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.
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.)