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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Every other business has figured out a way to operate on a single transaction model where I give them money and they give me a product and that is the end of our relationship until I need something else that they make. Somehow we have managed to operate in this manner for hundreds of years. Why is software development any different?
My water heater once emitted a cryptic warning light. I called a local contractor, the person came and spent 10 seconds inspected the appliance, then start dialing the appliance vendor's support number. Support asked him to press some buttons in a fixed sequence and the tiny display on the water heater showed an error code. Support said "yeah, that means part X is not working, but we don't know why" and the solution was replacing that part entirely.
"Wouldn't it be nice if the water heater comes with hundreds of sensors monitoring each part and emit metrics? You can diagnose with historical data and see what was working and at what time which part showed anomaly". As a person doing SRE in my day job, this was what I had in my mind at the time.
I am not saying that I want spyware in all the appliances in my house. But if I am an appliance manufacturer, I would always want the capability to manage appliances just like how software engineers managing software lifecycles.
1. bug fixes and updates
2. Services to work in the "cloud"
If you bought a piece of software, received precisely that version and never got updates, and didn't expect your data to magically follow you around, then we could have that model, as evidenced by that model working well back when software largely did work that way.
As evidenced by Rent-a-Center, automobile leases, and rental properties there are plenty of non-software businesses that cater to customers who prefer a subscription to a larger one-time transaction.
> Why is software development any different?
I think it's a combination of price-sensitivity and desire for internet-connected features. For example, MS Office 2010 Home was $150 in 2010 (which is ~$230 today due to inflation) and it looks like you can buy subscription-less MS Office 2024 Home for $180. But despite the price coming down in real terms, many people opt for the Microsoft 365 subscription for ~$10/month.
That might work if the software platform vendors kept compatibility with old versions, but they're quite poor at this. Windows used to be quite good at it, but Android and iOS are really bad at it, and macOS is not a lot better.
Software is, unfortunately, a living thing and when not actively maintain bit-rots and becomes unusable.
Software used to work like this. You'd pay for a shrink-wrapped product, and the only updates you'd ever get (if you're lucky) would be for major bugfixes.
Subscriptions have gotten ridiculous, but with the way we've come to expect frequent updates the pay-once model isn't sustainable for many products.
Okay, well I don't want most of the updates I get for most of the software I've paid for. I often cancel subscriptions due to unwanted updates. Spotify was a good app once upon a time, but it sucks now. If I could pay to use the old version, I would, but Spotify won't let me because they think they know better.
Additionally, shipped software used to not need too many updates most of the time, because the expectation was that the thing you bought was the thing, and any updates would be to address major defects in the product. Now, most software is delivered in "MVP" form where it doesn't even have all the features most users would want, and they get slowly dripped in over time, or they don't, and you never get the thing you originally wanted from the software at all.
Overall I think this has been mainly a loss for consumers. Security is better, and that's a real win, but frequently updated software is usually lower quality software, because it can be.
It's not. Software subscriptions are a relatively new thing. For a long time before this madness came around, software companies made money hand-over-fist by just selling software in the normal way.
"I don't need a receipt for the donut, I'll just give you some money, you give me the donut. End of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this."
Because your fucking bananas aren't connected to servers in a datacenter that require you to pay monthly bills and engineers need to get paid more than people stacking rocks for living.
One great genre of HN comment is where people insist subscriptions are the only way a software business can work, as if commercial software sprung into existence fully formed in 2012.
In my experience the only genre of HN comments is that subscriptions are evil, so I'm glad to see there are other perspectives. While it's true that software has been around a long time, it's also true that the world changes and building software in 2026 is much different than even in 2012 let alone 1995.
> One great genre of HN comment is where people insist subscriptions are the only way a software business can work,
It's the primary way most SW can work. Pre-subscription, you needed to make SW that was so much in demand that it could survive piracy. Once the worry about piracy went away, a lot more SW became commercially viable.
Even Sid Meier said in his memoir that while he hates subscription, the one time they released something on a subscription based the profits were significantly more than selling his games (but he went back to one time pricing on principle).
A growing problem is that there are whole generations of younger people who have no lived experience with or imagination about certain benefits we used to have, so the world you're describing is all they effectively know. It's so easy to fall for the midwit take that the past could not have actually been better in some ways, that it's only nostalgia when people claim it was.
Speaking about paying for apps in general, I'm all for it. The moment a new app shows an ad, if this app seems useful to me, I'll go make a purchase if it's a single "remove ads" IAP with a reasonable price, where "reasonable" is a price that is less or equal to a price of a cup of flat white where I live.
But I really don't see a reason to pay for a subscription for the app I probably don't use that often. If it's impossible to use the app without signing up for a trial, I'll normally set a reminder to cancel it a day before its expiration.
You can cancel immediately and still get that initial trial/month! I always do this, especially for apps i aspirationally purchase a subscription for a year for (fitness/language apps).
Yeah as a rule I cancel every service immediately after payment. If I still need it in the second month I'll just buy another month, it takes seconds and I don't need to track anything. (Only exception being a music subscription, the only thing I use on a daily permanent basis.)
I would much prefer if all services offered an option to buy only one period rather than always requiring manual deactivation - but I also understand they make a lot of money from people paying for things they aren't using.
Subscriptions are difficult to avoid for certain situations where the developer does a lot of ongoing work and where the work is expected to continue in perpetuity without there being a set-in-stone finished product somewhere in the future.
But in all other cases, or even many of the ones where it is 'necessary', the presence of a subscription is a red flag for predatory pricing. Minor ongoing work or maintenance really doesn't cost as much as the author thinks it does. Keeping the lights on and updating API calls can be covered by new sales of permanent licenses as long as the app continues to sell. But if they had to go with a subscription, the real per-user cost would probably be measured in cents per month. Maybe add a bit more for their profit margin and charge a nice $1/mo. Do you see that anywhere except the rare app by a small developer that doesn't want to price gouge? No, all software businesses want at LEAST $5/10 a month because they've run the numbers and figured out all the tricks to human psychology, and they know they can trick someone into spending 'just $5' without them internalizing that the company is charging them a ridiculous $50-100 per user per year for even the most trivial service, leaving with almost pure profit. This is why investors love anything with a subscription service.
The author just inflates the prices and adds zeros to numbers to make permanent purchasing seem dead in the water, ignoring that we had multiple decades of software development before the advent of subscription services, where those prices were reserved for big professional suites and not your everyday app or a minor service. It's not that expensive, companies charging insane prices has just shifted your perception of what's going on behind the curtain. We even had one-time purchase mobile apps briefly, and they weren't doing it for charity either. Video games that don't require external services are still overwhelmingly priced for a single purchase, and somehow they're making bank despite also having to release updates and bugfixes.
> I’m honestly not sure what that means. You can’t take Cal.ai and Flighty out of your phone and put them on your shelf. These things are only going to work as long as they’re maintained and updated. It’s not 1995 anymore.
Yeah, that's a big problem I have with modern technology. It's true that there are classes of applications which need constant updates and backend infrastructure. However, there is a huge category of applications which don't need those constant updates and are perfectly functional without constant updates.
