Apps that shouldn't be Subscriptions

What is the most useless app that you have seen being given as a subscription?

For me, I tried a ‘minimalist’ launcher app for Android that had a 7 day trial or something and they had a yearly subscription based model for it. I was aghast. I would literally expect the app to blow my mind and do everything one can assume to go that way. In a world, where Nova Launcher (Yes, I know it has been acquired by Branch folks but it still is a sturdy one) or Niagara exist plus many alternatives including minimalist ones on F Droid, the dev must be releasing revolutionary stuff to factor in a subscription service.

Second, is a controversial choice, since it’s free tier is quite good and people like it so much. But, Pocketcasts. I checked it’s yearly price the other day, and boy, in my country, I can subscribe to Google Play Pass, YouTube Premium and Spotify and still have money left before I hit the ceiling what Pocketcasts is asking for paid upgrade.

Also, what are your views on one time purchase vs subscriptions? Personally, I find it much easier to purchase, if it’s good enough even if it was piratable, something if it is a one time purchase rather than repetitive.

dgmib,

Wow… lots of people in here bashing the subscription model, but let me point out it’s maybe not as bad as you think…

If you sell a product under a perpetual license model (I.e the one-time purchase model). Once you’ve sold the product, the manufacturer has almost no incentive to offering any support or updates to the product. At best it’s a marketing ploy, you offer support only to get word of mouth advertising of your product which is generally a losing proposition.

Since there’s little incentive to improve the experience for existing customers. Your main income comes from if you can increase your market share which generally means making products bloated often leading to a worse experience for everyone.

If the customer wants support, you need to sell them a support contract. If they want updates you have to make a new version and hope the customer sees enough additional value to be worth upgrading. Either way we’re back to a subscription model with more steps, more risk, and less upside than market expansion so it takes a backseat.

If you want to make a great product without some variation on a subscription. You need to invest heavily upfront in development (which most companies don’t have the capital to do, and investors generally won’t invest in unproven software)

From a product perspective, you don’t know if you’ve hit the mark until people start using your product. The first versions of anything but the most trivial of products is usually terrible, because no matter how good you are, half to three quarters of the ideas you build are going to be crap and not going to be what the customers need.

Perpetual licensing works for a small single purpose application with no expectation of support or updates.

It works for applications with broad market needs like office software.

For most niche applications, subscription models offer a better experience for both the customer and the manufacturer.

The customer isn’t facing a large transition cost to switch to a competitor’s product like they would if they had to buy a perpetual license of it, so you have a lot more incentive to support and improve your product. You also don’t see significant revenue if the customer that drops your service a couple months in… even more reason to focus on improving the product for existing customers.

People ought hate the idea of paying small reoccurring fees for software instead of a few big upfront costs. But from a business model perspective, businesses are way more incentivized to focus on making their products better for you under that model.

Kir,

Lots of words and lots of assumptions. You can improve a product and release another version with a paid upgrade, while the old version remains completely functional. If your works have made the software substantially better, people will be happy to pay for a new version. If you aren’t adding real value, having the last version should not be necessary.

MomoTimeToDie,

Updates can both add real value, but not be worth piecemealing out as separate purchases.

dgmib,

Totally fair if you don’t like the subscription model.

But I am genuinely curious what you think I’m making assumptions about.

Kir,

Your biggest assumption is that you don’t have the drive to better a product if you don’t have a subscription model. It’s simply not true. You can and in fact must work to better your product if you want to stay relevant in the market and drive your customer to pay for a new version of your software.

Then, you proceed by describing the positives of a subscription model. While you’re not wrong about those points, you are leaving out the negatives and forgetting that every business model would have symmetrical points to be made.

There are some context in which subscription model are suited for or in fact even necessary, but the harsh reality is that now every software is turning into a subscription model only for two reason: you can extract 10x 100x more money for your customer, and you can lock-in them in order to keep them paying. This has proven to be detrimental for the quality of the softwares too: software loose interoperability and compatibility, updates are so frequent and gimmicky that they can be a problem, etc etc.

tartan,

This sounds almost identical to the script our former VP of PM parroted. Everyone in engineering was vehemently opposed. But the C suite loved it, so we switched to a subscription model. Guess what, NEMs and govt clients don’t like paying subscriptions. No one does, but these are huge, powerful business entities we’re talking about here. You can’t force their hand. We lost 3 of our 4 biggest clients within 6 months. It took a massive amount of work to reverse course.

Just admit it. Subscriptions are nothing more than a blatant money grab. We (the SW industry) have been successfully releasing software and making fucktonnes of money for decades before some bean counter decided to get too greedy and come up with this bullshit.

dgmib,

I will absolutely give you that transitioning an established mature product to the subscription model is usually a terrible idea. Plenty of examples of that going horribly wrong.

