There aren't many apps that can save you 1000/year. I keep hearing this, but that's nonsense. If a "service" is not producing money and isn't saving you time allowing you to produce money, then it's not worth paying for.
Yes, I have subscriptions for IntelliJ IDEA, for Dropbox, for FastMail and for a DigitalOcean VPS. All these are producing money for me. But the list ends here. Because here's the thing: $5/month here, $10/month there and pretty soon we're talking about serious money. Not only that, but as soon as you stop paying for whatever reason (eg temporary financial problems) you're out.
Of course, with our oversized salaries, we stop noticing that $5/month for a passwords app is actually expensive. And that's actually a good example because a passwords app at least has some utility.
More importantly, subscriptions are immoral because the end result is robbing users of any sense of ownership. And as a software developer, you no longer feel compelled to innovate, to improve, in order to convince users to upgrade. I for one hate renting things, I prefer ownership.
1) You're absolutely right: Pricing matters. If I charge you $10/mo for my app that sends you a text message every time there's a full moon, that would be way too expensive and you'd be well within your rights as a consumer to spend your money on something else. As far as I'm aware, Apple will not force you to subscribe to any apps.
2) "... subscriptions are immoral..." Bullshit. And you don't "own" software you buy and pay for once. Operating systems change. Companies and developers come and go. If you value a piece of software, then you value the developer and should desire that they maintain and improve the app.
What is moral is creating a system by which software developers can support themselves by creating products that are useful to the community. I'd say the App Store is currently broken in that regard (with a few high-profile exceptions). If popularizing subscription-based pricing will help fix that, I'm all in favor.
Subscriptions are immoral, but not for those reasons. It's an immoral business model because its success is based on bilking people -- cheating them into paying for 'service' when they don't want to.
The mechanism is simple: the slight inconvenience of cancellation prevents a huge number of users from cancelling as soon as they want to.
This is why getting your customers to set up automated and recurring payments is the pot of gold everybody wants (not just in software).
You don't have to intend to bilk people if you do subscriptions; it's inherent in your business model.
Try putting a confirmation screen in your app that makes the user press "Renew" each month before the app charges them again. That would move you toward the moral end of the spectrum, but it would gut your sales.
A $2 per month subscription, even if totally unneeded, is not something most busy people can find the time to deal with cancelling. Pretty soon a year has gone by and your "service" has provided zero value to them but you've ripped them off for $24.
(For clarity: I don't mean you personally, and also I do work in subscription-based software. I just don't have any illusions about it and it makes me feel icky.)
Quite obviously biased and overstated. Many subscription models have nothing to do with tricking people or making it hard to cancel and many customers of those continue to pay knowingly and willingly and appreciate the convenience of agreeing to this up-front instead of manually renewing multiple services each month. For example, my water provider. My Netflix subscription. You cannot just ignore this because it doesn't fit your model. The immorality is the trickery, not the subscription.
> many customers of those continue to pay knowingly and willingly and appreciate the convenience
Yes, I fully agree.
> Many subscription models have nothing to do with tricking people
I don't agree with this, at least for auto-renewing subscriptions; that's my point. Every piece of software sold on auto-renewing subscription has some significant number of subscribers (as a percentage of its total number of them) that don't actually want it.
That is true regardless of what the publisher intends or wants.
Obviously, the exact percentage will vary a great deal, depending on the product.
Water is an example of something where that percentage would be low — presumably, almost everybody wants their water to stay on.
Netflix, not so much; I myself once paid for Netflix for months, perhaps years, without using it once, and without wanting to keep it on "just in case". I was just too busy to cancel it the few times I thought of it (until I finally did).
Netflix is not on the sleazier side of the spectrum, though; it's quite easy to cancel.
There are, however, a lot more disgusting sleazy fuckers out there like the Wall Street Journal, MyFico.com, and Comcast, than there are Netflixes.
P.S.
As a bonus, here's my Second Law of Subscriptiodynamics:
The total difficulty in cancelling an isolated auto-renewing subscription always increases over time.
> I don't agree with this, at least for auto-renewing subscriptions; that's my point. Every piece of software sold on auto-renewing subscription has some significant number of subscribers (as a percentage of its total number of them) that don't actually want it.