For example, a large number of games from the 90s and 00s are still fun to play, you can still play them with friends over the internet by directly connecting. The developers don't need to invest into those games, they are done. They might have bugs, but that doesn't really matter. In fact, constant updates is something that I don't even really desire.
The problem with the subscription model is that it's quite expensive and the entire reason it exists is to try and get users who forget about that subscription (and it encourages businesses to make canceling the subscriptions as hard as possible). It's the gym membership model.
The other problem with the subscription model is that it needlessly kills off software when either the developer loses interest or goes bankrupt.
> Maybe for budgeting purposes you don’t want to lock in future obligations. And I guess I can understand that, but I can’t help feeling like you have in mind that this one-time purchase is going to be $5 total. And I’m here to tell you that’s not happening. For anything that takes effort it’s going to be more like $200.
Except he's forgetting that before subscriptions, most consumer SW cost $10-50 with a certain timeframe for support. Not every app is Photoshop, you know.
And stuff like music players? Free!
I think the real problem is the ecosystem keeps changing. The need to ensure there is an update after upgrading Android broke the app.
At least in my case, when I lament the fact that everything is becoming a subscription I'm not judging independent developers who charge a subscription for their mobile or web apps. They need to stay abreast of an endless treadmill of bugs, security issues, and API changes and may have servers to maintain as well, and all of that costs money.
But I do pine for the days when I could buy all the software I needed in a box like any other product and use it for decades with no updates or UI changes whatsoever. It's not the fault of independent app developers that I don't live in that world anymore.
To be honest it's also a little bit of rose-colored glasses. In the 2000s I probably spent the equivalent of thousands of dollars purchasing one-time commercial software licenses and I appreciate not having to save up for that any more.
Interesting take. In my gut I hate subscriptions mostly because keeping track of them is annoying. But I’m semi-convinced. I mean, aligning the interests of the developer and the users is a nice benefit.
Something Apple could do is allow iOS to handle some of this stuff automatically. Establish a sort of “small app subscription” account. Keep track of which apps had been opened every month, only pay the subscriptions for the ones I’ve opened, and allow me to set monthly limits. It could also offer feedback to the app developers, “X% of your users didn’t use the app this month,” etc.
> Keep track of which apps had been opened every month, only pay the subscriptions for the ones I’ve opened, and allow me to set monthly limits.
That turns app icons into land-mines though.
Idk what the happy medium is, but there's gotta be something between "buy this kids game once" and "pay $13 a month until he gets sick of it," and I don't think we've quite found one that's equitable for all parties yet.
A difficulty is that making the billing time more granular could reduce the landmine factor, but also would incentivize developers to keep users in the app for longer than necessary. We’ve already seen in social media that that incentive is… quite bad.
I guess it remains to be figured out. I dunno, maybe my framing is wrong, maybe development bounties are a better ongoing revenue stream or something.
Right, the issue is that we are owning our stuff less and less. You used to be able to even buy a copy of an OS on a CD. Thus, I don't think a subscription justifies the cost of maintenance, and a lot of app models don't do subscriptions for app updates.
Of course, if there is a cloud component, that's a different story because there are recurring costs to hosting a server. Or maybe a user uses the service enough to justify the subscription (e.g. Apple Music subscription vs paying per song on iTunes or how Claude Code and Codex are actual subscriptions that are extremely worth it for the user).
I still have my CD for Office 97 and (somewhere) SuSE Linux 7.2, but I can't honestly say I can continue to use those.
The way to get around that is either continually releasing feature upgrades with one-time payments, or paying for access to the software only while you need that access.
Both models have strengths, one is not inherently evil and the other inherently good.
It's easy to say app updates should be bundled into the one-time cost but even that needs to have a time bound on it. When software lasted 3 years that potentially made sense, but now the release velocity is so much higher that there would be an explosion in complexity to try to keep up with all "one-time" releases going back for years.
Even completely Free software packages struggle with the balance with how far back to claim prior releases are under maintenance (e.g. LTS is popular, but so are 'rolling releases'). That's because of the underlying economic complexity with the costs to maintain what has gone before vs. the cost to develop what will come next.
I addressed this in the post. I don't quite understand what people mean when they say they want to own their software. I mean okay you can put the CD on the shelf. Now what? I understand why they don't like paying money. But ownership just doesn't make a lot of sense when talking about a mobile app.
I want to be able to put that CD in my drive 20 years later and have working software. You used to get this. I still have some CDs that I could plug into my computer and (perhaps through Wine) get working software.
If you shut down, I want to still be able to run the software.
OK, if you're running something with a cloud component, I might not get all the functionality. But if you decide that you don't want be in the app business any more, I still want to use what I paid for.
I have a retail copy of Photoshop 7 I bought decades ago with hard earned money. A full copy of Photoshop then was hundreds of dollars. I still use it to this day.
I learned Photoshop well enough back in the day to do cool stuff and make a few bucks on the side doing graphic design. I'm not a professional graphic designer at all so it never made sense for me to get on the version treadmill. Even today it does everything I need and more.
Adobe got paid for the work they did. I've gotten incredible value out of my purchase since I've used it so long and the cost has amortized over decades.
Subscriptions imply change. I don't necessarily want change. If I buy something that suits my needs...it already suits my needs. Adding more shit isn't necessarily a boon. Changing the behavior or look with a new update is infuriating. This is especially true of complex software that takes time to learn.
For a developer selling a subscription the strategy of locking up data is entirely rational. They'll keep getting money no matter what they do because they're holding my data hostage. It's a model I have no interest in.
Even better is when they decide to shut down or get bought out. If the subscription shuts down there's no amount of money I can pay to get it back.
As a developer, subscriptions come with a few problems:
- Users cannot open their old projects unless they pay the subscription.
- Lower uptake in general, which affects viral adoption ("my friends use this software, so will I"). This is important if you rely on word-of-mouth instead of ad spend.
- Need to keep shipping features to justify the subscription cost. There is less focus on stability/maintenance.
I feel like I'd be more comfortable with subscriptions if accounts weren't consistently required for everything. I don't particularly like everything I do being tied to an email or phone or whatever. And all those accounts are consistently a pain in the butt to delete.
Despite their recent news, I do prefer the way Mullvad has done it re this: "Here's an id. If you make a payment, it funds that id.". Then you can use the id to login. They can still enforce limits like # of users, etc, but it still enables you to have an account where you can be sure the company isn't going to ignore your unsubscribe settings, send you upsells, and then leak your phone # in some db breach.
I agree 100%. The key thing is that the monthly subscription should be cheap. That way it really does work for everyone - the user does not end up paying very much over a lifetime and they are getting value for it. And I think in most cases the subscriptions are cheap enough because those that aren't get no business. Of course there are rip-offs out there, and there's nothing wrong with them existing, but just don't subscribe to them.
this. I would happily pay subscriptions if they reflected an app's value to my daily life. The unfortunate truth many many app developers would immediately find out is that their sun tracking app or sprit level app or game I play on the train twice a year or whatever is worth approximately 10 cents a month if they're lucky.
It's far too common for me to download something ive never used before and for it to ask me to cough up 10 dollars a month. Thats what I pay for netflix or youtube or whatever, things I use for hours each week!
