Subscriptions make companies lazy and it degrades the product. I'm looking at you: Foundry, Adobe, Maxon, heated seats on BMWs ...
They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.
Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.
Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.
Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.
"It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion. You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore."
That's your decision. I've published an music album on Bandcamp. You can buy it, I'll send you a real physical tape and you can _download_ high quality FLAC you own then.
If you like to own things, you have all the possibilities.
But I agree, we maybe tend to forget about high quality stuff, if we consume conveniently low quality streaming content for example on Spotify.
It’s a descision everyone makes, in almost all cases (okay, maybe only in few mobile app cases) "ownable" alternatives exist.
> You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore
This is the more general statement, once again, alternatives exist. I own almost all my apps and tools, and 100% of my music. Either because they are free, or because I bought them. Sometimes I’d would be easier to go the other way, but it’s still (mostly) a choice.
If I have FLAC or mp3 files, they cannot become a subscription.
If I have a working binary that does not need internet, it cannot become a subscription.
If I have invested in making open source solutions work, then I can also figure out ways to continue to own my tools, even if the company goes the subscription way.
The point of the article is that Goodnotes stopped selling a lifetime purchase version of the app and a lot of other products go this route. You can't buy things that can't be bought.
It does mention music in the quoted part though. And even regarding goodnotes, it’s a choice to use a tool like that. There are *many* note taking apps.
Not just apps but methods, too. And they're all fishing in the same pool, and they're all trying to sell the same product (a subscription), and they're all trying real hard to integrate AI, after making extra money from selling your notes (or a distillation or statistical analysis thereof).
This is why I collect vinyl records, make my own cassette tapes and have a fairly huge DAS drive with all my media (movies, music, photos, etc). Ironically, I use Plex (non free), but I can pivot very easily if needed.
It's asymmetrical, you publish something online, immediately it is used by social networks or AIs for profit. Vice versa you get an app, it's not even yours.
I think we should strive to avoid playing this game..
But in the end i feel in this particular case, it’s ops fault. He can avoid using that app there’s a world of alternatives for writing apps and organizing apps.
The irony is that a lot / most / all? of these apps and services are built and run on open source software.
(is fully closed source software development even still a thing? is there any popular propriatary programming language / editor / runtime / ecosystem?)
These aren't related items so there's no comparison.
Let's say you publish a blog post guide on how to set up a MySql cluster and I use that as part of DevOps contract work for a company. Do I owe you money?
What if I form an opinion because of a political piece you published then produce my own blog post?
AI use of public data to produce new information is exactly what we do as people.
And it's forbidden to do that in certain contexts. Selling a service that regurgitate licensed content is neither legal for humans or machines. German court just reminded OpenAI:
No I mean we're in the same community, and perhaps next thing I do is I answer a related question on Stack Overflow that you or someone else can use. Everyone wins, including you, because by writing you also get to structure your thoughts better and perhaps discover some new way.
I mean the degree of use or exchange should matter.
I want to be part of a community of people. And for decades, that's what sharing information online one.
A third party coming in and saying "hey, everybody stop talking to each other, just talk to us and we'll intermediate and eventually replace every interaction between you, and charge money for it, and fill it up with advertising and eventual enshittification" is not aligned with my goals there at all.
With subscription software, or subscription music, you're not paying for a thing, object, device. You're paying for someone's mind. The value isn't you using the app or playing the mp3. The value you pay for is someone else's mind having thought up something and creating that from pure thought stuff. The alternative is building your own from pure thought stuff, ie using your mind. You're subscribing to the creator, not the created result.
Side note: I'm not such a fan of FOSS, free for all get it here no conditions and no questions asked, when we're actually just giving away our mind for free. That's fine as long as others reciprocate, but many don't. The few who reciprocate might be worth it. In essence you're trading between minds, which is the payoff then, not the money.
Yeah, this really hits home. Everything’s turning into a subscription lately, even simple tools that should just run on your own machine.