Some SaaS providers make unused subscriptions free of charge (Slack AFAIR), others auto-cancel them after a period of inactivity. This obviously only works if the provider has knowledge of whether a subscription is used, but it shows that the flaw is not inherent with subscriptions.
Other than that: I have quite a couple of pieces of software that I bought at pretty much full price and never really used. Is that immoral as well?
Detecting non-use and waiving all charges in that case? That not only nullifies all moral/ethical/assholiness problems with the subscription model, it is practically heroic.
Why is it the company's responsibility to determine if a user "really wants it" or not? If the subscription is live, the assumption is that the service is desired. Personal accountability.
BTW, can I interest you in a franchise opportunity? We at "Veidr's Payday Loans" are always looking for local owner-operators who understand "personal accountability".
I don't understand your point. If you're incapable of cancelling a subscription...maybe you shouldn't be subscribing to things? But that's up to you, bro; don't count on others to do it for you.
> Try putting a confirmation screen in your app that makes the user press "Renew" each month before the app charges them again. That would move you toward the moral end of the spectrum, but it would gut your sales.
I like this experiment. If I had to bet, I think you're right that it would reduce revenue.
OTOH, to be fair, try this approach in the old-fashioned model... take the standard (large) transaction up front, offer a lifetime money-back guarantee (a very moral policy, to be sure), and then put a launch dialog in your app with two buttons: "Refund Now" and "Continue Using".
I predict one would also see reduced revenues by taking what could be considered moral high ground in the non-subscription model.
> your app with two buttons: "Refund Now" and "Continue Using".
I wonder if a service could actually function based on this idea. Sure, eventually all the initial money would be refunded but while you had it you profited by investing it in a fractional-reserve manner.
Your comment sounds a bit like all subscription based services only work because of people who never cancel their accounts. I'd say this is not true.
The pot of gold that everybody wants is not because people forget to cancel the subscription, but because you don't have to acquire new customers every single day. You can provide a good product to your "fan base" for years.
I can speak only from my experience in the B2C space with a 2 bucks a month product:
It's basically prepaid. Accounts will become inactive when the payment period ends. There is no automatic renewal. The reason is precisely, because I think this is the most transparent way.
It works, it pays me a decent salary and I get to maintain the software for a long time.
Indeed, nothing wrong with that. My comment pertains specifically to auto-renewing subscriptions. Which they overwhelmingly are, nowadays, but perhaps I should have been more precise.
It sounds like you're saying that a transaction is immoral if you judge that the buyer is paying more than the utility they are receiving. Of course, that requires you to be able to estimate a buyer's utility function better than the buyer, which is a pretty weak (even dangerous) foundation upon which to base moral arguments.
Nope, I am saying tons (tons!) of people don't get around to cancelling things they want to cancel, even if technically they can do it any time. Especially when each renewal is a small amount.
And I have seen some actual metrics on stuff I've worked on, where we can tell that they haven't used the software for months... but they are still paying. I know this goes on with other products too.
Perhaps "immoral" is an overstatement, but it's certainly a sleazy business model.
Subscriptions through the App Store are easy to cancel and you also get an email reminder when they're about to automatically renew. That reduces the sleaziness quite a bit, I think.
> It's an immoral business model because its success is based on bilking people -- cheating them into paying for 'service' when they don't want to.
I'm sure that happens. But when I buy an iPhone app for a fixed price, the incentive for the vendor is to make the app look fantastic at a first glance, and then to never fix any bugs or incompatibilities. Because why bother? Everyone who notices these problems has already paid, and getting a refund is even more troublesome than cancelling a subscription. How is that more moral? As a consumer, I generally prefer subscriptions for everything that I plan to use for a year or longer (which is most software).
We'll see how Apples interface will look like. With a centralized marketplace like this they have a perfect opportunity to build interfaces to work against this, the question is if they will. (e.g. nice overviews, options for time-limits, notifications for not-used subscriptions, ...)
Yes, this is something where Apple's own interests and the customer's might be aligned.
Even just having a central place to cancel subscriptions is significantly better than having to do it individually -- and Apple almost certainly won't allow developers to get too obnoxious with the 'customer retention' hoops we need to jump through to actually cancel.
> What is moral is creating a system by which software developers can support themselves by creating products that are useful to the community
Speaking as a developer - what kind of entitled, self-important thinking is this? No one owes developers a decent lifestyle or a liveable income. I can't wait till some idiot sells a subscription to a calculator or flashlight app - I say to them GTFO! The app 'industry' is not the first one to deal with product saturation, but somehow we do not have Dishwasher subscriptions (thank goodness).