I suppose theyre trying to target some mythical user that checks the sun position every morning and evening obsessively or some nonsense, as though their strategy should be to capture the entirety of the value a top 1% poweruser gets from their software. No! it's expected that a top 1% poweruser will get a lot of value, if you design your monetization for them, they'll be humming and hawing and comparison shopping, and nobody else will ever even entertain the idea of paying. And then you'll get half of 1% of your addressable market.
But of course, the entire reason it really exists is to profit off people who forget about the subscription. This is clear to see when looking into the financials of it, or the number of people paying for things they havent used in a year. This also affects incentives!
Finally, the neccasary structure around the apps means for the most part, if a company goes bankrupt, decides its not worth mantaining, or plain gets bored, you lose access to the thing.
The cheaper it is then the more people you need to sustain it. If there are only a small number of obsessives who want the sun tracking app, and the sun tracking app is really great and serving their needs, it should probably be more expensive not less. If the sun tracking obsessives want it to exist, they have to pay for it, because nobody else cares.
no, they really don't. if the sun tracking app didn't exist, I or some other enterprising fellow could make it, and release it for free. It's at best a series of calculations, or just taking data directly from some api.
Just because a business model can be made around something, does not mean a business model needs to exist to sustain that thing
That's totally fine, if you want to work on the sun tracking app in your free time and release it, I encourage it. But there's a lot of weird obsessive niches and I don't think you're going to make all of them, so the people who want weird things to exist should probably fund their obsessive niches. Of course, if you aren't interested in that niche, you shouldn't feel any obligation to use it or pay for it.
as I mentioned in my initial comment, I believe that a great many products are priced wrongly compared to the market. There may be some where it makes sense to go after power users (say, a train simulator game). I believe many more are common things most people will end up wanting at some point, just once or twice a year for a few seconds.
For some reason the floor price is $5 a month when given the complexity of the app and the benefit to my life, the price should be between a few cents and a dollar at the high end.
Never use any subscription based software in which you create data you want to keep! They have no incentive to allow good export options, you often loose all or most data that you kept in it. You have no alternative to go back to if the service is stopped!
The big problem with the subscription model for me is that it gives devs carte blanche to "fix it in post". Its now okay to sell a half baked product and then sell a subscription for bug fixes. Befiore the advent of subscriptions, comapnies sold complete tools that just worked. Im not saying there weren't bugs, but there were certainly far less.
> I like subscriptions because, in the worst kind of corporate management speak, subscriptions align our interests. You pay for the app for the duration that you see fit.
We see the same pattern over and over again: (1) subscription service starts and operates at a loss, (2) people recognise this and sign-up, (3) the service gradually enshittifies to the point where there is no real value propisition, (4) company banks on having enough customers from 1 and 2 that enough people will put up with 3 that they can remain profitable.
I subscribe to a couple of apps (OnX, Strong) and some news sites (Tangle, local sports site); as far as I know none of them started on 1, and 3 hasn't happened yet for any of them. They all provide services that I think are valuable, at a fair price - a price that, as far as I can recall, hasn't changed for any of them in the 4-6 years I've been a subscriber.
Strong appears to be a fitness tracker. It's in competition with a spreadsheet.
OnX appears to be heatmaps as a service for outdoor recreation. They have to cover their opex costs.
These are not the subscriptions people have in mind when they say they hate the subscription model. People dislike obvious rent-seeking behavior; they really dislike it when there is no technical reason something can't be sold to them in a one-time transaction; and they hate it when a product that was offered as a permanent one-time purchase is then only available as a subscription service.
I mean, I guess in the sense that any software that stores data is in competition with a spreadsheet? It's in competition with pencil and paper too. And if those things work for you, great!
The app runs on my watch, which tracks my heart rate through the workout and ultimately passes data to Apple's Health stuff. It syncs the workout to my phone so I can more easily input data. It keeps a database of exercises with video instructions (WAY better than trying to run down stuff via search or YouTube), keeps track of my history and records per-exercise, as well as doing one-rep max calculations. It has built in timers and a bunch of little conveniences that make it easy to log weighted exercises.
If you don't see value in that, that's fine, but it's hardly a grift, especially when the cost is just $2.50 a month.
>These are not the subscriptions people have in mind when they say they hate the subscription model.
Right. This why I replied saying that I think you're overgeneralizing, and why I provided examples of subscriptions that are eminently reasonable and in the spirit of the post we're commenting on ("talented individuals work hard on making great software like craftsmen, and they just get paid for it." - though I'll admit I don't know the size of the team that make Strong, they're certainly not Adobe-sized).
Strong is exactly the type of subscription that I hate. This is the sort of app that can be "complete". It doesn't need any sort of backend and doesn't have any sort of real operating expenses. So why is there a subscription? This is exactly the sort of app that should have a single $10 purchase.
About the only argument for it having a subscription of any sort is the devs have to cover the BS from apple/google (mostly google) who don't believe in backwards compatibility.
It's far down the list as to why I decided to subscribe, but I do like the idea that if I lose my phone, my data won't be lost forever.
>This is exactly the sort of app that should have a single $10 purchase.
If you cloned the app and offered it as a one-time $10 charge, I'd be interested in that for sure!
> So why is there a subscription?
Recently they pushed out some updates that made the Watch experience a lot better. If you were the developer, would you have delivered that to $10 one-time purchasers for free, or would you have charged for a major version bump that had the feature?
> It's far down the list as to why I decided to subscribe, but I do like the idea that if I lose my phone, my data won't be lost forever.
You can pay for backup services with both google and apple. There's really no reason that data should be lost forever assuming the app stores data using that service. $7 a month gives you the ability to backup 1000s of apps worth of data.
> Recently they pushed out some updates that made the Watch experience a lot better. If you were the developer, would you have delivered that to $10 one-time purchasers for free, or would you have charged for a major version bump that had the feature?
This is a tricky thing. Sort of depends on where sales are currently at. I somewhat view this as the software not being complete before it was sold.
It'd be up to the dev if they wanted to run a new rev of pull out some good will to hopefully sell more apps. I'd assume you wouldn't make a new major version just for better watch integration. But then, there is the case of EA sports whose entire business model is releasing the same game with only roster and game player updates.
>You can pay for backup services with both google and apple.
I could, but I don't because (for more broad reasons beyond of this particular app) I don't want my data storage to dictate what software and hardware I use.
And yeah, thoughtful reply to the other point. There are a few options, each with their pros and cons. I was a happy customer before the Watch integration was good, and it's nice to see genuinely new stuff land on an update. That's the perk of the subscription model, especially when I'm getting more for the same price. Which...well, we all rightly get mad when we get the same or less for a higher price!
This is such a garbage take. Yes, if you're running a cloud-backed service, a subscription makes sense. But the overwhelming number of complaints have been when previous download-only apps (e.g. Photoshop) become part of a subscription service (Creative Cloud). And people complain when the option of a thing that didn't need the cloud (like a garage door opener) now is only available in a subscription model (see "Unauthorized Bread" by Cory Doctorow). It's called "enshitification".
I mean in a perfect world where I knew my subscription fees were going to developers and enabling them to live a high quality of life, sure thing.
