[speak_plainly]

Thinking about customer support as a ‘differentiator’ or a way to drive profit is depressing. You should simply strive to do what’s best for your customers. The sort of feedback you’re getting is golden and in the right hands can be put to use rather than be dismissed. Assuming that people who disagree with your pricing model just don’t understand how business works is really telling. You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.

Your support strategy is missing an outlet for needy users to ask questions, effectively blaming customers for a structural flaw in your own setup. You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other and devs can occasionally jump in to help or note pain points. Furthermore, your development and QA processes clearly need scrutiny. The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.

It’s completely okay to define your product however you want and to reject feature requests, but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.

[michaelt]

> You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.

And for some subscription situations, you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you.

There's a 'PhotoSync' app that offers a premium option for either $1/month or $24 for life. Presumably because they looked at the average subscription duration and found it was in the region of 2 years. Modulo the time value of money and per-transaction processing costs.

Personally I much preferred the one-off purchase, even though it's not clear I'll be using the app in 24 months, because it fits a lot better with my (somewhat chaotic) way of managing my money.

[jwr]

> you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you

There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions. You can't go to a local bakery and pay $24 for life to get fresh rolls every day.

Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.

[jbstack]

> there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions

This is clearly incorrect given that there are plenty of software developers who offer lifetime purchases. In fact there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of.

On a lower level, all that matters is the numbers. If your average customer stays subscribed for 24 months, then charging a lifetime fee equal to 24 months is equivalent to a subscription model. At that point it's irrelevant what's "sustainable" since 24 months is the max you can expect to charge on average anyway.

[feoren]

> there are plenty of software developers who offer lifetime purchases. In fact there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of.

There's a big difference between software you buy, run on your computer, and don't expect to be constantly updated, vs. an online service that you expect to stay up and serve you new content forever. In the latter case, if a customer drops off after 24 months, that lowers your costs. You can't reasonably charge a user for the number of months they could potentially remain subscribed.

[bluGill]

Software was always a subscription you bought version two then version three... It wasn't obviously or explicitly a subscription but it still was one.

[jbstack]

That isn't the same thing at all.

If I buy version 2 then it's mine and I can continue to use it for as long as I want, if I'm happy with the feature set. I can ignore version 3 or choose to buy it. If I buy it then I now own two products instead of one. Sometimes the older version might even be better (e.g. features I like have been removed or made worse).

With a subscription model I'm forced to pay again and again even if I'm perfectly happy with version 2.

[bluGill]

In theory you are correct but realistically you will upgrade.

[true_religion]

We like to think of physical products as one offs where what you buy tomorrow is the same as what you buy today.

But I have run a bakery for 5 years, and you get better day by day, you introduce new techniques, find different flours, optimize bake times for fluffiness, crispiness, and taste. The croissants we make today are much better than what we made during our first month.

We improved our product just like how software improves, but we did it without a croissant subscription, but by selling its own version as its own thing day by day.

What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited. In the physical world, we have wear and tear, or in the case of croissants, decomposition or consumption which limit customers from using the same product forever.

Can the same not be found for many software products?

To use iOS as an example, the OPs app Castro charges for night mode, but night mode via OS controls didn’t always exist in iOS so a theoretical Castro v1 could have been released without before it, and v2 would include that new feature. Or when inevitably, v1 no longer works on new iOS versions, people would have to upgrade.

[angiolillo]

> What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited... Can the same not be found for many software products?

Some of the enterprise software I've worked on has an option that functions this way. You pay for a specific version which is supported for a few years. You can keep using it forever but if you want to keep getting security updates or live support then you'll have to buy a newer version that is still in its support window.

Having said that, it seems like most businesses seem to prefer subscriptions.

[dabluck]

We don't charge for night mode. I don't really think versioning would work very well for us, many have tried, but I do agree Apple should facilitate other business models like this in a better way.

[true_religion]

On https://castro.fm/

It says Castro plus has advanced features, side loading, night mode, icons and more.

If you don’t charge for it, then highlighting it as part of the Plus package is confusing.

[michaelt]

> There is no such price

If it’s sustainable at $1/month, and a customer is willing to prepay $1200 for a 100 year subscription, that sounds sustainable to me.

[Uvix]

It’s sustainable at $1/month at current costs, but those costs will go up over time. The subscription price could be raised accordingly but they can’t go back and ask for an inflation adjustment from people who bought it.

[Grombobulous]

Technically you could invest the money that hasn’t been used to cover the lifetime user’s costs.