> "... subscriptions are immoral..." Bullshit. And you don't "own" software you buy and pay for once. Operating systems change. Companies and developers come and go. If you value a piece of software, then you value the developer and should desire that they maintain and improve the app.
Sadly, all apps 1) non-consumable & non-perishable and 2) most apps are utilitarian and can't really be improved - if they could be, subscriptions wouldn't be necessary as developers would depend on people buying the improved versions as in every other. If Nike sold you an indestructible trainer (including non-wearing sole) that you could buy tomorrow, would you rather buy it outright or pay subscriptions in perpertuity?
> No one owes developers a decent lifestyle or a liveable income.
If the developer cannot make a living by creating an app (or any other piece of software for that matter), why would they bother creating it at all?
> If Nike sold you an indestructible trainer (including non-wearing sole) that you could buy tomorrow, would you rather buy it outright or pay subscriptions in perpertuity
This is not a great comparison. As was previously mentioned, software like requires updates to continue running correctly (new OS versions, bugs, etc) while a shoe does not require any changes or maintenance. If the shoe fits, then you wear it and that is that. You can do nothing to it and it will continue to work as a shoe forever (especially, if it is indestructible as in your example). However, if you paid once for a piece of software and then do nothing to it for a few years, the chance of it running correctly on your device is close to zero.
People should be paid for creating and maintaining software.
> If the developer cannot make a living by creating an app (or any other piece of software for that matter), why would they bother creating it at all?
If you're trying to make a living doing X, and you can't, then don't do it anymore. There are tens of thousands of apps that did not need to be made, yet were (no doubt the first step of someone's get-rich-quick scheme). If there is a need, the need will be met, eventually, by someone, and if it is truly a "need", people will be willing to pay money for it.
As others have mentioned, requiring updates to run correctly is actually a fault of the underlying system, and the change therein.
> People should be paid for creating and maintaining software.
This "should" is really nebulous. By whose standard/ethics? What belief system led you to believe that you were guaranteed to be paid for your work (software or otherwise)? You get paid when you sell something. You can create the shit out of lots of things and maintain lots of things, and not see a dime for your efforts. Software is no different -- you need to create something that will SELL and be profitable.
These two things do not go hand in hand. Creating and a necessity of maintenance are not necessarily the case. Remember when software used to be sold on CDs? You bought and were able to use the software for your given operating system, and for the given time that it had no bugs. There were no other guarantees, and I don't think there should be today.
If something in your app breaks, release an update and either release it for free, or charge for it. There is no need for me to pay you forever -- your certainly won't be releasing updates forever.
It's obvious why companies want to move everyone to this model though -- much easier to setup recurring incomes, and once it's ingrained in the culture, people won't remember a time when you bought a piece of software and you actually owned it.
Maybe this will be a chance for F/OSS to make a resurgence? Once people get tired of paying for Office 365 and their Flappy Bird subscription, they'll start looking for software that they can truly own
I like your customer-oriented point of view. Because ultimately, it's not about the developer, but about the customer. A few points I want to add though:
> As others have mentioned, requiring updates to run correctly is actually a fault of the underlying system, and the change therein.
Theoretically yes, but this changed from the customer perspective as well. Whereas a few years ago, it was a sign of quality software that no updates were required, it's now a sign of an app that is unmaintained. No updates is a negative signal and thus, updates are mandatory to be perceived as high quality software and to a certain extend, to prevent 1-star reviews.
> If there is a need, the need will be met, eventually, by someone, and if it is truly a "need", people will be willing to pay money for it.
"If there is a need, the need will be met, eventually." Period. The rest of the sentence isn't always true. People aren't necessarily willing to pay money for it and there are other revenue streams ("pay with your data").
> As was previously mentioned, software like requires updates to continue running correctly (new OS versions, bugs, etc)
.. not really? There are only so many bugs to fix (and are they really significant enough to be a major hindrance anyway?), and bit rot is a platform problem, not an application problem.
And even then, shouldn't users be able to choose whether the "upgrade" is worth it?
They do get to choose whether the upgrade is worth it. They can stay on an old version and system that it works with, or they can move to an app that has a business model they like better. Subscriptions are adding options, and that's great.