Except in practice, that’s rarely the case. The systemic incentives in society have perverted the subscription into little more than rent extraction rather than genuine support. Products see arbitrary “updates” all the time just to justify someone’s promotion or some executive’s whims rather than actual customer feedback or needs. Hiding software behind layers of infrastructure to justify largesse instead of transparency around how it actually works and providing options for those who would rather retain some degree of ownership even at the expense of building the infra themselves.
The entire present-day model for 99% of corps out there isn’t subscriptions-as-support, it’s subscriptions-at-gunpoint. Companies like Panic or Capture One are the exception to the norm, making it clear what the fees actually do and don’t just funnel them up and out to external shareholders.
I am all for supporting developers, content creators, and everyone else involved in technology. I’m just beyond done with forced migrations to new UI/UX or arbitrary monetary extraction schemes for technology that frustrates me rather than helps return time back to me.
> Upgrade pricing also doesn’t solve this. [...] versioned upgrades incentivize developers to chase shiny features that people might pay for rather than improving their app and building for the long haul. It makes the product worse.
In my mind this is missing the point. I am very pro-upgrade pricing because upgrade pricing actually forces the developer to think about what their users actually will pay for, or what improvements will make my workflow better, instead of just adding whatever fancy side-quest thing that you've decided I need today.
If users are asking for shiny new features and are willing to pay for them then fine. If we want refinements and are willing to pay for them then fine. If you want to optionally provide backend storage or backups or whatever then fine.
However, if my continued use of a specific version of your software has no continued cost to you, then be absolutely assured that I do not feel a moral obligation to keep on paying for it endlessly, nor should you assume that I do.
> However, if my continued use of a specific version of your software has no continued cost to you
That's just it, it does carry a cost, at the least for security updates and allowing the application to continue to be installed on later OSe or key libraries.
That's why even open-source libraries that in actively being used will get forked if unmaintained too long, because there's always something to do to keep bitrot at bay.
I don't expect that my current version of the software will be updated forever or remain indefinitely secure though. I expect that I'll get some small updates or security patches for a certain amount of time only and I'm OK with that. If something comes along that I can't live without, or the platform breaks things sufficiently, then I pay for the upgrade at that time.
Can you list any examples of companies that have done this well? The products I have used that tried this either stopped trying it (Ulysses articulated it really well) or devolved into shinier objects. In practice I think it's pretty tough to pull off.
TablePlus is a good example. I buy their product and in exchange I get a year of updates. After that, it keeps on working without new features or updates. If I want new features or updates after that, I buy it again. Otherwise, I can keep on using the version I have pretty much until it stops working due to e.g. platform changes.
"Ownership" is something only the HN set cares about. The reason your average person hates app subscriptions the author relegated to a footnote: they mostly exist to trick you into paying for the app more than once.
Folks pay for all sorts of subscriptions, nobody cares about ownership, but when my mom finds out she's been paying $0.99/mo for a "countdown timer" app she used a few times over a year ago she swears off paying for apps for good.
I think broadly your comment is true, and it would be better for the good actors if the bad actors didn't exist. Apple and Google do make it pretty easy to cancel though vs the wild west of the web
IMO, this whole 'article' has such a corporate bootlicky flavor to it. I pay for subscription (claude, gpt, netflix etc) since there are no real (pragmatic, convenience and financial) alternatives and it's not easy to rig a solution. otherwise the very fact that the only option is app subscription, i stay out of it on principle. even IDApro has perpetual license.
Interesting article, I guess it may come off as a reflection of being of a different mindset than an older style of open source software and culture?
I thought the idea was, software is created with an open source and open license to it - so people know what the software is, and are able to make copies of it freely, and so that becomes hard to monetize.
If you are trying to sell software and make it proprietary with closed source, it's not software you can trust (could contain literally any insecure code) so you avoid it and it would lack people using it (not saying this happens in practice, but I thought was the open source argument).
Hence you're saying, just create / pay for insecure proprietary closed source software that can't be shared and isn't intended to be shared.
The subscription model lends itself towards abuses: namely, you can use something temporarily, then lose access. The open source vision was about creating software that can be freely re-used indefinitely without a required subscription and shared without as much of restrictions.
So I think basically people object to this increased limitation of "indefinite reuses" which you can get with open source software that you "own", and maybe the proprietary closed source tendencies of these locked down subscriptions.
Now granted, some of the newer "spaces" we operate in may look a little differently, with lots of things needing or desiring constant updates and we recognize we only have so much time so a question comes up if we even want or need "indefinite reuse" or to even have open source software or to understand how the software works.
But, there might not even be disagreement here... if you just "donate" to an open source nonprofit project, that could still be framed as a "subscription". I think it's maybe not conventionally how we're referring to subscriptions, but I think I could see your case for reframing the subscription towards being something "good" or "ok".
There are open source monetization strategies, but if code tends towards being less able to be monetized, how can software projects be funded? I think in this "post-intellectual property" open source scenario I'm suggesting at, the funding might shift in other directions (maybe like from selling hardware or tangible physical goods).
But anyway, I guess we would just probably distinguish between "unwanted" and "desired" subscription practices: limited locked down subs versus unlimited maybe subscription-less or limited open source subs.
At least these were some thoughts this essay was generating in me.
Yes open source is a whole different animal, I had a paragraph addressing open source but decided it really needs its own essay, so stay tuned for 'open source is a scam'
First, a big part of subscription is the fault of Google and Apple, and that is not given enough credit. There are plenty of non-subscription software models that obviously work. But Apple and Google don't let them work, because of money. Yes, you need infrastructure and you need to keep paying for it ... because Google and Apple make it so. There is no reason apps can't work standalone, they're just making this hard on purpose.
Second all the arguments against subscription software also apply against essentially every AI service everywhere.
Is this REALLY a software developer making robocalling software complaining about intrusive ads?
REALLY?
Yes ... yes it is.
I mean is there any doubt at all what companies will use this software for? (and of course, zero attention given to the fact that robocalling is illegal in most places. For good reason. Using this software is a crime. Which means scummy salespeople and scammers are the only ones going to use it)
First: this is obviously a robocalling application. It's probably illegal in half the world. And being against ads, but helping companies with robocalling ... that's not a very consistent attitude.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
>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...
>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.
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.
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.
If you don't like or want any mobile apps whatsoever, I completely agree you should not pay for them.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Every other business has figured out a way to operate on a single transaction model where I give them money and they give me a product and that is the end of our relationship until I need something else that they make. Somehow we have managed to operate in this manner for hundreds of years. Why is software development any different?
My water heater once emitted a cryptic warning light. I called a local contractor, the person came and spent 10 seconds inspected the appliance, then start dialing the appliance vendor's support number. Support asked him to press some buttons in a fixed sequence and the tiny display on the water heater showed an error code. Support said "yeah, that means part X is not working, but we don't know why" and the solution was replacing that part entirely.
"Wouldn't it be nice if the water heater comes with hundreds of sensors monitoring each part and emit metrics? You can diagnose with historical data and see what was working and at what time which part showed anomaly". As a person doing SRE in my day job, this was what I had in my mind at the time.
I am not saying that I want spyware in all the appliances in my house. But if I am an appliance manufacturer, I would always want the capability to manage appliances just like how software engineers managing software lifecycles.
