No, no, never. Subscriptions never benefit the consumer. They all work exactly the same way:<p>- Get the user hooked into their ecosystem<p>- Slowly make the service worse / more expensive / different over time<p>- The user is paying for a subscription which feels like an investment, so they put up with more crap than they would otherwise.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[edit]<p>If the counter-point is that mobile apps will suffer, then good. I don't like or any want any mobile apps whatsoever.
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 you don't like or want any mobile apps whatsoever, I completely agree you should not pay for them.
This feels backwards—if the service gets worse, simply cancel your subscription.<p>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<p>> 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?<p>Couldn't it encourage the provider to make it better because their revenue comes from new customers?<p>> if the service gets worse, simply cancel your subscription.<p>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.
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.<p>Another issue is they tend to get more unnoticed as time goes on and little additional fees start creating in.<p>Just avoid subscriptions when possible has served me well
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?
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.<p>Software is, unfortunately, a living thing and when not actively maintain bit-rots and becomes unusable.
Because people expect:<p><pre><code> 1. bug fixes and updates
2. Services to work in the "cloud"
</code></pre>
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.
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.<p>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.
Agreed.<p>"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.
> One great genre of HN comment is where people insist subscriptions are the only way a software business can work,<p>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 <i>lot</i> more SW became commercially viable.<p>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).
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.
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.
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 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>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.<p>And stuff like music players? Free!<p>I think the real problem is the ecosystem keeps changing. The need to ensure there is an update after upgrading Android broke the app.
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.<p>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.<p>That turns app icons into land-mines though.<p>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.
Thanks for reading. Totally agree Apple can do more a lot here and it's disappointing they haven't tried.
> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The other problem with the subscription model is that it needlessly kills off software when either the developer loses interest or goes bankrupt.
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 <i>are</i> 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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.
also friction-less<p>I am so burnt out of making accounts. verifying my email. entering 2fa. re-logging in. entering cc info. getting spammed with marketing email.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Both models have strengths, one is not inherently evil and the other inherently good.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Why shouldn't it?<p>Why does my calculator app need a subscription? Why does it need constant updates?<p>There's no reason the ownership model shouldn't exist for apps. There's also no reason why all apps should need constant development.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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 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.<p>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.<p>Adobe got paid for the work they did. I've gotten incredible <i>value</i> out of my purchase since I've used it so long and the cost has amortized over decades.<p>Subscriptions imply <i>change</i>. 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.<p>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.<p>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.
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".
> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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.<p>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.
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?<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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".<p>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).<p>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.<p>At least these were some thoughts this essay was generating in me.
Just ask for one-time payment also.<p>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.
> 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.<p>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.<p>How does this align with my interests?
I think you're overgeneralizing.<p>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.
"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.<p>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.
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.<p>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?<p>Someone should tell the vibe coders because the vast majority posted here seem to include poorly considered subscription plans.