That’s why we built ChannelVault (https://mestr.io/channelvault.html), as a desktop app (made with Wails + Go) to archive and search Slack workspaces locally for eDiscovery and backups. No SaaS, no recurring fees, no cloud dependency. It just runs on your computer and keeps your data with you. Trying to defy that general trend.
I miss when software felt like something you actually owned, not rented month to month.
We used to own tools that made us productive. Now we rent tools that make someone else profitable. Subscriptions are not about recurring value but recurring billing and at some point every product decision starts bending toward dependence instead of ownership.
For me it's more like "people used to make free tools so that nobody owns them, no everybody complains they don't come for free without effort". Think of gcc, linux, and many others. There was a huge effort invested in them by people that could sell their knowledge and choose to share it.
We can build today complete products with nothing paid on the tools. This was NOT the case 30 years ago.
Back when subscriptions started to be a thing some people (myself included) were cautiously optimistic.
The problem with paid upfront and paid upgrades was that it eventually resulted in bloated programs because the only way to continue having a business was to add features.
Subscriptions, in theory, could leave the focus on user experience and fixing bugs, because in the end the people who are paying are those that like your product as it is now.
Now of course this optimism was misplaced. Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
With notes, if I ever have the need, I just use plain text / markdown files in a shared folder (I went back to the Dropbox free plan but there are plenty of alternatives). I don't have a habit of note taking though so I never had any attachment to any particular app for that.
I just wish the file sharing things didn't feel so entrenched. I think it's only a matter of time before Dropbox becomes unavailable or no longer offers a free plan (plus it's already restricted to 2 or 3 devices). Using Apple's thing feels unnatural on my Windows PC, using Microsoft's feels unnatural on my Apple devices, using Google's feels like it would require a separate app on every device and you'd still end up in the (imo unnatural feeling) web interface a lot.
Just earlier this month I was at a recording studio and no ILok plugin worked because of a connectivity issue god knows where. Plugins that did cost a lot of cash for them and were in the advertisement material of the studio.
Now even hardware things that used to work for decades need apps. Some guitar pedals need apps to operate. The first generation of those has already become paper weight: after Digitech was bought by Samsung, all the app servers died.
Apps that need a server are never for my behalf, they are purely for creating a dependency. The real feature is allowing an actual backup of the data.
Streaming has the even worse issues. It promises to pay creators, but after listening to only two bands in a month, as an experiment, no visible fraction of the $10 didn’t went to neither of those bands. It probably went to some major label, of course.
I am 100% disillusioned on anything touched by tech and see piracy as a way to resist this crap. So far only piracy has been reliable in having things work as they should when they should.
In my student years I used DC++ just to watch free movies. With the rise of streaming I kind of forgot about it, until I got annoyed.
I don't like the Spotify. Most songs I like are available, but the 'playlist' experience is terrible. A lot of songs are actually part of an album. "Is an album like a playlist on a disk?" my kid asked. No it's not, a playlist is a randomly assembled list of songs, but an album are songs who belong together, they are the album.
And video streaming is the opposite. The experience is nice, but there is so much missing even if you have multiple streaming subscriptions.
And let's not talk politics, what if Trump wants a list of everyone who thumbed up 'The White House Effect' on Netflix?
So, after many years I took an old Raspberry 3 and started torrenting again. To my surprise piratebay is still active (although my old account doesn't work anymore, no clue how to provide new content).
I'm really happy, the Raspberry has a Samba fileshare. Just download the VLC app on your smart tv and you can stream anything you like.
I know there are more advanced solutions to torrenting, but I like this simple approach, and it makes me completely independent. Let's start sharing great content again!
If others control the things that are important to you, they will at some point find a way to abuse that power. A very important point to keep in mind when making technology choices.
True ownership of software requires the ability to tinker and repair via open or at least licensed source code. But source code almost never makes sense to release for commercial products that must grow to survive and requiring funding to do that.
In the little software business I have been working towards creating, my desire was to offer a educational product for aspiring programmers as a monthly subscription.