Because people expect:
If you bought a piece of software, received precisely that version and never got updates, and didn't expect your data to magically follow you around, then we could have that model, as evidenced by that model working well back when software largely did work that way.As evidenced by Rent-a-Center, automobile leases, and rental properties there are plenty of non-software businesses that cater to customers who prefer a subscription to a larger one-time transaction.
> Why is software development any different?
I think it's a combination of price-sensitivity and desire for internet-connected features. For example, MS Office 2010 Home was $150 in 2010 (which is ~$230 today due to inflation) and it looks like you can buy subscription-less MS Office 2024 Home for $180. But despite the price coming down in real terms, many people opt for the Microsoft 365 subscription for ~$10/month.
That might work if the software platform vendors kept compatibility with old versions, but they're quite poor at this. Windows used to be quite good at it, but Android and iOS are really bad at it, and macOS is not a lot better.
Software is, unfortunately, a living thing and when not actively maintain bit-rots and becomes unusable.
Software used to work like this. You'd pay for a shrink-wrapped product, and the only updates you'd ever get (if you're lucky) would be for major bugfixes.
Subscriptions have gotten ridiculous, but with the way we've come to expect frequent updates the pay-once model isn't sustainable for many products.
Okay, well I don't want most of the updates I get for most of the software I've paid for. I often cancel subscriptions due to unwanted updates. Spotify was a good app once upon a time, but it sucks now. If I could pay to use the old version, I would, but Spotify won't let me because they think they know better.
Additionally, shipped software used to not need too many updates most of the time, because the expectation was that the thing you bought was the thing, and any updates would be to address major defects in the product. Now, most software is delivered in "MVP" form where it doesn't even have all the features most users would want, and they get slowly dripped in over time, or they don't, and you never get the thing you originally wanted from the software at all.
Overall I think this has been mainly a loss for consumers. Security is better, and that's a real win, but frequently updated software is usually lower quality software, because it can be.
> Why is software development any different?
It's not. Software subscriptions are a relatively new thing. For a long time before this madness came around, software companies made money hand-over-fist by just selling software in the normal way.
Agreed.
"I don't need a receipt for the donut, I'll just give you some money, you give me the donut. End of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this."
I mean, software is absolutely not the only business where one pays money to gain access to the thing for a certain interval of time...
Because your fucking bananas aren't connected to servers in a datacenter that require you to pay monthly bills and engineers need to get paid more than people stacking rocks for living.
One great genre of HN comment is where people insist subscriptions are the only way a software business can work, as if commercial software sprung into existence fully formed in 2012.
In my experience the only genre of HN comments is that subscriptions are evil, so I'm glad to see there are other perspectives. While it's true that software has been around a long time, it's also true that the world changes and building software in 2026 is much different than even in 2012 let alone 1995.
> One great genre of HN comment is where people insist subscriptions are the only way a software business can work,
It's the primary way most SW can work. Pre-subscription, you needed to make SW that was so much in demand that it could survive piracy. Once the worry about piracy went away, a lot more SW became commercially viable.
Even Sid Meier said in his memoir that while he hates subscription, the one time they released something on a subscription based the profits were significantly more than selling his games (but he went back to one time pricing on principle).
A growing problem is that there are whole generations of younger people who have no lived experience with or imagination about certain benefits we used to have, so the world you're describing is all they effectively know. It's so easy to fall for the midwit take that the past could not have actually been better in some ways, that it's only nostalgia when people claim it was.
Speaking about paying for apps in general, I'm all for it. The moment a new app shows an ad, if this app seems useful to me, I'll go make a purchase if it's a single "remove ads" IAP with a reasonable price, where "reasonable" is a price that is less or equal to a price of a cup of flat white where I live.
But I really don't see a reason to pay for a subscription for the app I probably don't use that often. If it's impossible to use the app without signing up for a trial, I'll normally set a reminder to cancel it a day before its expiration.
You can cancel immediately and still get that initial trial/month! I always do this, especially for apps i aspirationally purchase a subscription for a year for (fitness/language apps).
Yeah as a rule I cancel every service immediately after payment. If I still need it in the second month I'll just buy another month, it takes seconds and I don't need to track anything. (Only exception being a music subscription, the only thing I use on a daily permanent basis.)
I would much prefer if all services offered an option to buy only one period rather than always requiring manual deactivation - but I also understand they make a lot of money from people paying for things they aren't using.
I do the same. Then when I lose access and I actually care, I know that's something I should support.
Subscriptions are difficult to avoid for certain situations where the developer does a lot of ongoing work and where the work is expected to continue in perpetuity without there being a set-in-stone finished product somewhere in the future.
But in all other cases, or even many of the ones where it is 'necessary', the presence of a subscription is a red flag for predatory pricing. Minor ongoing work or maintenance really doesn't cost as much as the author thinks it does. Keeping the lights on and updating API calls can be covered by new sales of permanent licenses as long as the app continues to sell. But if they had to go with a subscription, the real per-user cost would probably be measured in cents per month. Maybe add a bit more for their profit margin and charge a nice $1/mo. Do you see that anywhere except the rare app by a small developer that doesn't want to price gouge? No, all software businesses want at LEAST $5/10 a month because they've run the numbers and figured out all the tricks to human psychology, and they know they can trick someone into spending 'just $5' without them internalizing that the company is charging them a ridiculous $50-100 per user per year for even the most trivial service, leaving with almost pure profit. This is why investors love anything with a subscription service.
The author just inflates the prices and adds zeros to numbers to make permanent purchasing seem dead in the water, ignoring that we had multiple decades of software development before the advent of subscription services, where those prices were reserved for big professional suites and not your everyday app or a minor service. It's not that expensive, companies charging insane prices has just shifted your perception of what's going on behind the curtain. We even had one-time purchase mobile apps briefly, and they weren't doing it for charity either. Video games that don't require external services are still overwhelmingly priced for a single purchase, and somehow they're making bank despite also having to release updates and bugfixes.
> I’m honestly not sure what that means. You can’t take Cal.ai and Flighty out of your phone and put them on your shelf. These things are only going to work as long as they’re maintained and updated. It’s not 1995 anymore.
Yeah, that's a big problem I have with modern technology. It's true that there are classes of applications which need constant updates and backend infrastructure. However, there is a huge category of applications which don't need those constant updates and are perfectly functional without constant updates.
For example, a large number of games from the 90s and 00s are still fun to play, you can still play them with friends over the internet by directly connecting. The developers don't need to invest into those games, they are done. They might have bugs, but that doesn't really matter. In fact, constant updates is something that I don't even really desire.
The problem with the subscription model is that it's quite expensive and the entire reason it exists is to try and get users who forget about that subscription (and it encourages businesses to make canceling the subscriptions as hard as possible). It's the gym membership model.
The other problem with the subscription model is that it needlessly kills off software when either the developer loses interest or goes bankrupt.
> Maybe for budgeting purposes you don’t want to lock in future obligations. And I guess I can understand that, but I can’t help feeling like you have in mind that this one-time purchase is going to be $5 total. And I’m here to tell you that’s not happening. For anything that takes effort it’s going to be more like $200.
Except he's forgetting that before subscriptions, most consumer SW cost $10-50 with a certain timeframe for support. Not every app is Photoshop, you know.
And stuff like music players? Free!
