[lawtalkinghuman]

> you'll slowly get dependent on things that will eventually break in ways you will have no capacity to fix

If the commercial provider charging you $10 a month breaks it, you also have no capacity to fix it.

Your options are: send them an email, or unsubscribe and use something else.

[hahahahhaah]

Right but most of the time, in my experience they keep the lights on.

[lawtalkinghuman]

Keeping the lights on is fine.

But if they remove a feature I rely on, I can't put it back.

If they add a feature I hate, I can't remove it.

If they jack the price up, I have no real solution to this.

If they move features I rely on from the standard tier to the 5x more expensive pro tier, I have no real solution to this.

Why, yes, this is an echo of the old argument for open source software.

[pixl97]

Yep. At one point I expected the software I needed to work for a reasonable time range, possibly up to a decade. Best if you could buy it once and use it from then on.

Now crap has turned into revenue sucking subscriptions, at most yearly licensing, feature flutter. And the worst is being bought up by VC/PE and milked for anything useful and thrown away.

[withinboredom]

> Now crap has turned into revenue sucking subscriptions

So much this. Each subscription is literally a small percentage of your revenue. You can't reinvest it ... it's just gone. Hopefully it enables more productivity ... but most likely, it is only marginal.