
Subscription or no subscription? That is not the question - OberstKrueger
https://ia.net/topics/subscription-or-no-subscription
======
valuearb
This seems like a long winded mess of anecdotal opinions and assumptions, that
still somehow ignores the real reason for subscriptions. The list of
acceptable uses for subscriptions is silly, subscriptions are always
acceptable if your customers accept them. And the authors refusal to try
subscriptions out of a fear that short term revenues will decline is an
abandonment of long term thinking.

And I am not a subscription apologist either. I just wrote a long post on the
need for Apple to build tools for selling upgrades as good as the ones for
selling subscriptions.

The real driving force for subscriptions is the need for recurring revenue to
support a software business, especially bug fixes and enhancements. The one
time sales model never worked in software, it was a path to oblivion that was
quickly abandoned or never used by the vast majority of PC developers.

That’s why the PC software market became dominated by maintenance plans and
paid upgrades. If you had a good product, and offered valuable new features in
an upgrade, your users would be more than happy to buy the upgrade. That
matched revenues better to costs, allowing software companies to keep more
employees on staff to actually improve the product.

When Apple came out with the iOS App Store, they broke the upgrade model.
Existing users get every update for free. Releasing a large update as a
separate product means it can’t access the existing user data because of
sandboxing, and it can’t be priced at a discount for existing users.

There are workarounds to all these problems using in-app purchase and data
export/import schemes but they are costly in developer time and offer a poorer
user experience than traditional upgrades did.

I’m convinced if Apple had an upgrade purchasing system as easy to implement
as subscriptions, developers would abandon most of their subscriptions and
replace them with upgrades.

~~~
zepto
The part about separate upgrades not being able to access existing data is not
accurate.

You can use a container that is shared between more than one app - this is not
an import/export scheme.

~~~
valuearb
This is true, but it’s not simple and requires quite a bit of work for both
versions.

------
OldHand2018
Microsoft offers Office as both a 1-time purchase and on a subscription basis.
The price of the 1-time purchase is generally about what a subscription would
cost over 3 years.

Since Office is the kind of tool you would keep for 3+ years and has an
established reputation, this doesn't seem like a bad deal. Especially since
Office has always been expensive.

People get angry about subscriptions when the subscription price far exceeds
the previous 1-time purchase cost within a reasonable amount of time. In the
case of the Android tool in this article, that's either $30 up front or $5 per
year. So it seems that the subscription is either underpriced or the up-front
price is too high: it's not surprising that they didn't have a lot of anger
directed at them. Flip that around and say $15 per year or $30 up front, and
I'd bet you have a lot of anger directed at them.

~~~
est31
Note that MS Office has a cycle length of 3 years, while their cycle length is
somewhere between 7 and 10 years.

~~~
judge2020
How long do you get updates for the 'single year' edition of MS Office now?
Does Office 2017 still get security/bugfix updates?

~~~
Crosseye_Jack
I forget what they promise to support, but MS are still pushing secuirty
updates for Office 2010 - [https://support.microsoft.com/en-
gb/help/4563408/august-2020...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-
gb/help/4563408/august-2020-updates-for-microsoft-office)

EDIT: Dug out the end dates for Office.

Ver - Mainstream Support - Extended Support

Office 2010 - no longer supported - October 13, 2020

Office 2013 - no longer supported - April 11, 2023

Office 2016 - October 13 2020 - October 14, 2025

Office 2019 - October 10 2023 October 14, 2025

------
PaulDavisThe1st
As a small developer who lives entirely from software sales, a large part of
which are in the form of monthly subscriptions, I think this author misses an
important reason for using subscriptions:

    
    
        N. You want to smooth out the monthly income associated with sales, avoiding big peaks when you do major releases and avoiding large troughs when there are no releases for some time.
    

Put differently, if you want me to keep wprking full time on the software,
help offer me some assurance that I'll still be able to afford to do so in a
month, or 3 months, or 6 months time.