I think the real problem is the ecosystem keeps changing. The need to ensure there is an update after upgrading Android broke the app.
At least in my case, when I lament the fact that everything is becoming a subscription I'm not judging independent developers who charge a subscription for their mobile or web apps. They need to stay abreast of an endless treadmill of bugs, security issues, and API changes and may have servers to maintain as well, and all of that costs money.
But I do pine for the days when I could buy all the software I needed in a box like any other product and use it for decades with no updates or UI changes whatsoever. It's not the fault of independent app developers that I don't live in that world anymore.
Yes, it's fine to nudge the world in the direction you want it to be, but it's also worth reconciling yourself to the world as it exists
To be honest it's also a little bit of rose-colored glasses. In the 2000s I probably spent the equivalent of thousands of dollars purchasing one-time commercial software licenses and I appreciate not having to save up for that any more.
Interesting take. In my gut I hate subscriptions mostly because keeping track of them is annoying. But I’m semi-convinced. I mean, aligning the interests of the developer and the users is a nice benefit.
Something Apple could do is allow iOS to handle some of this stuff automatically. Establish a sort of “small app subscription” account. Keep track of which apps had been opened every month, only pay the subscriptions for the ones I’ve opened, and allow me to set monthly limits. It could also offer feedback to the app developers, “X% of your users didn’t use the app this month,” etc.
> Keep track of which apps had been opened every month, only pay the subscriptions for the ones I’ve opened, and allow me to set monthly limits.
That turns app icons into land-mines though.
Idk what the happy medium is, but there's gotta be something between "buy this kids game once" and "pay $13 a month until he gets sick of it," and I don't think we've quite found one that's equitable for all parties yet.
That’s true.
A difficulty is that making the billing time more granular could reduce the landmine factor, but also would incentivize developers to keep users in the app for longer than necessary. We’ve already seen in social media that that incentive is… quite bad.
I guess it remains to be figured out. I dunno, maybe my framing is wrong, maybe development bounties are a better ongoing revenue stream or something.
Thanks for reading. Totally agree Apple can do more a lot here and it's disappointing they haven't tried.
Right, the issue is that we are owning our stuff less and less. You used to be able to even buy a copy of an OS on a CD. Thus, I don't think a subscription justifies the cost of maintenance, and a lot of app models don't do subscriptions for app updates.
Of course, if there is a cloud component, that's a different story because there are recurring costs to hosting a server. Or maybe a user uses the service enough to justify the subscription (e.g. Apple Music subscription vs paying per song on iTunes or how Claude Code and Codex are actual subscriptions that are extremely worth it for the user).
I still have my CD for Office 97 and (somewhere) SuSE Linux 7.2, but I can't honestly say I can continue to use those.
The way to get around that is either continually releasing feature upgrades with one-time payments, or paying for access to the software only while you need that access.
Both models have strengths, one is not inherently evil and the other inherently good.
It's easy to say app updates should be bundled into the one-time cost but even that needs to have a time bound on it. When software lasted 3 years that potentially made sense, but now the release velocity is so much higher that there would be an explosion in complexity to try to keep up with all "one-time" releases going back for years.
Even completely Free software packages struggle with the balance with how far back to claim prior releases are under maintenance (e.g. LTS is popular, but so are 'rolling releases'). That's because of the underlying economic complexity with the costs to maintain what has gone before vs. the cost to develop what will come next.
I addressed this in the post. I don't quite understand what people mean when they say they want to own their software. I mean okay you can put the CD on the shelf. Now what? I understand why they don't like paying money. But ownership just doesn't make a lot of sense when talking about a mobile app.
> But ownership just doesn't make a lot of sense when talking about a mobile app.
Why shouldn't it?
Why does my calculator app need a subscription? Why does it need constant updates?
There's no reason the ownership model shouldn't exist for apps. There's also no reason why all apps should need constant development.
No, I'd argue that this applies even for a mobile app: they can be shut down and become unavailable on the App Store or whatever.
On Android the solution is side loading if you have the APK. But on iPhone, unless you have the source code or IPA, you're stuck
I want to be able to put that CD in my drive 20 years later and have working software. You used to get this. I still have some CDs that I could plug into my computer and (perhaps through Wine) get working software.
If you shut down, I want to still be able to run the software.
OK, if you're running something with a cloud component, I might not get all the functionality. But if you decide that you don't want be in the app business any more, I still want to use what I paid for.
Tbh for most things you could probably run a personal version of the webserver component yourself.
I have a retail copy of Photoshop 7 I bought decades ago with hard earned money. A full copy of Photoshop then was hundreds of dollars. I still use it to this day.
I learned Photoshop well enough back in the day to do cool stuff and make a few bucks on the side doing graphic design. I'm not a professional graphic designer at all so it never made sense for me to get on the version treadmill. Even today it does everything I need and more.
Adobe got paid for the work they did. I've gotten incredible value out of my purchase since I've used it so long and the cost has amortized over decades.
Subscriptions imply change. I don't necessarily want change. If I buy something that suits my needs...it already suits my needs. Adding more shit isn't necessarily a boon. Changing the behavior or look with a new update is infuriating. This is especially true of complex software that takes time to learn.
For a developer selling a subscription the strategy of locking up data is entirely rational. They'll keep getting money no matter what they do because they're holding my data hostage. It's a model I have no interest in.
Even better is when they decide to shut down or get bought out. If the subscription shuts down there's no amount of money I can pay to get it back.
No, thank you. As long as better options exist - and they do - I shan't.
As a developer, subscriptions come with a few problems:
- Users cannot open their old projects unless they pay the subscription.
- Lower uptake in general, which affects viral adoption ("my friends use this software, so will I"). This is important if you rely on word-of-mouth instead of ad spend.
- Need to keep shipping features to justify the subscription cost. There is less focus on stability/maintenance.
I feel like I'd be more comfortable with subscriptions if accounts weren't consistently required for everything. I don't particularly like everything I do being tied to an email or phone or whatever. And all those accounts are consistently a pain in the butt to delete.
Despite their recent news, I do prefer the way Mullvad has done it re this: "Here's an id. If you make a payment, it funds that id.". Then you can use the id to login. They can still enforce limits like # of users, etc, but it still enables you to have an account where you can be sure the company isn't going to ignore your unsubscribe settings, send you upsells, and then leak your phone # in some db breach.
I agree 100%. The key thing is that the monthly subscription should be cheap. That way it really does work for everyone - the user does not end up paying very much over a lifetime and they are getting value for it. And I think in most cases the subscriptions are cheap enough because those that aren't get no business. Of course there are rip-offs out there, and there's nothing wrong with them existing, but just don't subscribe to them.
this. I would happily pay subscriptions if they reflected an app's value to my daily life. The unfortunate truth many many app developers would immediately find out is that their sun tracking app or sprit level app or game I play on the train twice a year or whatever is worth approximately 10 cents a month if they're lucky.
It's far too common for me to download something ive never used before and for it to ask me to cough up 10 dollars a month. Thats what I pay for netflix or youtube or whatever, things I use for hours each week!
