[everdrive]

No, no, never. Subscriptions never benefit the consumer. They all work exactly the same way:

- Get the user hooked into their ecosystem

- Slowly make the service worse / more expensive / different over time

- The user is paying for a subscription which feels like an investment, so they put up with more crap than they would otherwise.

Trust me. If you have a subscription for something, and you like it, it will change under your feet. It will get worse, and in effect, it will be taken from you.

I'm not paying for the subscriptions. If everyone moves towards subscriptions, I'll move into a shack in the woods. I don't care. I don't want your subscriptions. If you think subscriptions are a good idea I don't want to hear from you, and I wish you had no say in how anything was built.

[edit]

If the counter-point is that mobile apps will suffer, then good. I don't like or any want any mobile apps whatsoever.

[Brendinooo]

As I said in a different thread[0], the fact that some subscriptions are predatory doesn't mean subscriptions are necessarily predatory.

> If you have a subscription for something, and you like it, it will change under your feet. It will get worse, and in effect, it will be taken from you.

Then I can move on and find something else. If I really think I can't, then it's probably providing me with something I find valuable enough to keep. That idea has its limits (again, I don't disagree that subscription services can be predatory) but it's certainly true sometimes.

>If the counter-point is that mobile apps will suffer, then good. I don't like or any want any mobile apps whatsoever.

Right. And if you don't like or want magazines, you shouldn't subscribe to magazines. But there's no reason to think that because you personally do not like magazines, no one else should like them and no one else can find value in them.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48846637

[everdrive]

This problem is doubly worse if you have a family. No one keeps track of their subscriptions. I found out my wife had a NYTimes game subscription she'd forgotten about. She never used it and it cost us an unknown (but likely $100-$200) before we figured it out. Is this the end of the world? No, but we wasted money because these things intentionally obfuscate themselves and received no benefit whatsoever. When was the last time you paid $200 for software? It's been a while for me, but we paid a bunch of money for some stupid subscription that escaped our notice.

[JohnFen]

> Then I can move on and find something else.

This is a highly suboptimal solution to a problem that doesn't have to exist. If the application as it exists meets my needs, but an update makes it worse, I should be able to keep using the good one.

If I just buy the application rather than license it, it won't change unless I choose for it to by buying the next version. That is ideal.

There are a number of reasons why I avoid software subscriptions, but this is one of the biggest ones.

[Brendinooo]

I agree that this would be a more ideal world to live in (at least as a consumer, dunno about as the kind of smaller-time developer the article is talking about), but I don't see it as something I can practically choose in 2026 given my mix of computing devices, my priorities, and the computing ecosystem writ large.

I have a couple of apps that I bought in the early days of the App Store that I can no longer use because I didn't think it worthwhile to keep an old iPod Touch running iOS 6 or whatever. I think my Adobe CS license stopped being viable...can't remember actually, if it was the switch to 64-bit or the switch off of Intel that killed it for good.

[inexcf]

>As I said in a different thread[0], the fact that some subscriptions are predatory doesn't mean subscriptions are necessarily predatory.

"Some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Subscriptions are structurally designed to extract payment for non-use. the whole point of the model is to be predatory.

You pre-pay for some allotment of resources but get nothing back for unused resources. And the main profit comes from the gap between what you paid for and the actual usage. And that's just in the best case scenario there the company is not running at a loss just to squeeze you later even harder. The entire model only works if people throw their money into the void.

If a provider genuinely wanted to cover the costs my usage imposes on them, they would bill me for usage. That's the honest version: you used X, here's the bill for X. Instead, subscriptions deliberately decouple what I pay from what I consume, and they always decouple it in the vendor's favor, never mine. I never (well i think Kagi[0] actually is different, one outlier) get a refund for the month I didn't watch anything or the API calls I didn't make.

[0]: https://getlago.substack.com/p/why-kagi-launched-no-use-no-p...

[Brendinooo]

>You pre-pay for some allotment of resources but get nothing back for unused resources.

I dunno. This just doesn't quite compute to me as some universal principle.

I paid $30 for a year of Strong (an iOS fitness app), for example. What do you see as the "allotment of resources" there? They're delivering maintenance upgrades and feature releases periodically that I'll use any time I log a workout; the app runs on a phone that I own; the data is presumably sitting on a server of theirs, so it needs to be ready for whenever I want to use it.

I've logged ~40 workouts so far, so let's hope I stay consistent and end up with 80 for the year. That's ~38 cents per workout.

I just don't feel ripped off here, especially since I moved off of a fitness app that I liked less and cost $50/year, the price has stayed the same over four years while improving steadily, and I'm not aware of anything that does what I want for a better price. I'm not sure I'd even want some kind of metering system; psychologically I don't like the idea that I'd have to spend a second thinking about if I want to pay more to log more workouts.