Even leaving it in a the right checking account, it’ll earn interest.

[jwr]

But that's a gamble! That's exactly my point. Someone is betting on something. How long the customer will stay, how long the software will be maintained and available, etc.

[michaelt]

Everything in business is a gamble.

Maybe tomorrow my competitor will aggressively cut prices. Maybe the product line I've spent money developing won't sell well. Maybe that new machine I've invested in won't be as productive as the marketing materials promised. Maybe bad weather will mean my customers stay home instead of visiting my shop. Maybe a war on the other side of the planet will raise my material costs and empty my customers' wallets. Maybe the artist headlining my music festival won't be allowed to enter the country. Maybe 10 years into its 50 year life my nuclear power plant will be undercut by falling costs for solar. Maybe Google will make the thing my app does a native feature of their OS. Maybe we pushed the envelope too far or didn't test thoroughly enough and we'll be buried in warranty claims.

This risk is why investments in businesses pay more than treasury bonds.

If you aren't comfortable with that, entrepreneurship might not be right for you - nothing wrong with being an employee and getting the certainty of a monthly salary.

[mrguyorama]

When I go to a bakery and buy a roll of bread, some of the money I pay the bakery will be squirreled away for future purchases, improvements to the business, expansions, cover lean times, etc.

That margin is called profit and has been the standard way every single business ever has managed ongoing expenses outside of per-transaction costs forever.

Despite this "Gamble", businesses continue to function every day. Some fail, but that is a purposely designed part of the market. If you cannot forecast your costs and revenue, you are supposed to go out of business.

It's funny that only in the world of Tech, the supposedly magical world where you can do so much with so little and one individual can "Build" something used by millions, that suddenly customers have to bear the burden of the business's inability to forecast costs and profit.

What, do you also expect me to tip you when I download?

Keep in mind that the vast vast majority of software subscriptions do not let you continue using the product you have paid for when your subscription lapses, even when the product gets no more support!

[angiolillo]

> There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions

Such a price clearly exists -- in an extreme case you could charge 50x your annual subscription price and invest it with a 2% yield to get the equivalent of your subscription as interest. More realistically, if you are already considering taking on debt to grow your business it can make financial sense to offer lifetime licenses that are equivalent to several years' worth of subscription revenue to get an influx of up-front liquidity. Of course as your needs change so will your ratio of subscription-to-purchase price and this may result in a purchase price that is too high for your customers to consider, but the number always exists.

> Every one-time price is a gamble

True, but so are subscription prices! Either way, as the person who sets the prices, you are well-positioned to pick ones that are most likely to be successful.

[zmgsabst]

$1/day forever is around $9125 using the safe drawdown rate of 4% per year.

So if you’re a bakery and a customer offers $9000+ for a fresh roll every day forever, you should almost certainly take them up on that offer. A smart baker could probably get that number sub-$5000, but you’ll always come out okay around 25x the yearly cost (in this case, $365).

Similarly, if the amortized yearly cost of a customer is $12 (ie, $1 per month), then a $300 forever price is financially indistinguishable from a permanent subscription. (Actually, better: time value of money, they can’t cancel the annuity you buy, etc.)

So there always is a price where that is financially viable.

[drdec]

> the safe drawdown rate of 4% per year

IIRC this rate is based on some standard retirement length (like 30 years), not forever.

[swiftcoder]

> Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.

The gambling goes both ways. Your $1 subscription price is betting that you can convince each user to keep on paying that subscription forever, their $24 lifetime price is betting that customers are going to churn after a year on average.

Your gamble is perhaps slightly safer, in the sense that if subscriptions fall so too do the ongoing costs. But there is a floor to costs (i.e. you need to keep paying your team), so both approaches are pretty dependent on the sales funnel bringing in new subscribers

[PaulHoule]

I remember an article in Byte magazine circa 1982 or so which talked about how the software business sucks because it goes like

(1) Raise capital and spend a year developing a product

(2) Release the product, make a certain amount of money, then revenue dries up

(3) Pay yourself a bit and feed the rest of the money into develop version 2.0

(4) A year later it is struggle to sell version 2.0 because you're not just competing with applications from other people you are competing with your old 1.0, your most satisfied customers might be the least likely to upgrade

And that assumes development for 2.0 goes according to plan! As a software developer who gets a paycheck my life is easier working on a subscription based project my life is easier because management is not facing a financial crisis because a project is running a few months late.