Then, once the subscription product is paying the bills and successful, create a single seat offline version of the software and sell that as a package with a book. The book would be a user's guide for the programming language with fun example programs to type in suitable for families and schools who don't have internet to connect to my site.
I have planned networking and sharing features for the online edition that the offline book edition wouldn't have, so there'd be an incentive to pay the subscription to get all that. Nevertheless, I feel an offline version should be made available with a perpetual license in case my company dies, taking the website and web-based programming environment with it and leaving people with nothing.
Seems fine to me. Guy bought Goodnotes 5, and can use Goodnotes 5. He wants Goodnotes 6 to be included for free, but it isn't. That's life. When I got Invasion of the Vorticons, I didn't expect to get Keen Dreams for free too. Nothing new about that
Well, no. If someone offers a "lifetime" license (which I assume wasn't cheap), I expect to get free updates as long as the app exists. There was probably a sentence in the terms & conditions that stated something different, but still, IMHO "lifetime" should mean lifetime, not "until we decide to change our pricing model".
In this case I'd actually agree that the author got what they paid for: A lifetime license to Goodnotes version 5. I don't think Goodnotes should have worded it as "lifetime license", the "lifetime" has no real meaning.
Updates should be free, but upgrades don't have to. That's how it worked with software previously. Sometimes you could buy older version of e.g. Office used, and that part we lost with downloads and app stores.
The app store model just sucks for every one. Developers needs to resort to subscriptions, because upgrade pricing isn't supported. Consumers are confused, because why are there multiple versions of the same software?
One issue I do see in this case is that Goodnotes aren't offering a subscription free alternative. That might be due to the AI feature. If that isn't running on device, then that's a recurring cost they placed on themselves.
That's an impossible model though - you're asking somebody to do unlimited work for you forever, for a fixed one-off price.
In that world nobody should ever ever sell a lifetime license, it's a huge responsibility with strictly limited upside. Imo "Use the current-ish version forever" is the only reasonable expectation, and that's a fair trade.
It's expectations like this that drive subscription models. People do (quite reasonably) want ongoing support and updates, but that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.
I bought a lifetime gold license to Mediamonkey 3, 15 years ago.
I have since gotten Mediamonkey 4 and Mediamonkey 2024.
Unfortunately I don't like the 2024 refresh, but I can use it if I want to. I would also be completely happy if they just did maintenance/bugfixes on the original version.
If my local ice cream parlor is bold (or foolish) enough to offer a "single payment lifetime ice cream subscription", and I would have got that, yeah, I would expect to never pay for ice cream there again...
Besides what other replies have mentioned, I'd like to point out that this model of versioning has died a long time ago, especially in the mobile realm. For any app there's only two options, "newest available" or "keep the one I already have installed", assuming that auto-update is not forced down your throat in the latter scenario.
You're advocating for anti-consumer practices. In response to your strawman, one can easily say that they don't pay for updates to their operating system. So there is clearly a line where we, as consumers, draw a line, right? And this is without addressing the fact they sold a "lifetime" license.
I suppose it would've been fair if Goodnotes were selling their lifetime licenses with the clear remark that this license is for the current version only.
I don't think that's it. I imagine op would be willing to pay to upgrade to Goodnotes 6, at which point he would own that for ever, just like Goodnotes 5. But there is no option to do that.
> Companies prey on those who forget to cancel their free trial. So far, it only happened once to me, but thankfully, I managed to get my refund.
This dark pattern has completely taken over the iOS ecosystem. Apps hide the fact that they’re paid until you’ve gone through several steps—registration, login, setup—making you believe the what you downloaded it for is just one the next screen. And then, bang, a paywall! with a “generous” 3-day free trial and a $3.99/week subscription.
I uninstall such apps immediately and leave a one-star review. I get it, devs need to make money, but there are better ways than this sleazy bs. Unfortunately, too many gurus have normalized this practice by constantly bragging how much revenue they are making.