It's a temporary option though. As soon as you need to restore a new device and you don't keep the apps backup, you will get the latest version. If I were to bet, I'd say not many people keep a backup of their current apps' versions.
The problem with subscriptions is that it allows the app maker to potentially not maintain and improve their app while still earning money.
I've been employed by companies (who I've now left) where the management explicitly wanted to move to subscription for this reason: not having to keep adding new features to get customers to buy new versions. (apps were desktop software).
That's not to say subscription doesn't make sense - but it's not a complete win for everyone.
Yeah, that's what's nice about IntelliJ products. You can stop subscribing and are left with a perpetual license for the current version you are on. It provides protection for the stagnation issue you are talking about.
Last I heard, IntelliJ actually gave you a perpetual license for the version 12 months behind the current one when you stopped subscribing - with no guarantee it'd even open your current project files. See https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/18/final-update-on-t...
> You can stop subscribing and are left with a perpetual license for the current version you are on
Yeah, we (IntelliJ subscribers) had to fight[1] for that[2]: before there was an outcry, JetBrains had planned to brick[3] your IDE the moment your subscription lapsed.
This is the one thing that sold me on recently switching to one of their products. I absolutely refuse to pay Adobe's subscription because I don't get a perpetual license ever.
The other issue with Adobe's shift to subscriptions that upset many is that you absolutely did not need a subscription for Lightroom and Photoshop for most users. The small incremental changes were not needed by many, and if a new feature came along worth paying for they would upgrade. This was very forced.
Sure, charge a subscription for Creative Cloud but taking software that worked fine without a subscription, tacking one on under the guise of perpetual updates and killing access if they stop paying stinks of doing what is best for the business, not what is best for the customers.
This x1000. Just because a piece of software has a subscription does not mean that you automatically lose access to that software if you stop paying. The developer of the software can choose to handle a cancellation any way (s)he deems appropriate. They could cut you off entirely, or they could leave you on the version you have forever with full access, or they could remove features which rely on their servers, or......
On the other hand, the problem with making money from selling upgrades is that it encourages the app maker to bloat their software with useless features to justify the price of the new version.
Operating systems change, and companies/developers come and go, but not all software really needs ongoing maintenance, and some of it really can work indefinitely. I still have DOS games I legally purchased in the 1990s that run fine today. Why shouldn't that be true of mobile games? If the company stops updating the game, fine, but I should still be able to play it in 5 years if I bought it. Or at least, legally be able to; if it stops working for technical reasons, fair enough. I think the shift away from that is more to do with business models than technology— even book publishers have been trying to move from a sale to rental model.
Funny you mention DOS games, which are one of my earliest examples of bit-rot. A lot of them stopped working with win95/98, and the rest are gone with 64-bit windows. DOS Box can help but there was a period of time when computers were too slow to emulate a DOS machine quickly enough.
> Funny you mention DOS games, which are one of my earliest examples of bit-rot
The other option is bit-rot and some form of DRM (the only way to enforce subscription) which would make playing the games an impossibility, even with emulators. It's clear to me the non-subscription/non-DRM option is the better one: even with subscriptions, no publisher will last forever.
Most of my DOS software ran fine on a Windows XP laptop in 2003 (sometimes with the addition of VDMSound to handle FM synthesis emulation). That same laptop will run most of the remainder quickly enough in Dosbox.
I've also got a desktop with tech mostly circa 2000. It's got DOS and Windows 98 on it. Among my collection, I haven't found anything that I can't get to run.
The hole that I see is during the time shortly after Dosbox's release when its compatibility with software would've been low and before they optimized for speed. It'd be closed up somewhat if we could send the current Dosbox source code back to 2002 ;-)
Me, Personally? I have a Pentium 3 desktop running Windows 98, with a GeForce 4 video card. It's also got a Sound Blaster 16 video card. I consider it my machine to cover an era from the 80s to about 2002, when I can't run the software anywhere else. Actually, I mentioned that machine in my last post.
An example piece of software: Rayman 2. I had trouble running it under Windows XP, 7, and Wine in Linux. It won't run in a VM because it requires (I think) DirectX 7 and hardware acceleration. It's a flawed example, though: it's had a few re-releases, including a compatibility fix by GOG for modern Windows versions.