[OkayPhysicist]

Why does a fitness tracker need continuous development? How on earth is something whose main competition is a $5 notebook and a $1 pen worth $50/yr?

A fitness tracker is exactly the sort of software I would expect to pay once for. It doesn't need some compute-heavy backend. It shouldn't need any backend at all. The entire application is window dressing for a SQLite database.

[Brendinooo]

Like I said, I'm paying $30 a year, not $50.

A pen and notebook do not provide a database of exercises with video instructions; they don't organize/aggregate my data to show records, chart progress over time, and do the 1RM math for me. They don't track my heart rate (via my watch, which live syncs to my phone when desired) and report health data to a service where I like to see it all aggregated. They don't run timers and they don't operate on a platform that can play music, which means they must be an extra thing I carry around and keep track of.

If you think a pen and notebook are the best solution for how you want to track workouts...great! And if you think you could match those features for a lesser cost, post it up and hopefully I'll find it! What I have is certainly not an essential good; one can definitely lift without it. But it provides services that I find worth the cost.

[morgoo]

You're actually using Strong as an example? It's practically abandonware nowadays!

[Brendinooo]

What do you mean?

[drivingmenuts]

Why is your data stored on their server where they have access to it at any time for any purpose they choose? For that, they should be paying you, no the other way around.

[Brendinooo]

It's stored there so I don't have to think about managing it.

[etrautmann]

I’m with you. I generally refuse. There are way too many things that I’d like to use extremely intermittently that beg for recurring revenue. I just opt out for the most part, aside from a tiny subset of indispensable apps.

[JKCalhoun]

Yep.

"But the subscription is so low!"

We're being nickeled and dimed into poverty.

[dabluck]

If you don't like or want any mobile apps whatsoever, I completely agree you should not pay for them.

[Funes-]

Hmm... To my mind, the best way to commercialize software is the old way: pay for the binaries of every major version. This, of course, bars the option of using the software online, and makes pirating it easier, but I think it's the most fair.

[MintPaw]

This is way too absolute a point. There's services like water and internet service you're effectively subscribed too that don't get worse. There's obvious efficiencies that can be gained from regularizing demand with subscriptions. Amazon Prime is another example of a something I've been subscribed to for over a decade and I don't feel has gotten worse.

[morgoo]

One of the earliest lines in the article:

> I believe subscriptions for mobile apps are the best thing that has ever happened for both indie developers and iPhone users.

The article isn't extolling the virtue of paying for a utility!

[JKCalhoun]

Subscriptions are giving the seller permission to dip into my bank account every month whether I used the product or not.

At least when I pay monthly rent my stuff (and usually me) are actually in the unit the whole time.

[ur_tech_friend]

This feels backwards—if the service gets worse, simply cancel your subscription.

If it were a one-time purchase, wouldn't that encourage the service provider to make it worse over time because they've already taken your money?

[fusslo]

I agree with you in theory

> If it were a one-time purchase, wouldn't that encourage the service provider to make it worse over time because they've already taken your money?

Couldn't it encourage the provider to make it better because their revenue comes from new customers?

> if the service gets worse, simply cancel your subscription.

There's plenty of examples of subscriptions that are nearly impossible to cancel, or have a giant fee for cancelling early. Adobe, Comcast, siriusxm spring to mind. Anecdotally, streaming services are partly funded by people who subscribe for a particular film/tv show and just never cancel.

[miyoji]

> This feels backwards—if the service gets worse, simply cancel your subscription.

It's not backwards. I've canceled many subscriptions because software has gotten worse. I occasionally check back in with those services to see if they've gotten better, or at least back to as good as they used to be and they are always, inevitably, worse.

I'd love to hear about a subscription that gets better over time but I haven't had that experience. I've also heard how product managers talk about subscribed users and I don't like being thought of that way by the businesses I give money to.

[zetsurin]

That's the rub, numerous times you can't cancel until the x is done (for gym memberships it used to be a whole year). Or alternatively look at prime cancelling is made difficult.

Another issue is they tend to get more unnoticed as time goes on and little additional fees start creating in.

Just avoid subscriptions when possible has served me well

[JKCalhoun]

I have not hiked this month. Note to self: cancel AllTrails subscription.

I might hike this coming weekend. Note to self: reinstate AllTrails subscription.

etc.

[Gud]

Then how do you pay?

[everdrive]

For mobile apps? I don't. Mobile apps are generally worse than anything you can get on a real computer. I use as few mobile apps as possible. I certainly don't add additional mobile apps unless there's no other choice. (ie, OTP app from work)

[jmpz]

I don't get the connection between a subscription and getting a user hooked, making the service worse, or ensure worsening of the service.

All of these things can be true, all without a subscription.

Not having revenue certainly makes it impossible to sustain a business to work on a service, without some other kind of monetization path, like ads, or data harvesting and sale.