I share the general sentiment of the post. But I have to say this is one of the multitude posts exactly like that, condemning subscription based model, closed ecosystems etc. without proposing even a theoretical solution.
Yes, things are messed up, FSF is just some fringe radical micro-organisation with no real power, open source movement get EEE'd by the likes of MS, hardware is locked down, your always online games stop working the moment their publishers deem them unprofitable, so what are we doing now?
Subscriptions make companies lazy and it degrades the product. I'm looking at you: Foundry, Adobe, Maxon, heated seats on BMWs ...
They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.
Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.
Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.
Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.
"It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion. You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore."
That's your decision. I've published an music album on Bandcamp. You can buy it, I'll send you a real physical tape and you can _download_ high quality FLAC you own then.
If you like to own things, you have all the possibilities.
But I agree, we maybe tend to forget about high quality stuff, if we consume conveniently low quality streaming content for example on Spotify.
That may be true for your music, but it doesn't refute the author's original statement.
It’s a descision everyone makes, in almost all cases (okay, maybe only in few mobile app cases) "ownable" alternatives exist.
> You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore
This is the more general statement, once again, alternatives exist. I own almost all my apps and tools, and 100% of my music. Either because they are free, or because I bought them. Sometimes I’d would be easier to go the other way, but it’s still (mostly) a choice.
They exist, and then they become subscription only. That is literally what the post is about.
If I have FLAC or mp3 files, they cannot become a subscription.
If I have a working binary that does not need internet, it cannot become a subscription.
If I have invested in making open source solutions work, then I can also figure out ways to continue to own my tools, even if the company goes the subscription way.
Guess you haven't downloaded any self-updating executables then? They are very annoying.
Yes I have, but was talking about that:
"binary that does not need internet"
Or executables that check silently for a server and pretend to be transparent but really aren't. Very common with music production apps.
The point of the article is that Goodnotes stopped selling a lifetime purchase version of the app and a lot of other products go this route. You can't buy things that can't be bought.
It does mention music in the quoted part though. And even regarding goodnotes, it’s a choice to use a tool like that. There are *many* note taking apps.
Not just apps but methods, too. And they're all fishing in the same pool, and they're all trying to sell the same product (a subscription), and they're all trying real hard to integrate AI, after making extra money from selling your notes (or a distillation or statistical analysis thereof).
This is why I collect vinyl records, make my own cassette tapes and have a fairly huge DAS drive with all my media (movies, music, photos, etc). Ironically, I use Plex (non free), but I can pivot very easily if needed.
I own everything I rely on in my digital life and am pretty happy.
Just stop using proprietary software, as it is never possible to own it no matter how much money you pay.
FOSS solves every software need I have, and likely for most people that choose to invest in learning it.
I sympathize with not owning stuff, but I don't get this part:
> I bought the previous “lifetime” version of the app, but for WHAT, since I have to pay for the subscription to access the newest features.
Yeah, that's how "ownership" works. When you own something, nobody else changes it–for better or worse–out from under you.
It's asymmetrical, you publish something online, immediately it is used by social networks or AIs for profit. Vice versa you get an app, it's not even yours.
I think we should strive to avoid playing this game..
But in the end i feel in this particular case, it’s ops fault. He can avoid using that app there’s a world of alternatives for writing apps and organizing apps.
This is one reason open source wins.
The irony is that a lot / most / all? of these apps and services are built and run on open source software.
(is fully closed source software development even still a thing? is there any popular propriatary programming language / editor / runtime / ecosystem?)
Indeed.
However Visual Studio and Xcode are closed source and still popular in some circles.
Most people will still be relying on open source libraries while using those platforms though.
MS Office perhaps? Word, Excel, etc not including Teams
These aren't related items so there's no comparison.
Let's say you publish a blog post guide on how to set up a MySql cluster and I use that as part of DevOps contract work for a company. Do I owe you money?
What if I form an opinion because of a political piece you published then produce my own blog post?
AI use of public data to produce new information is exactly what we do as people.
LLMs don't form an opinion, they simply regurgitate the opinions of others.