~~~
jmnicolas
I just wonder what kind of software needs a full time dev once version 2.0 has
been released?

What I mean by v 2.0 is major bugs have been found and major missing features
have been added.

It seems to me that after that it's just the feature treadmill to justify
asking money recurrently.

As a dev myself I understand you want to live of your craft, but as a customer
I'm not going to pay all my life for an app, I will find an alternative.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
DAWs (digital audio workstations) have no closed lifetime or defined feature
list. The workflows and desired features expand every year. Every once in a
while, someone comes up with a game changing idea that rewrites everyone's
expectations of what is supposed to be possible (e.g. Ableton Live and their
automated fitting of audio to the music grid).

------
mantap
If you can't convince your users to fund the development of your software with
a subscription then perhaps it's not delivering real value to them. After all,
if your users are indifferent to your software disappearing into thin air
because you can no longer afford to pay the bills, perhaps they never cared
that much about it in the first place.

~~~
samatman
I don't think this is true in the slightest.

I happily plunk down for a one-time purchase of software, because it's a
simple question: is this worth $n bucks?

A lot of it just sits there for months on end, and then I have the task which
I bought it for again, and I use it.

But a subscription? Now I have to ask if it's worth $n bucks a month on an
ongoing basis. It's a whole different question, and I feel like if I'm not
going to use it for a few months, I'm just bleeding money I'd rather keep in
my wallet.

I'm especially wary of products which want $n a month to lock my creative
output up in a proprietary format, such that I can only retain access to it if
I keep shelling out. That... sucks, and it baffles me why it's so popular.

When I see a subscription I always ask: what's five years of this going to
cost me? Why five? I dunno, that's just the multiple that makes sense to me.

 _Very_ few subscriptions on offer make sense on that basis. I'd have dropped
Netflix a year or two ago, but my Mom likes it. I keep almost dropping Apple
Arcade, a piddly five bucks a month, but there's this one game I want to
finish and never get around to it... and there it is: a lot of subscriptions
are sticky, in a bad way. As far as I know, there's no way for me to pay full
price for that one game, and keep my save point, and ditch the rest of the
subscription.

Now if I'm making money with it, that's a whole different ballgame. Sure, sign
me up. But if I'm not? Likely as not, it's gonna be a pass.

~~~
judge2020
> and it baffles me why it's so popular.

The Adobe situation is simply because it's such a good product suite. You can
transition away but the pain points of using other software can be high enough
to warrant paying for the software[0]. As for why the majority of users and
businesses still pay for creative cloud, it's probably because they do see the
value of receiving updates and bugfixes effectively forever.

0: [https://youtu.be/L9VysWRHPdI](https://youtu.be/L9VysWRHPdI)

~~~
samatman
Adobe wasn't what I had in mind.

That's a moneymaker, for one thing. For another, they're the industry
standard, and yeah the formats are proprietary but if you take a couple years
break and start paying again, your files are going to open.

I was thinking more of products like Roam Research. Not to pick on them in
particular, I know a lot of people like it, but it's just a non-starter for
me.

The Moleskin iPad app is the one I'd most like to use, if they came up with a
different business plan for it.

------
renewiltord
I like Jetbrains' subscription model. Haven't ever not been on the
subscription. It just gives me peace of mind knowing I won't be left out to
dry if I need to be off it.

~~~
n3t
For those who are not familiar with JetBrains' subscription model:

> A perpetual fallback license is a license that allows you to use a specific
> version of software without an active subscription for it. [0]

There are some details about which version you are eligible for. The spirit is
that if you subscribe for ≥ 1 year, you have some version available when you
stop paying.

[0]: [https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
gb/articles/207240845-What...](https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license-)

~~~
andrewf
JetBrains was initially going with a more traditional subscription model, and
introduced the perpetual license fallback in response to negative feedback.

HN comments and the original announcement:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165334)

The followup introducing the perpetual fallback license:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10278285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10278285)

~~~
renewiltord
Yeah I was a bit unhappy but accepted it for what it was when it was
announced. I'm glad other people complained. I really like the current form.

