stop making feature updates, but if they turn off the servers, the service ends. They still have costs even if you use the software less. You can argue about the profit margins, but that's not the point here. As most SaaS companies don't start with on-premises, they can't ever get their software working there for many reasons. There are a few like Atlassian and GitHub that do both, but if you look at the heritage, both are really on-premises first.

Or drop the price to $20 a year instead of $20 a month and and focus on small software updated infrequently. Software as a service has a dirty secret that it was more service than software. The companies became larded with payroll and most never had great gross margins.

Pretty much. A lot of software is just good enough already, just keep security updates going and fix occasional bug people complain for too long.

But that might require just firing some people because that amount of man-hours is not needed any more or moving them to make something new and no investor likes it

I think that's where technical issues come in. For a web based SaaS app it's not worth the devs time to make multiple versions available. Even for local apps, I would say most of them have some functionality tied to an API and now you're back to running multiple versions of that server.

I just don't understand this naive argument against subscription. If I have to pay same amount of money, I will pay in subscription than paying one time. So let's say average subscription time is 2 years, they can make $400 onetime or $20/month to get the same revenue. As a consumer I will prefer the second option.

For $40 product, I will rather pay $1/month than $40 once. It keeps the incentive aligned. I think most people just assume that if the devs move away from subscription they would be fine with lower revenue and would charge less.

> So let's say average subscription time is 2 years, they can make $400 onetime or $20/month to get the same revenue.

Does the software stop working after the 2 years? If so, I’d go subscription (or find another product that doesn’t explode). If it doesn’t, I’d pay the $400 assuming I want to use it for more than 2 years.

I said assuming average usage of 2 years just to give example. Exact depends on product and customer segment.

You wrongly assume that you are left with the SaaS product after paying for it for 2 years. For the one time payment, you will still have the software 2 years and more down the road.

Here's what I said:

> So let's say average subscription time

It could be anything from month to decades depending on the subscription. And the price should be accordingly (risk based)adjusted for the same revenue.

Even getting an app on the Apple App Store requires a $100/year payment. You either grow users continuously or you ask for a subscription.

regardless of whether an app _does_ ongoing development. there's plenty of examples - especially mobile - of apps switching to subscriptions and simultaneously slowing down development, which is maddening

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