People also do that.
And it's forbidden to do that in certain contexts. Selling a service that regurgitate licensed content is neither legal for humans or machines. German court just reminded OpenAI:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45886131
But people get earworms and sing songs out loud that they don't own rights to.
People may do that, but that's all LLMs can do.
No I mean we're in the same community, and perhaps next thing I do is I answer a related question on Stack Overflow that you or someone else can use. Everyone wins, including you, because by writing you also get to structure your thoughts better and perhaps discover some new way.
I mean the degree of use or exchange should matter.
I don't understand the issue.
I gave an example of where I'm using your info for my benefit in a different community.
Why does it matter that AI is in the same community, doesn't that actually help my argument because its information is more public?
I want to be part of a community of people. And for decades, that's what sharing information online one.
A third party coming in and saying "hey, everybody stop talking to each other, just talk to us and we'll intermediate and eventually replace every interaction between you, and charge money for it, and fill it up with advertising and eventual enshittification" is not aligned with my goals there at all.
That's not happening.
No one is forcing us to exclusively provide information to AI
AI isn't the sole source of information nor are you forced to use it.
The internet is already full of advertising and shit
With subscription software, or subscription music, you're not paying for a thing, object, device. You're paying for someone's mind. The value isn't you using the app or playing the mp3. The value you pay for is someone else's mind having thought up something and creating that from pure thought stuff. The alternative is building your own from pure thought stuff, ie using your mind. You're subscribing to the creator, not the created result.
Side note: I'm not such a fan of FOSS, free for all get it here no conditions and no questions asked, when we're actually just giving away our mind for free. That's fine as long as others reciprocate, but many don't. The few who reciprocate might be worth it. In essence you're trading between minds, which is the payoff then, not the money.
I'm not for or against, just thinking out loud.
Yeah, this really hits home. Everything’s turning into a subscription lately, even simple tools that should just run on your own machine.
That’s why we built ChannelVault (https://mestr.io/channelvault.html), as a desktop app (made with Wails + Go) to archive and search Slack workspaces locally for eDiscovery and backups. No SaaS, no recurring fees, no cloud dependency. It just runs on your computer and keeps your data with you. Trying to defy that general trend.
I miss when software felt like something you actually owned, not rented month to month.
We used to own tools that made us productive. Now we rent tools that make someone else profitable. Subscriptions are not about recurring value but recurring billing and at some point every product decision starts bending toward dependence instead of ownership.
For me it's more like "people used to make free tools so that nobody owns them, no everybody complains they don't come for free without effort". Think of gcc, linux, and many others. There was a huge effort invested in them by people that could sell their knowledge and choose to share it.
We can build today complete products with nothing paid on the tools. This was NOT the case 30 years ago.
Back when subscriptions started to be a thing some people (myself included) were cautiously optimistic.
The problem with paid upfront and paid upgrades was that it eventually resulted in bloated programs because the only way to continue having a business was to add features.
Subscriptions, in theory, could leave the focus on user experience and fixing bugs, because in the end the people who are paying are those that like your product as it is now.
Now of course this optimism was misplaced. Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
With notes, if I ever have the need, I just use plain text / markdown files in a shared folder (I went back to the Dropbox free plan but there are plenty of alternatives). I don't have a habit of note taking though so I never had any attachment to any particular app for that.
I just wish the file sharing things didn't feel so entrenched. I think it's only a matter of time before Dropbox becomes unavailable or no longer offers a free plan (plus it's already restricted to 2 or 3 devices). Using Apple's thing feels unnatural on my Windows PC, using Microsoft's feels unnatural on my Apple devices, using Google's feels like it would require a separate app on every device and you'd still end up in the (imo unnatural feeling) web interface a lot.
Just earlier this month I was at a recording studio and no ILok plugin worked because of a connectivity issue god knows where. Plugins that did cost a lot of cash for them and were in the advertisement material of the studio.