As a customer though I often like paying ahead and I've been through a few cycles like this with Plex. Like I see the lifetime offering from Plex and I have the money now and it looks like a good deal... Then two years later they come up with something that really alienates me (that FAST service) and I hate being pushed into something I want nothing to deal with. So I go to Jellyfin and it is a godawful mess that I never get working quite right, just watching a movie with family and friends becomes an exercise in humiliation.

And I'm thinking... I don't have the option of exit [1] because I can't cancel my Plex pass! If on the other hand I was paying for a monthly subscription they are motivated to care what I think [2]

Now funny I had this summer when I was trying to gentle a stray cat [3] in a room in the other house and wound up watching a lot of Tubi, came to the conclusion FAST wasn't so bad, switched back to Plex, got a monthly subscription, and I am highly satisfied.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model

[2] I hate to be this way but when I have trouble w/ amazon I write to [e-mail] and point out that it makes no sense to screw me for $20 because I have a say in at least $2M NPV of AWS cloud spending, when you consider a Prime subscription and how much an ordinary person could buy from AMZN in a lifetime, AMZN has a tremendous amount to lose from "exit"

[3] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/bobb

[vladms]

Depends though what you pay for the one-time price. You can pay an offline version of the application (no extra costs afterwards), or a limited period of SaaS application updates (let's say 3 years).

I agree that paying a one time price and expecting continuos updates and new features is not reasonable.

[jbstack]

For the majority of software I use, I don't really care about continuous upgrades and new features, as long as it works with the feature set I signed up for.

A great example for me is the Xodo app on Android. It's by far the best PDF editor that I've found on Android, particularly for annotating with a digital pen. Some features are locked. If I want to unlock them, it's $5 a month. I get nothing out of that which isn't already in the app. I'm happy to pay a one-off fee for the work the developers have done up to that point. I'm definitely not happy to add another $5 a month to my pile of subscriptions.

For me the boundary is this: (1) If I get something of value every month (e.g. use of a cloud server, or something which obviously needs regular updating like Netflix) -> subscription justified; (2) If I just want to use what I can already see in the app -> very unlikely I'll ever subscribe unless the product is absolutely essential to me and there are no competitors.

A good example of the latter is Skritter. I don't care about new functionality, but there literally isn't another app which can do what it does, so I pay the subscription.

[Grombobulous]

As you have demonstrated with this comment, customers don’t really understand that there’s no such thing as “the product is done and costs are no longer incurred” even if the product is 100% done, and this is especially true on commercial app stores.

It costs $99/year to keep your app on the Apple App Store. Stop paying and all apps are delisted.

It costs $5/month to maintain a business phone line (Apple needs a phone number)

It costs $10/month for a mail forwarding service (or else Apple will publish your home address)

It costs ~$100/year to maintain an LLC.

A developer must buy a new Mac every 10-12 years or so just to maintain basic OS support (we can call that ~$50 a year for a MacBook Neo, but if you want your code compile to not be painful you’ll probably grab a MacBook Pro).

Domain name? $15/year. Business email, $10/year.

[dghlsakjg]

Yep. Businesses have overhead.

There are plenty of businesses that have all that overhead and still sell things instead of subscriptions.

Flip this argument around: you go buy a rake at the hardware store. They tell you they need to charge $5 a month for as long as you want to use it since they have to pay for a phone and website, no apple fee, but their city business license is more than that, etc.

Precisely no one will take that deal. If the store wants to stay in business they must continue to sell more products. It’s not my responsibility to keep paying them for a product so they can have a phone line.

If you are selling an app that has a service backing it or are providing support and updates, fine. Try to sell it as a subscription. If you are selling an app that runs entirely on my device? Version it. If you want me to pay for your overhead of continued development, create a new version that has something I would want to pay for.

[mrguyorama]

You think that's bad? You should see what the hole in the wall food place pays for rent every single month. They still don't require a subscription for their service.

None of that applies to Android, and it only applies to Apple because we have such abysmal regulation in the modern era, where you apparently aren't allowed to regulate business that happens with a computer for some reason.

[simiones]

The biggest tension between software and one-off purchases is related to bugfixing, and especially security. It makes sense that you don't expect new features for a product that you paid for once. But, what is the case with bugs? If the product mostly does what it promised to do, but sometimes crashes, do you expect those crashes to be fixed for your version, or not? What it you're using a 10-year old version and a new critical (say, unauthenticated remote execution) vulnerability is found in it? Do you expect to get it resolved as part of the price you originally paid, or would you be ok with being told you have to buy a new version if you want this ?