A more recent example: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. It'll run on more recent versions of Windows, but has trouble with having over 2GB of RAM (or was it 4?) available. Some lovely group logged the system calls and developed a binary patch to allow it to run on modern systems. This illustrates another option: banding together as a community and doing what the publisher won't (or can't).
A lot of the posts in this thread (including yours) seem to elevate convenience to the level of a technical requirement. At some high-90s percentage of coverage, that isn't a problem for old software. Every once in a while though, you have to do the inconvenient thing.
Immoral or not, what is being said is: If I were to buy software X and place it on a box I control, without access to the internet, I expect it -- and its bugs -- to work forever. Ruling out time issues (y2k or similar), I expect notepad.exe (for example) or grep to work forever. I can extract from it all the use I am able to.
> If you value a piece of software, then (...)
No. Just no. If I value X, I value X. Don't try to con me into doing something else. It is "I value X because something.", not "I value X because I want something else to happen in the future." (in this case, maintain and improve the app). I may want to donate, or buy future products from the same developer, just so I can support him. But if I just value X, no further action is implied.
> As far as I'm aware, Apple will not force you to subscribe to any apps.
True. In the same way nobody will force you to pay taxes. You are not forced to pay taxes. But you are punished if you don't. You are not forced to use this app model, but you are punished if you don't. (if the current model of buying apps completely migrates to a subscription based one).
>> Apple will not force you to subscribe to any apps
No, but if the marketplace shifts to 90% of developers using subscriptions in their apps (essentially replacing the existing in-app purchases model), then it was facilitated by Apple as the "preferred" model for monetization.
I'm in the same boat as others in the comments. I am willing to pay a subscription for the 2-3 pieces of software that are absolutely core to my daily habits. Beyond those precious few apps, no developer deserves a monthly subscription from me - and they will never suck one out of me. I'm sorry, but too many solo developers think that creating a single app should earn them a $200k/year salary. I've known a couple of these people who think that a single app they worked on for 3 months should set them up for lifetime retirement. The expectations are unreal, and will never be fulfilled no matter the monetization scheme used.
And if the marketplace shifts to 90% subscription apps and users don't want to pay it, then you'll see the marketplace shift again. We may not see it from our perspective, but the pay-once model is not sustainable for many apps - either they'll lose you, or you'll lose them.
>> if users don't want to pay it, then you'll see the marketplace shift again
My pessimistic opinion is that within Apple's walled garden, the consumers don't get to choose. If the majority of apps go the subscription route, they will succeed because there is no alternative. Average users won't stop paying because it's subscription; in the grand scheme of things, I suspect my refusal to go along with that model puts me in the minority.
I'm a huge fan of Apple hardware/software, but the App Store is not something I ever expect to operate on a set of ideals I agree with. The day they came out with in-app purchases, I figured the days of a model designed for someone like me will never happen.
I run a niche B2C SaaS with a monthly fee. This lets me maintain the product for a long time. If it was a one-off payment, I probably could've closed shop by now. Thing is, all niche products with tiny markets (say, a few hundred or a few thousand users) won't be able to survive in the long run without subscriptions.
Anything *aaS is a perfect candidate for subscription. Most other things aren't. Why should you pay recurring fee for what can easily run on your local machine? On the other hand, the $1 price on AppStore for most apps is ridiculously low.
The line is somewhat arbitrary between SaaS and self-hosted. How many software products must truly be SaaS from an infrastructure point of view? Few I'd say. But there are other advantages of SaaS, for both customer and developer: No installation required, no updates to install, easier to maintain from a developer perspective.
The hosting cost are virtually nonexistent. I pay 150 bucks a month for a server which handles thousands of users. I don't understand why you'd call this a mess. It's a win-win in my case, since I serve a tiny niche which currently wouldn't be provided with a good solution at all if it wasn't for my subscription based software.
At some point, done is done. If you can't get users to buy your upgrades anymore, then that might be a sign that it's time to move on?
It's pretty crazy that people expect to be able to pay themselves indefinitely from charging the same people repeatedly without any improvements to show for it.
Only if the rest of the ecosystem doesn't move. If the OS stays the same, APIs, platforms, and the hardware. Then yes, you're eventually done.
See, I guess a lot of this discussion stems from what specific examples people have in their mind. Yes, there is obviously software that is done at some point, that doesn't require updates, that can be run forever and is good enough for most people.