I suppose theyre trying to target some mythical user that checks the sun position every morning and evening obsessively or some nonsense, as though their strategy should be to capture the entirety of the value a top 1% poweruser gets from their software. No! it's expected that a top 1% poweruser will get a lot of value, if you design your monetization for them, they'll be humming and hawing and comparison shopping, and nobody else will ever even entertain the idea of paying. And then you'll get half of 1% of your addressable market.
But of course, the entire reason it really exists is to profit off people who forget about the subscription. This is clear to see when looking into the financials of it, or the number of people paying for things they havent used in a year. This also affects incentives!
Finally, the neccasary structure around the apps means for the most part, if a company goes bankrupt, decides its not worth mantaining, or plain gets bored, you lose access to the thing.
The cheaper it is then the more people you need to sustain it. If there are only a small number of obsessives who want the sun tracking app, and the sun tracking app is really great and serving their needs, it should probably be more expensive not less. If the sun tracking obsessives want it to exist, they have to pay for it, because nobody else cares.
no, they really don't. if the sun tracking app didn't exist, I or some other enterprising fellow could make it, and release it for free. It's at best a series of calculations, or just taking data directly from some api.
Just because a business model can be made around something, does not mean a business model needs to exist to sustain that thing
That's totally fine, if you want to work on the sun tracking app in your free time and release it, I encourage it. But there's a lot of weird obsessive niches and I don't think you're going to make all of them, so the people who want weird things to exist should probably fund their obsessive niches. Of course, if you aren't interested in that niche, you shouldn't feel any obligation to use it or pay for it.
as I mentioned in my initial comment, I believe that a great many products are priced wrongly compared to the market. There may be some where it makes sense to go after power users (say, a train simulator game). I believe many more are common things most people will end up wanting at some point, just once or twice a year for a few seconds.
For some reason the floor price is $5 a month when given the complexity of the app and the benefit to my life, the price should be between a few cents and a dollar at the high end.
also friction-less
I am so burnt out of making accounts. verifying my email. entering 2fa. re-logging in. entering cc info. getting spammed with marketing email.
Never use any subscription based software in which you create data you want to keep! They have no incentive to allow good export options, you often loose all or most data that you kept in it. You have no alternative to go back to if the service is stopped!
The big problem with the subscription model for me is that it gives devs carte blanche to "fix it in post". Its now okay to sell a half baked product and then sell a subscription for bug fixes. Befiore the advent of subscriptions, comapnies sold complete tools that just worked. Im not saying there weren't bugs, but there were certainly far less.
> I like subscriptions because, in the worst kind of corporate management speak, subscriptions align our interests. You pay for the app for the duration that you see fit.
We see the same pattern over and over again: (1) subscription service starts and operates at a loss, (2) people recognise this and sign-up, (3) the service gradually enshittifies to the point where there is no real value propisition, (4) company banks on having enough customers from 1 and 2 that enough people will put up with 3 that they can remain profitable.
How does this align with my interests?
I think you're overgeneralizing.
I subscribe to a couple of apps (OnX, Strong) and some news sites (Tangle, local sports site); as far as I know none of them started on 1, and 3 hasn't happened yet for any of them. They all provide services that I think are valuable, at a fair price - a price that, as far as I can recall, hasn't changed for any of them in the 4-6 years I've been a subscriber.
Strong appears to be a fitness tracker. It's in competition with a spreadsheet.
OnX appears to be heatmaps as a service for outdoor recreation. They have to cover their opex costs.
These are not the subscriptions people have in mind when they say they hate the subscription model. People dislike obvious rent-seeking behavior; they really dislike it when there is no technical reason something can't be sold to them in a one-time transaction; and they hate it when a product that was offered as a permanent one-time purchase is then only available as a subscription service.
> It's in competition with a spreadsheet.
I mean, I guess in the sense that any software that stores data is in competition with a spreadsheet? It's in competition with pencil and paper too. And if those things work for you, great!
The app runs on my watch, which tracks my heart rate through the workout and ultimately passes data to Apple's Health stuff. It syncs the workout to my phone so I can more easily input data. It keeps a database of exercises with video instructions (WAY better than trying to run down stuff via search or YouTube), keeps track of my history and records per-exercise, as well as doing one-rep max calculations. It has built in timers and a bunch of little conveniences that make it easy to log weighted exercises.
If you don't see value in that, that's fine, but it's hardly a grift, especially when the cost is just $2.50 a month.
>These are not the subscriptions people have in mind when they say they hate the subscription model.
Right. This why I replied saying that I think you're overgeneralizing, and why I provided examples of subscriptions that are eminently reasonable and in the spirit of the post we're commenting on ("talented individuals work hard on making great software like craftsmen, and they just get paid for it." - though I'll admit I don't know the size of the team that make Strong, they're certainly not Adobe-sized).
Strong is exactly the type of subscription that I hate. This is the sort of app that can be "complete". It doesn't need any sort of backend and doesn't have any sort of real operating expenses. So why is there a subscription? This is exactly the sort of app that should have a single $10 purchase.
About the only argument for it having a subscription of any sort is the devs have to cover the BS from apple/google (mostly google) who don't believe in backwards compatibility.
> It doesn't need any sort of backend
It's far down the list as to why I decided to subscribe, but I do like the idea that if I lose my phone, my data won't be lost forever.
>This is exactly the sort of app that should have a single $10 purchase.
If you cloned the app and offered it as a one-time $10 charge, I'd be interested in that for sure!
> So why is there a subscription?
Recently they pushed out some updates that made the Watch experience a lot better. If you were the developer, would you have delivered that to $10 one-time purchasers for free, or would you have charged for a major version bump that had the feature?
> It's far down the list as to why I decided to subscribe, but I do like the idea that if I lose my phone, my data won't be lost forever.
You can pay for backup services with both google and apple. There's really no reason that data should be lost forever assuming the app stores data using that service. $7 a month gives you the ability to backup 1000s of apps worth of data.
> Recently they pushed out some updates that made the Watch experience a lot better. If you were the developer, would you have delivered that to $10 one-time purchasers for free, or would you have charged for a major version bump that had the feature?
This is a tricky thing. Sort of depends on where sales are currently at. I somewhat view this as the software not being complete before it was sold.
It'd be up to the dev if they wanted to run a new rev of pull out some good will to hopefully sell more apps. I'd assume you wouldn't make a new major version just for better watch integration. But then, there is the case of EA sports whose entire business model is releasing the same game with only roster and game player updates.
>You can pay for backup services with both google and apple.
I could, but I don't because (for more broad reasons beyond of this particular app) I don't want my data storage to dictate what software and hardware I use.
And yeah, thoughtful reply to the other point. There are a few options, each with their pros and cons. I was a happy customer before the Watch integration was good, and it's nice to see genuinely new stuff land on an update. That's the perk of the subscription model, especially when I'm getting more for the same price. Which...well, we all rightly get mad when we get the same or less for a higher price!
This is such a garbage take. Yes, if you're running a cloud-backed service, a subscription makes sense. But the overwhelming number of complaints have been when previous download-only apps (e.g. Photoshop) become part of a subscription service (Creative Cloud). And people complain when the option of a thing that didn't need the cloud (like a garage door opener) now is only available in a subscription model (see "Unauthorized Bread" by Cory Doctorow). It's called "enshitification".