Now even hardware things that used to work for decades need apps. Some guitar pedals need apps to operate. The first generation of those has already become paper weight: after Digitech was bought by Samsung, all the app servers died.
Apps that need a server are never for my behalf, they are purely for creating a dependency. The real feature is allowing an actual backup of the data.
Streaming has the even worse issues. It promises to pay creators, but after listening to only two bands in a month, as an experiment, no visible fraction of the $10 didn’t went to neither of those bands. It probably went to some major label, of course.
I am 100% disillusioned on anything touched by tech and see piracy as a way to resist this crap. So far only piracy has been reliable in having things work as they should when they should.
Yes piracy is more necessary than ever!
In my student years I used DC++ just to watch free movies. With the rise of streaming I kind of forgot about it, until I got annoyed.
I don't like the Spotify. Most songs I like are available, but the 'playlist' experience is terrible. A lot of songs are actually part of an album. "Is an album like a playlist on a disk?" my kid asked. No it's not, a playlist is a randomly assembled list of songs, but an album are songs who belong together, they are the album.
And video streaming is the opposite. The experience is nice, but there is so much missing even if you have multiple streaming subscriptions.
And let's not talk politics, what if Trump wants a list of everyone who thumbed up 'The White House Effect' on Netflix?
So, after many years I took an old Raspberry 3 and started torrenting again. To my surprise piratebay is still active (although my old account doesn't work anymore, no clue how to provide new content).
I'm really happy, the Raspberry has a Samba fileshare. Just download the VLC app on your smart tv and you can stream anything you like.
I know there are more advanced solutions to torrenting, but I like this simple approach, and it makes me completely independent. Let's start sharing great content again!
If others control the things that are important to you, they will at some point find a way to abuse that power. A very important point to keep in mind when making technology choices.
True ownership of software requires the ability to tinker and repair via open or at least licensed source code. But source code almost never makes sense to release for commercial products that must grow to survive and requiring funding to do that.
In the little software business I have been working towards creating, my desire was to offer a educational product for aspiring programmers as a monthly subscription.
Then, once the subscription product is paying the bills and successful, create a single seat offline version of the software and sell that as a package with a book. The book would be a user's guide for the programming language with fun example programs to type in suitable for families and schools who don't have internet to connect to my site.
I have planned networking and sharing features for the online edition that the offline book edition wouldn't have, so there'd be an incentive to pay the subscription to get all that. Nevertheless, I feel an offline version should be made available with a perpetual license in case my company dies, taking the website and web-based programming environment with it and leaving people with nothing.
Everything comes full circle.
Companies own you - they pay a subscription (your salary) to rent you. Wouldn't it be great if they could pay a one-time fee to own you forever?
What
Feels like every day I run into another reason to never stop taking notes by hand in good old cursive.
Why would you trust any company Google, Apple, Microsoft, any company like them, to be in control of stuff that's important to you.
There's really no excuse if you're talking about notes.
"It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion.
I always say that "Privacy is for Nerds", guess I can start adding Ownership as well.
Coming up next, at https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight ...
If you don't own it, then pirating it isn't a crime.
I agree with the general sentiment, but it seems fair to me that an old "lifetime" license won't have access to new features.
Get an Android device.
Install F-Droid.
Have a wide array of apps that are free as in beer as well as in freedom.
You don't have to use rent-seeking proprietary junk. There's alternatives out there.
Seems fine to me. Guy bought Goodnotes 5, and can use Goodnotes 5. He wants Goodnotes 6 to be included for free, but it isn't. That's life. When I got Invasion of the Vorticons, I didn't expect to get Keen Dreams for free too. Nothing new about that
Well, no. If someone offers a "lifetime" license (which I assume wasn't cheap), I expect to get free updates as long as the app exists. There was probably a sentence in the terms & conditions that stated something different, but still, IMHO "lifetime" should mean lifetime, not "until we decide to change our pricing model".
In this case I'd actually agree that the author got what they paid for: A lifetime license to Goodnotes version 5. I don't think Goodnotes should have worded it as "lifetime license", the "lifetime" has no real meaning.