And there's software that is essentially useless after a few years if you don't upgrade to the newest version.
Offering paid upgrades or providing a SaaS are often the same thing, with slightly different billing schedules. Try to use Microsoft Word 2000 in 2016. The software you bought once and "owned" is of no use in 2016, where businesses email .docx files around. I think software ownership is a myth. Almost every product comes with a best-before date.
I think the market will reflect precisely this. Some apps will keep one-off-pricing, because it fits the nature of the app. Other apps will use subscriptions. If a subscription-based app doesn't provide enough value to its users, someone will come, make a better product with a lower price point and that's it.
> It's pretty crazy that people expect to be able to pay themselves indefinitely from charging the same people repeatedly without any improvements to show for it.
I agree, but my assumption is that the software gets continuously improved, because that's what's expected. If software is subscription-based and doesn't appear to be maintained, people will complain and stop using the service.
> And you don't "own" software you buy and pay for once.
What else could ownership possibly mean at that point?
The thing that's missing from the app store isn't subscriptions, it's service contracts.
* I go down to the store and buy a toaster -- I now own that toaster. Now I don't expect the toaster to last forever, but if the toaster breaks or simply stops functioning after a year I have both contractual and legal recourse to have my toaster replaced or refunded.
* When I buy a Windows license I know that I am paying for a guaranteed X years of support.
* If I buy an app I'm paying for... well that's the thing, I don't really know. Some apps it's indefinite, some apps it's until the VC funding runs out, some apps it's until the dev is bored with the project, etc.. Worse, since apps are all thin clients now when that support ends the app is useless.
> What is moral is creating a system by which software developers can support themselves...
Don't kid yourself, no morality went into this decision from Apple's side or any Dev that chooses this monetization path. This is about what people think they can get away with.
I think the central point worth debating is this: A customer has a reasonable expectation that a one time purchase guarantees them that an app will continue to function and be maintained^1 for either the lifetime of the service or the lifetime of the device on which it runs^2.
^1 Not necessarily any new features, just continuing to function.
^2 Depending on whether the app is a service or not.
Regardless of whatever semantic "morality" you're going on about, this guy is an example of a lost customer. His money won't be going to your "favor" and it does no one a service if no one is buying it.
The way I look at it is you own the app like you own an apartment but you're paying homeowners association fee to keep the grass trimmed, pathways painted and the pool maintained.
> I for one hate renting things, I prefer ownership.
I applaud your idealism, but with this attitude, you might as well not buy any apps at all. When you buy an app, or TV show, or pretty much anything digital in 2016, you're purchasing a license, not the thing itself. You don't "own" anything.
Even if you can download the app you buy in 2016 in 5 years from now, what are the odds that it still works on whatever operating system is still available, on your 2016 hardware? What good is ownership when you can't even use what you own?
I expect everything on my phone to be throw-away, beyond the life of that specific device (with the possible exception of the things that I've got as apk's and can sideload). I expect a thing on my PC to be available as some form of install medium that I'll have free access to while the service it came from is still running, and that I'll be able to install from that medium when the service goes defunct. The exception to this is most games...but I only pay prices similar to what I would've to rent it from Blockbuster for a couple days, so I don't feel to bad about the long term rental.
I pay subscriptions for a few TV-related things (Netflix+Amazon for me, DirecTv for the wife). If I really expect to want to watch the shows at some point in the future, I'll buy a copy. If I buy them, it's on a medium that I can format-shift at my convenience and get to run on arbitrary devices (which usually means DVD and the subset of Blurays with released keys).
> What good is ownership when you can't even use what you own?
I've never run into this in a practical sense, but it's an excellent point in the theoretical one. I keep around enough old hardware and software to make it a non-issue.
Fair enough. I suppose as long as there are mainstream high quality non-digital alternatives then we should take those. I agree nothing I have digital rights to is "owned" by me.
It's not like asking "ah don't like coal or nuclear power? Go live in a cave."
> ore importantly, subscriptions are immoral because the end result is robbing users of any sense of ownership. And as a software developer, you no longer feel compelled to innovate, to improve, in order to convince users to upgrade. I for one hate renting things, I prefer ownership.
Sure as long as you also accept that you are not owed bug fixes it updates. If you however believe that with system upgrades you should get corresponding app upgrades, then it starts to sound more like a service. I like subscription because I want developers to treat this as a service: support, fixes, features, etc.
