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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

> 4. Subscriptions drive our economy, I don't know the details but it seems like every company wants subscriptions over one time purchases.

Every person I know wants a subscription, too. Who wouldn’t want a nest egg throwing off passive income?

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A lot of entrepreneurs hate the saasification of everything, and don't want to create sub services. They tow the line because investors LOVE subs and will look at you like you're insane if you disagree.

The reason is a very simple one - predicting future revenue is extremely difficult if you're selling an $X package one time (even with upgrades etc), but knowing that you have Y subscribers with a $Z subscription and a churn rate of N% gives you some kind of future forecast.

Anything you can do to operationalize cash flows is a huge boon to continuity of business operations

There's also the fact that people are bad about cancelling when they don't use them, and it makes it easy to jack up prices.

I don't argue that they're great from a predatory business perspective. The consistency you state comes on the back of negative value for customers though. Particularly now that everything is a subscription. People are worn TF out by keeping track of the people hoovering their money away.

Yeah personally I think it's absolutely awful and a clear example of the way that financialization has negatively affected a lot of things these days, but if you're in that mindset the reasoning is perfectly clear and valid - it's just lacking the larger picture.

NB, toe the line.

<https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/pardon-the-expression/to...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line>

> Every person I know wants a subscription, too.

You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me.

I do understand why companies want to screw consumers, obviously.

I meant everyone wants to have a recurring income. After all, we have a recurring need to feed and house ourselves.

Sure, but when you buy a spoon, you expect to own the spoon. You don't pay 1$/month/spoon, do you?

That is neither here nor there. I was making a tongue in cheek comment that companies wanting recurring revenue is not notable, because everyone wants recurring revenue. The only thing limiting it before was lack of technical ability.

> I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription.

There's a huge car finance market where people do exactly that. How much they pay a finance company monthly vs. how much they pay the manufacturer monthly makes little difference to them. It's all about the monthly fee and what they get in return for it.

> You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me.

If I'm buying something that has recurring costs to deliver services, I feel better if I'm covering those costs, so I'm buying something with a sustainable business model.

Subscription service for heated seats - outrageous.

Subscription service for premium, ad-free mapping - reasonable.

Just don't think about the long term economic effects of rent-seeking

With all the top heavy population age histograms around the world, the rent seeking is built into all the economies to provide benefits until it becomes too top heavy and revolution occurs.

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