Nice try
https://www.jpeek.com/free_sw.html
I mean in a perfect world where I knew my subscription fees were going to developers and enabling them to live a high quality of life, sure thing.
Except in practice, that’s rarely the case. The systemic incentives in society have perverted the subscription into little more than rent extraction rather than genuine support. Products see arbitrary “updates” all the time just to justify someone’s promotion or some executive’s whims rather than actual customer feedback or needs. Hiding software behind layers of infrastructure to justify largesse instead of transparency around how it actually works and providing options for those who would rather retain some degree of ownership even at the expense of building the infra themselves.
The entire present-day model for 99% of corps out there isn’t subscriptions-as-support, it’s subscriptions-at-gunpoint. Companies like Panic or Capture One are the exception to the norm, making it clear what the fees actually do and don’t just funnel them up and out to external shareholders.
I am all for supporting developers, content creators, and everyone else involved in technology. I’m just beyond done with forced migrations to new UI/UX or arbitrary monetary extraction schemes for technology that frustrates me rather than helps return time back to me.
> Upgrade pricing also doesn’t solve this. [...] versioned upgrades incentivize developers to chase shiny features that people might pay for rather than improving their app and building for the long haul. It makes the product worse.
In my mind this is missing the point. I am very pro-upgrade pricing because upgrade pricing actually forces the developer to think about what their users actually will pay for, or what improvements will make my workflow better, instead of just adding whatever fancy side-quest thing that you've decided I need today.
If users are asking for shiny new features and are willing to pay for them then fine. If we want refinements and are willing to pay for them then fine. If you want to optionally provide backend storage or backups or whatever then fine.
However, if my continued use of a specific version of your software has no continued cost to you, then be absolutely assured that I do not feel a moral obligation to keep on paying for it endlessly, nor should you assume that I do.
> However, if my continued use of a specific version of your software has no continued cost to you
That's just it, it does carry a cost, at the least for security updates and allowing the application to continue to be installed on later OSe or key libraries.
That's why even open-source libraries that in actively being used will get forked if unmaintained too long, because there's always something to do to keep bitrot at bay.
I don't expect that my current version of the software will be updated forever or remain indefinitely secure though. I expect that I'll get some small updates or security patches for a certain amount of time only and I'm OK with that. If something comes along that I can't live without, or the platform breaks things sufficiently, then I pay for the upgrade at that time.
Can you list any examples of companies that have done this well? The products I have used that tried this either stopped trying it (Ulysses articulated it really well) or devolved into shinier objects. In practice I think it's pretty tough to pull off.
TablePlus is a good example. I buy their product and in exchange I get a year of updates. After that, it keeps on working without new features or updates. If I want new features or updates after that, I buy it again. Otherwise, I can keep on using the version I have pretty much until it stops working due to e.g. platform changes.
"Ownership" is something only the HN set cares about. The reason your average person hates app subscriptions the author relegated to a footnote: they mostly exist to trick you into paying for the app more than once.
Folks pay for all sorts of subscriptions, nobody cares about ownership, but when my mom finds out she's been paying $0.99/mo for a "countdown timer" app she used a few times over a year ago she swears off paying for apps for good.
I think broadly your comment is true, and it would be better for the good actors if the bad actors didn't exist. Apple and Google do make it pretty easy to cancel though vs the wild west of the web
Just ask for one-time payment also.
IMO, this whole 'article' has such a corporate bootlicky flavor to it. I pay for subscription (claude, gpt, netflix etc) since there are no real (pragmatic, convenience and financial) alternatives and it's not easy to rig a solution. otherwise the very fact that the only option is app subscription, i stay out of it on principle. even IDApro has perpetual license.
Interesting article, I guess it may come off as a reflection of being of a different mindset than an older style of open source software and culture?
I thought the idea was, software is created with an open source and open license to it - so people know what the software is, and are able to make copies of it freely, and so that becomes hard to monetize.
If you are trying to sell software and make it proprietary with closed source, it's not software you can trust (could contain literally any insecure code) so you avoid it and it would lack people using it (not saying this happens in practice, but I thought was the open source argument).
Hence you're saying, just create / pay for insecure proprietary closed source software that can't be shared and isn't intended to be shared.
The subscription model lends itself towards abuses: namely, you can use something temporarily, then lose access. The open source vision was about creating software that can be freely re-used indefinitely without a required subscription and shared without as much of restrictions.
So I think basically people object to this increased limitation of "indefinite reuses" which you can get with open source software that you "own", and maybe the proprietary closed source tendencies of these locked down subscriptions.
Now granted, some of the newer "spaces" we operate in may look a little differently, with lots of things needing or desiring constant updates and we recognize we only have so much time so a question comes up if we even want or need "indefinite reuse" or to even have open source software or to understand how the software works.
But, there might not even be disagreement here... if you just "donate" to an open source nonprofit project, that could still be framed as a "subscription". I think it's maybe not conventionally how we're referring to subscriptions, but I think I could see your case for reframing the subscription towards being something "good" or "ok".
There are open source monetization strategies, but if code tends towards being less able to be monetized, how can software projects be funded? I think in this "post-intellectual property" open source scenario I'm suggesting at, the funding might shift in other directions (maybe like from selling hardware or tangible physical goods).
But anyway, I guess we would just probably distinguish between "unwanted" and "desired" subscription practices: limited locked down subs versus unlimited maybe subscription-less or limited open source subs.
At least these were some thoughts this essay was generating in me.
Yes open source is a whole different animal, I had a paragraph addressing open source but decided it really needs its own essay, so stay tuned for 'open source is a scam'
First, a big part of subscription is the fault of Google and Apple, and that is not given enough credit. There are plenty of non-subscription software models that obviously work. But Apple and Google don't let them work, because of money. Yes, you need infrastructure and you need to keep paying for it ... because Google and Apple make it so. There is no reason apps can't work standalone, they're just making this hard on purpose.
Second all the arguments against subscription software also apply against essentially every AI service everywhere.
It's definitely true that Apple and Google have not allowed enough experimentation here
strawman fallacy, I can debate anti-subscription arguments much better. I don't think subscriptions have to be bad, but this is unreasonable
Is this REALLY a software developer making robocalling software complaining about intrusive ads?
REALLY?
Yes ... yes it is.
I mean is there any doubt at all what companies will use this software for? (and of course, zero attention given to the fact that robocalling is illegal in most places. For good reason. Using this software is a crime. Which means scummy salespeople and scammers are the only ones going to use it)
I don't know what you're referring to but I own a podcast app and have nothing to do with robocalling
This is the app you're defending: https://cal.com/ai
First: this is obviously a robocalling application. It's probably illegal in half the world. And being against ads, but helping companies with robocalling ... that's not a very consistent attitude.
AI is going to make you unemployed and that's a good thing.
Hmm interesting, wonder how Anthropic and OpenAI make money. Subscriptions perhaps?
It's glib, but allegedly they are losing money on those. Certainly compared to what they'd be getting with their usage-based pricing.
Unless you mean people are forgetting to use the maximum amount every month, or forgetting to cancel?
Are Anthropic and OpenAI the only entities permitted to charge for their work in this brave new world?
Someone should tell the vibe coders because the vast majority posted here seem to include poorly considered subscription plans.