Updates should be free, but upgrades don't have to. That's how it worked with software previously. Sometimes you could buy older version of e.g. Office used, and that part we lost with downloads and app stores.
The app store model just sucks for every one. Developers needs to resort to subscriptions, because upgrade pricing isn't supported. Consumers are confused, because why are there multiple versions of the same software?
One issue I do see in this case is that Goodnotes aren't offering a subscription free alternative. That might be due to the AI feature. If that isn't running on device, then that's a recurring cost they placed on themselves.
That's an impossible model though - you're asking somebody to do unlimited work for you forever, for a fixed one-off price.
In that world nobody should ever ever sell a lifetime license, it's a huge responsibility with strictly limited upside. Imo "Use the current-ish version forever" is the only reasonable expectation, and that's a fair trade.
It's expectations like this that drive subscription models. People do (quite reasonably) want ongoing support and updates, but that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.
I bought a lifetime gold license to Mediamonkey 3, 15 years ago.
I have since gotten Mediamonkey 4 and Mediamonkey 2024.
Unfortunately I don't like the 2024 refresh, but I can use it if I want to. I would also be completely happy if they just did maintenance/bugfixes on the original version.
Somebody once gave me a free ice cream, so why should I ever pay for ice cream?
If my local ice cream parlor is bold (or foolish) enough to offer a "single payment lifetime ice cream subscription", and I would have got that, yeah, I would expect to never pay for ice cream there again...
Besides what other replies have mentioned, I'd like to point out that this model of versioning has died a long time ago, especially in the mobile realm. For any app there's only two options, "newest available" or "keep the one I already have installed", assuming that auto-update is not forced down your throat in the latter scenario.
You're advocating for anti-consumer practices. In response to your strawman, one can easily say that they don't pay for updates to their operating system. So there is clearly a line where we, as consumers, draw a line, right? And this is without addressing the fact they sold a "lifetime" license.
I suppose it would've been fair if Goodnotes were selling their lifetime licenses with the clear remark that this license is for the current version only.
I don't think that's it. I imagine op would be willing to pay to upgrade to Goodnotes 6, at which point he would own that for ever, just like Goodnotes 5. But there is no option to do that.
I don't think you actually grasped the core of the post if this is your conclusion.
> Yesterday, I checked out the Goodnotes app because I’m planning to buy an iPad to give note-taking on it a try again.
I would also reconsider HW manufacturer that tries to push Newspeak "side-loading" instead of "installing".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideloading
As far as I'm concerned, the iPad is just a web browser with some messaging features. There is no App Store.
iSH and a-shell offer some (emulated, non-JIT) Linux CLI functionality on iPad, which is quite functional for compiled apps, e.g. taskwarrior.
> Companies prey on those who forget to cancel their free trial. So far, it only happened once to me, but thankfully, I managed to get my refund.
This dark pattern has completely taken over the iOS ecosystem. Apps hide the fact that they’re paid until you’ve gone through several steps—registration, login, setup—making you believe the what you downloaded it for is just one the next screen. And then, bang, a paywall! with a “generous” 3-day free trial and a $3.99/week subscription.
I uninstall such apps immediately and leave a one-star review. I get it, devs need to make money, but there are better ways than this sleazy bs. Unfortunately, too many gurus have normalized this practice by constantly bragging how much revenue they are making.
> It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion.
it's like every "innovation" now brings with it convenience at a higher cost and takes away ownership and often features
personally i'm quite sick of digital nothingness. its all transient.
i want to get more into real world things that have texture, weight and permanence.
I share the general sentiment of the post. But I have to say this is one of the multitude posts exactly like that, condemning subscription based model, closed ecosystems etc. without proposing even a theoretical solution.
Yes, things are messed up, FSF is just some fringe radical micro-organisation with no real power, open source movement get EEE'd by the likes of MS, hardware is locked down, your always online games stop working the moment their publishers deem them unprofitable, so what are we doing now?