------
Fission
We use iA Writer daily at satchel.com. We pay a one-time cost of $30 per seat,
but I think we get much more than $30 worth of value from iA Writer. So when I
read the article, I thought that the $5 per month price is much too low for
the value we get out of the product. And then I realized it's actually $5 per
year.

Which brings up an interesting observation: the folks at iA seem to be tech
purists at heart, and seem disinclined to ask for more money for their
products. But I suspect that people would surely be willing to pay more money,
and that if they were to price-segment their customers (e.g. by building out
some collaboration features for teams, which we would love to have, and then
charging a premium for that), they might be able to effect a step function in
their business.

~~~
jmnicolas
I don't think you representative of a lot of customers.

Where I work I must do without critical software because it's deemed too
expensive by the management (weekly restaurant outings for the managers aren't
deem expensive though ;)

~~~
Fission
I think that's okay though. If we're only representative of only 5% of the iA
userbase, but we're willing to pay more than 20x of the subscription price
($5/yr → $8.33+/mo), then the 5% of users like us can double iA's revenue.

------
CubsFan1060
This is an interesting statement "Basically, Android was always a struggle,
but for the first time since the very beginning, Android is moving towards
sustainability."

And I didn't see any mention of the economics of iOS. From everything I've
heard, iOS users are willing to spend more money. In that sense, it does seem
like Apple is bringing something to the table with its 30%.

~~~
valuearb
iOS devs make 50% more than Android devs, and the average iOS user spends
about 10x more than the average Android user does on Apps.

~~~
criddell
It's strange how that works out.

I use both Android and iOS and I've easily spent 10x as much on iOS apps as
Android apps.

~~~
searchableguy
Why didn't you spend that much on android apps? Lack of good apps that you
would pay for or enough free apps?

~~~
rtx
I have done the same, here are some the reasons.

1\. Better targeting by app companies when I am on iOS device.

2\. Trust in the Apple app eco system

3\. Most top apps are paid, so it makes it more acceptable to pay

~~~
arvinsim
That's why Apple is so afraid of sideloading. Because it threatens their
business model.

~~~
valuearb
And their developers business model, and their high customer satisfaction
levels.

------
syrrim
Not being familiar with these things, why not just emulate "upgrades" through
in app purchases? You would offer a limited version of the app for free, and
then prompt users to pay for the full version. Every now and then, you would
declare a new version of the app, and only give access to new features you add
to relatively recent users. Older users would be prompted to pay (again via
iap) a reduced price to get the "upgrade".

Issues with this are:

\- still has the 30% fee instead of 15%

\- adds complexity, due to needing to track what each feature is, and which
users are allowed to access each feature

\- to obviate above, you would probably end up giving all
bugfixes/optimizations/etc to old features to all users.

Could maybe clear up the first point by accepting payment via subscription
instead, with the following caveat: "if you stay subscribed for more than 3
years [say], you will gain permanent access to the app, minus any features
added after you terminate your subscription". As a user, I would feel pretty
good about that (i think), since I'm not locked into either a subscription or
a full payment. Of course, this is likely a downside for whoever makes the
app, since it probably entails less revenue for them.