> Sure as long as you also accept that you are not owed bug fixes it updates.
"Bug fixes" and "updates" are both too broad. If a feature is broken enough that an advertised feature of the software doesn't work, or in the case of something criminally negligent on the developer's part, I'd consider myself entitled to an update to fix the issue. Either that or a refund for whatever amount I paid for the app (or potentially damages, if I could prove them negligent).
New features and functional changes should be available as an upgrade, perhaps with a discount over buying a new copy of the software.
I'd expect the app not to break over minor OS updates, but major versions changes are always a less predictable.
> I'd consider myself entitled to an update to fix the issue. Either that or a refund
If a company publishes an app and then goes out of business, and then years later the platform shifts out from under that app such that it no longer works, do you feel like you deserve a refund? If so, who do you expect to pay? The platform gave your money to the developer; the developer ceased to exist. Neither one has "your" money any more.
I'm not talking about years later. I'm talking about an immediately obvious shortcoming that manifests on the platform supported by the product at the time of purchase.
If I buy it and they're out of business 5 minutes later, then I guess I should've been paying more attention to who I give my money to.
I think you've got it backwards. Adobe supported running CS6 on various platforms. The platforms weren't (and aren't) the ones doing the support.
At this point, no one supports CS6. The fact that you can use it on some particular desktop platform is partially a consequence of their past support, and partially because the platform hasn't "shifted out from under" the application yet.
> At this point, no one supports CS6. The fact that you can use it on some particular desktop platform is partially a consequence of their past support, and partially because the platform hasn't "shifted out from under" the application yet.
I don't think that reflects reality. I would suggest taking a look at the internals of AppKit and other critical paths, you'll discover they are very aware of the applications linking into them.
There aren't many Apps that can save you $1000 a year because there is no money to make them, because people aren't buying $100 software packages on the AppStore.
> More importantly, subscriptions are immoral because the end result is robbing users of any sense of ownership.
I don't know why people allowed this transition from software ownership to subscription to happen (although they really weren't given the choice). It's ridiculous that the customer is giving away his MS Office ownership in exchange for the marginal improvements that MS has been doing in the last couple of releases.
Most people here on HN (me included) would benefit from this development but I agree with you: subscriptions are immoral.
PS: IntelliJ IDEA it's great but it is ridiculously expensive imho.
IntelliJ IDEA is crazy cheap if you're being paid as a software developer or have developers on your payroll.
I wish there was more software like it that can just instantly make all my developers more effective. The cost is so minuscule compared to what it actually costs to keep a developer's butt in the chair, I'd be a complete idiot to try to save a few bucks on the tools they use.
I can make anything look cheap if I compare it with something substantially more expensive but that isn't the point. I think it is expensive because after shelling that amount I end up without a copy of the software that I can call my own.
It started with corporations. It's far "cheaper"—in how things appear on a balance-sheet—for corporations to subscribe to services, than it is for them to buy software at retail. "Convert CapEx to OpEx" is the keyword-phrase to chase for this. It's the same reason hardware sellers like Apple have leasing programs: they're mainly for corporations, and just coincidentally there for individuals.
Do note that the big conversions to SaaS models in recent years—Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office 365, etc.—are of products where 90+% of the revenue already came from corporate buyers rather than from individual consumer licenses. That the SaaS model also does something-or-other to drive consumer income is cute, but kind of irrelevant to the product managers who are making these business-model decisions.
It's expensive if after shelling out that amount I still don't own the software. I wouldn't complain if I could pay a onetime $500-$600 if in the end I at least owned a copy.
Yes, I have subscriptions for IntelliJ IDEA, for Dropbox, for FastMail and for a DigitalOcean VPS. All these are producing money for me. But the list ends here. Because here's the thing: $5/month here, $10/month there and pretty soon we're talking about serious money. Not only that, but as soon as you stop paying for whatever reason (eg temporary financial problems) you're out.
Of course, with our oversized salaries, we stop noticing that $5/month for a passwords app is actually expensive. And that's actually a good example because a passwords app at least has some utility.
More importantly, subscriptions are immoral because the end result is robbing users of any sense of ownership. And as a software developer, you no longer feel compelled to innovate, to improve, in order to convince users to upgrade. I for one hate renting things, I prefer ownership.