[jbstack]

There's some merit to your arguments, but not enough to justify a subscription:

- Subscriptions are marketed as being a lot more than just bugfixes - new features being the big one. But there's usually no cheaper "bugfix-only" subscription, which means that someone who doesn't care about new features has to pay for them anyway.

- To be honest - yes, I do expect bugfixes for free if I've paid to buy the product. After all, a bug is a defect, and products are usually sold with the expectation that they will be fit for purpose. That's the principle which applies to physical consumer products, so why should it be any different for software? If I bought software that calculates my taxes for me, and it turns out a bug means that it applies the wrong tax rules, then I haven't got what I paid for. Why am I expected to pay every month just to make my software do what it was supposed to do in the first place?

- The developer is still incentivised to fix bugs in order to attract new purchasers.

- Subscriptions aren't a magic solution financially anyway, because there's an average limit to how long a customer stays subscribed for.

[skinfaxi]

How do manufacturers of physical products handle defects? Aren't they obligated to correct defects through recalls and similar mechanisms? I don't see why software wouldn't work similarly.

[swiftcoder]

A good chunk of the software on my device doesn't need to access the internet, another big chunk does so using standard mechanisms (i.e. libcurl) that could be security patched out of band by the OS.

The only reason I routinely need to update most software, is that Apple/Google keep changing device screen resolutions/cutouts and they keep killing off old APIs

[egorfine]

> as long as it works with the feature set I signed up for.

Yes. On the exact major OS version you signed up on.

[jbstack]

That's fine. It's my choice whether to upgrade my OS or not. If I do so, and my app no longer works on the new OS, then I can purchase a new version. Why should I pay a monthly fee just in case I might upgrade my OS and just in case the app doesn't work there?

Also, it's far less likely than you're suggesting that I would need the exact major OS version I started with. The majority of apps survive an OS upgrade just fine. In my case, I use NixOS, so that isn't even an issue at all since every package can have all of its dependencies frozen for as long as you like, even with a new major OS version.

[Grombobulous]

It’s worse than that, stop paying Apple $99/year and all your apps get pulled.

[unsungNovelty]

One off purchase and no updates?

[philipswood]

I find this:

> but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.

Somehow incredibly ironic when applied to you comment itself...

[zmgsabst]

How so?

I’m missing the irony.

[brazzy]

The comment is basically doing exactly what it accused OP of doing: behaving as if the commenter has "singularly thought through every problem in an armchair" and knows better than OP who actually tried doing it.

[card_zero]

Could be an armchair, could be a toilet, either seems a reasonable standard for a commenter on a messageboard, are we expecting a focus group or something?

[braiamp]

No, but pointing out the irony of the situation is still helpful to anyone reading it.

[michaelt]

> The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.

Yes and no.

You want enough logging and telemetry that you can roll out an update to 2% of users and know if something is terribly wrong before you roll it out to the other 98%.

On the other hand, you probably don't want enough telemetry to detect that customer Jim Smith has trouble with WebRTC when joining calls without a microphone while using Firefox and Cloudflare Warp with split tunnels enabled.

[kmoser]

Also, logging and telemetry only tell you what the app is (or isn't) doing; unless the logging includes user input, screen captures or video recording, it won't tell you where the user failed to understand the UI.

[ozim]

None of these categories seem to build any meaningful rapport. Any honest answer I give is deeply unsatisfying to both parties, and we typically have better data from telemetry or crash logs than the emails provide. It’s certainly useful for us to receive them, but there’s not a helpful response I can give.

I don't know how you read the blog post but it seems your interpretation is uncharitable to say the least.

He wrote he already has good enough telemetry, there is just not much he can write in an e-mail to customer, besides generic "we know the issue thank you for the report" that would be useful for the customer and for themselves.

[miki123211]

> you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself.

Which is exactly why HN's anti-telemetry stance is so unjustified.

[bloak]

Why exactly? "Error logging" is mentioned there as an alternative. I would have thought that if you can do telemetry you ought to be able to generate a local log file that is readable enough for the customer to feel confident about sending part of it back to you without breaking the law or their contracts with other parties.

[timcobb]

OP's post clearly described his thought process and experience. What are experience are you basing your assertions on?

[mcphage]

> You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.

I think the article was very clear that they had already accepted that, and had already decided it was worth never getting their money.

[fredsters_s]

> You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other

tell me you've never run anything without telling me you've never run anything...

[dabluck]

After a long day answering emails, I love kicking back and moderating my support forum.

[hn_acc1]

Especially in 2026 with the majority of traffic being bots..