------
john-shaffer
I like the pricing model of language apps like LingoDeer and Rosetta Stone.
They offer a lifetime subscription for a one-time fee that costs less than two
annual subscriptions. I have no problem taking that offer, but I have no
recurring subscriptions for apps.

~~~
disposekinetics
I love that model, I can subscribe for a month to see if I like something and
then either go lifetime or dump it.

------
candiddevmike
Our app ([https://about.domestica.app](https://about.domestica.app)) uses a
yearly subscription model for both SaaS and self hosted users. For self hosted
users, the licenses are permanent/perpetual, but tied to a minor version (i.e.
the last release before your subscription runs out is 1.1.0, you can get
1.1.1, but not 1.2.0, etc).

We've played around with different pricing (monthly, tiers) and none of them
changed conversions much. What did help was replacing the free trial (no CC
required) with a free tier, as it provided more of an onboarding journey and
the subscription purchase becomes the next logical step.

------
jrs235
Prior to monthly or annual subscriptions, business software was purchased for
a larger lump sum up front and perpetually owned. If you wanted to get updates
and support you often paid a yearly maintenance fee ranging from 10% to 30% of
the initial license/software cost. Saas, Software as a service was originally
paying a monthly or annual fee for the software maker to also pay and run the
servers. Now it seems Saas stands for software as a subscription where that
still applies but everyone expects continuous never ending features to be
added.

~~~
valuearb
For corporate software maintenance as mandatory, making it little different
from subscriptions.

------
pedalpete
I've been thinking about this quite a bit, and though the DropBox is mentioned
briefly, I'd really like to understand more about why we're comfortable with
paying a subscription to them, but not other similar apps.

We're building a wearable, so we're in the hardware space, but there is
processing of data and personalized improvements to each users experience
happening every day. I think we're similar to Whoop in this way. Any Whoop
users want to chime in about how they feel about the subscription model?

------
anonfunction
If anyone else is finding the style hard to read here's a link to the outline
version (you can do it to most articles by just prefixing the URL with
outline.com/)

[https://outline.com/JMZJJH](https://outline.com/JMZJJH)

------
thetechimist
Hard to see how apps like this exist. The author seems to enjoy writing about
his app as much as creating technology that exists already, and has for
decades.

For $7/mo, you can have MS Office. You get a real Word Processor for all
possible writing that happens in the real world where proper want to
collaborate on business documents, or use Focus Mode for distraction-free
creative writing. IA makes a big deal about their grammar checking but so
what? Other word processors have had it for years and MS’s is genuinely
impressive when you learn how to set it for your needs. Plus for the same
price, you get the workhorse beast Excel, a business email and calendaring
client (Outlook), the #1 presentation tool (PowerPoint), and a highly
functional note-taking tool (OneNote).

I’m not trying to push Microsoft’s product line. There are others like Corel,
or Apple’s iWork suite.

I just don’t understand the plethora of “distraction-free” editors, or all the
fuss about code editors. Just use VS Code, JetBrain, Atom, or what have you.
But as we speak, people are sweating to create yet more code editors which
will have twice the bugs and half the functionality of the existing ones.

The world of writing tools is even worse. Markdown is a bit of a joke in the
real world. If I see one more article about how someone wrote a book or
dissertation using markdown, python, pandoc, makefile, and git... sigh! The
reason they write those blog posts is because no one would believe anyone
would go through the hassle of avoiding Microsoft Word to that extreme. It’s
one thing to be a bit “retro” and keep using WordStar or WordPerfect, but
those are at least real word processors.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
A whole lot of people don't _like_ writing in Microsoft Word, for a variety of
reasons, and there are editors of varying types aimed at that audience. A lot
of professional authors write in Scrivener. I know of more than you
(apparently) think who write in Ulysses or iA Writer, which are both pretty
capable editors. I own all three of those apps, am actively using Ulysses for
a big fiction project currently, and don't own Microsoft Word. I know of more
than a few fiction authors who like writing their prose in text editors --
Charlie Stross, Cory Doctorow, and Steven Brust come to mind off the top of my
head. (Brust has used Emacs for a very long time and I presume still does;
Stross and Doctorow both used BBEdit at some point in the past, and I believe
both used Markdown, although that was years ago.)

As for whether Markdown is "a bit of a joke in the real world," I suppose it
depends on what your definition of the real world is. Having attended a major
technical writing conference a few weeks ago, I can assure you that while
there are arguments in my field over Markdown, they are not over whether we
should just give up on it and use Microsoft Word instead.

