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gordaco | 3 years ago

I'm a very, very firm believer on not paying for "subscription" to software. New content, I can understand (I spend about 40€ monthly on several Patreons, mostly comic artists; and I have a couple news subscriptions as well), although I still hate music/tv subscriptions and I don't want Netflix, Spotify or whatever. But for software, no matter how useful it is, I just refuse to choose between an unbounded price and the possibility of losing it because I don't want to keep paying. For the record, I don't have any problems paying, say, 400€ for Mathematica and things like that (in fact, I haven't pirated anything in a very long time). But I paid once and I can use the software as much as I want without paying again.

For me, it's not about the amount of money, but the peace of mind (no additional bills, no additional shit to renew when I my debit card expires, and most important, I don't need to engage in any bullshit cancellation process). In the rare cases where both a subscription and a single payment is offered, I've done the math and from time to time I actually estimate that I'll spend less money on the subscription (although normally it's the other way around, of course), but even in these cases, I prefer paying upfront. I hate that this is becoming less and less available.

discuss

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DavideNL|3 years ago

Yea, i also refuse subscriptions for the same reasons, and always buy one-time purchases when possible. I’ve been spending less money on software the past years because of this, simply because i don’t buy the software at all anymore (example: Tweetbot);

By the way, I really like this subscription model by Due:

"When you purchase Due, you unlock every feature today, including any new features that will be introduced in the next one year [.....] The Upgrade Pass is an optional subscription that unlocks features permanently, even after the subscription lapses. Any feature unlocked remains available to you forever."

https://dueapp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360053244591-Wh...

yourMadness|3 years ago

Would you use a service that converts subscriptions into one time purchases at 20x the yearly subscription cost?

hoherd|3 years ago

20x? No. But I paid way more than the annual subscription cost ($40/yr) for a perpetual license of plex pass ($120 for life), so in general, yes.

This was also the case for everybody who had bought a perpetual license for Adobe products and then did not subscribe to them when they switched to a subscription model.

matwood|3 years ago

I think a more reasonable multiple would be 5x. The problem you'll run into is that people who complain want the cheap subscription price and perpetual access.

gordaco|3 years ago

I'm not sure that twenty times the yearly price would look like a reasonable price, but if it's software I actually want, I might agree. I would weigh that price against the functionality of the software, ignoring whether there is a subscription model. As I said, I'm not beyond paying a three-digit sum for software I like (and Mathematica is the first example that came to mind, but not the only one).

Someone|3 years ago

Only the provider of that service can provide that, and not even completely.

Third parties promising it would still be at the whim of the original provider. If they shut down the service, what would that third party do to fulfill their promise to you?

What we need is open, documented protocols for internet-connected hardware and escrow for pure internet services, with a guarantee to open source if the original provider shuts down their servers.

The latter will be difficult to enforce. The service provider could, instead of shutting down the service, just raise prices to something above absurd, and then shut down once all customers are gone.

jwommack|3 years ago

There’s a reason they stopped selling Photoshop in non-subscription when the pricing difference was something like this.

$699 vs $49/mo. Now maybe $20/mo since they no longer force bundling and have lower cost feature restricted versions.

The math was easy at the time because you’d break even in 2 years with the old price. Now it’d be like 4 but plenty of users were on CS2 for 6 or so.

Since 12x is your 1 year break even rate it’s not too unreasonable. Especially if you’re not upgrading it ever year.

sorrychuck|3 years ago

Is this a thing you’ve seen? Really cool idea!

I doubt many would actually use it because complainers on HN aren’t average users, and the number of months you’d have to prepay would likely be quite high to actually make it make sense for the businesses involved.

But still, if you could make a business reselling monthly subs as 1-off purchases, it would be pretty dang cool!