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by abhinav22
1693 days ago
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It’s hard because subscription services hit a sweet spot in human psychology - cheap on a monthly basis so many are happy (can you go back to paying 400$ for software unless it’s something you are 100% guaranteed to want and use for a long time), and expensive in the long run so businesses are happy (also recurring stable revenues) It’s unfortunate, but I don’t see a reversal any time soon. If I was a developer I would also want to do subscription based services, would you (put yourself in the shoes of someone running a software company)? It’s criminal how many times I have paid for Microsoft Office though. |
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In the case of some SaaS tools I pay for (like Todoist), I don't resent the model because I've seen steady improvements and the cost is low enough relative to the value I feel like I get. If they increased the price more than ~20%, I would probably cancel and use an alternative.
Netflix is different; I actually don't watch much content and would happily live without it, but it appears to be good enough value during the times I do use it, particularly given that I'm well aware of how expensive their products are to create in the first place.
The problems with reMarkable here are two-fold. Firstly, the existence of any subscription is problematic when the device has such a high up-front cost. Secondly, the prices they have chosen far exceed the value their "extra" services can offer. If they had priced it at $12 per year I would have probably grumbled but accepted it. By $24 we are around my personal tipping point where I think they are being unreasonable and I want to get out of the ecosystem. The real price of around $96 is totally absurd and makes me actively root against the company, at least enough to write these long comments and post them into the void.