As for subscriptions being a “blatant money grab” that definitely happens sometimes… notably when there’s a mature product with a dominating market share. The company already captured most of the market share, so they can’t get much more revenue from new customers, existing customers are satisfied with the version they have so they’re not buying any updates. Sales go down and someone comes along say just make it a subscription and keep milking the cash cow forever…. Yep, I admit it, that totally happens. The enshitification ensues.

But none of that’s the fault of the subscription model per se.

The same subscription model that becomes the incumbent’s downfall, is what creates a market opportunity for a new competitor.

A new competitor can coming in with a new product that was built with a subscription model from the start. The competitors product is cheap to try for a month, cheap to switch to with no big upfront costs. The newcomers can generally react much faster to customers needs than the incumbent. (Not because of the model, they can because they’re smaller)

Established software companies doing blatant money grabs happen all the time. Hell most of us are here using Lemmy because Spez attempted a blatant money grab on Reddit. Had nothing to do with the model.

Subscription model gets a lot of hate because greedy companies tried to use it as a blatant money grab exactly as you described. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Subscription models make it easier for newcomers entering a space, which is good for consumers. It’s more compatible with agile development methodologies because you don’t need wait until you’ve bundled enough features together to market it as a new version worth upgrading to. It’s in your best interest to ship new features immediately as they’re developed.

It’s totally fair of you don’t like the model.

But the model itself isn’t the problem.

Shitty companies being greedy will always happen.

tartan,

Fair enough. I think us and everyone else on this thread can definitely agree on that last point, at the very least. 🫡

conciselyverbose,

I don't want or need continuous updates.

I want to buy something and have it be left alone without trying to steal more money from me for the thing I already bought.

The only possible valid excuse for a subscription to software is services that cannot possibly exist without meaningful spending on server infrastructure. If that's cloud storage as the core of the purchase of the app, computations that are literally impossible to do locally or rely on data that's expensive to maintain, a subscription is legitimate.

If it's anything else it's shitty and you're a shitty person for doing it. Sell actual upgrades when they're actually upgrades, without stealing access to what people bought. It's the only acceptable model.

Rosco,

One-time purchase. If I’m buying something, I want to own it. No compromises. Luckily basically every software that I use is free and open-source so I don’t have to worry about that. If I can’t find a particular software for a niche usage, I make it.

mindbleach,

Products aren’t services.

So much bullshit has come from pretending otherwise.

janguv,

But loans are temporal. That’s all that is happening – you’re renting out software (akin to digital library borrowing), in some sense, not buying a product.

The problem is how to do it otherwise and maintain enough income to ensure continued active development for future updates.

I don’t have a solution to it, and subscriptions aren’t ideal, but that’s the problem at least.

kratoz29,
@kratoz29@lemm.ee avatar

Well, there are too many to name, but one that called my attention recently was Battery Guru… I thought you could buy the app, but it seems that it has only a subscription model? Yeah I’d rather buy it once than having to pay each day, month or year.

dasgoat,

Would you rather drain your battery or your bank account

kratoz29,
@kratoz29@lemm.ee avatar

I chose none 😆

There is BetterBatteryStats and Franco Kernel Manager, AccuBattery and GSam Battery Monitor to track the battery, most tools should exist too.

Anyway, the free version of Battery Guru doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

kirk782,
@kirk782@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Lol, I was actually browsing Mobilism yesterday and came across a modded version of this app, I think. I didn’t install it though. I wonder if I should that a try.

kratoz29,
@kratoz29@lemm.ee avatar

I’d say you are going to be fine with the free app, at least I don’t see ads as I have AdAway always on lol.

beto,
@beto@lemmy.studio avatar

There’s was a scanner app that I loved, for Android. Turned into a subscription, even though most people use it less than once a month and even though the app was basically complete and never got updates.

monz,
@monz@pawb.social avatar

Any app that doesn’t require any backend to function.

If you ask for a subscription for an app without the need to support a backend… I won’t subscribe. I’ll find something else.

Mostly anything else is fine.

Though, if it’s something like a Note-Taking app where the cloud infrastructure for backups and sharing would cost pennies and you’re asking more than $1 a month, I’m out. Looking at you, Evernote. $64 a year to replace the built-in Notes app? No thanks.

lemmyvore,

Maybe you can think of the developer like a backend.

traches,

Payroll pretty much always costs more than hosting. Update frequency and quality is a far more useful consideration

Chobbes,

I’ve seen some companies make a valiant effort to make their AWS bill their largest expense, but you’re right.

AWittyUsername,

So companies/indie Devs don’t deserve profit. I see

somegadgetguy,

It’s higher level, but video editing on mobile got ugly with this. I’m totally fine to pay for new plugins, but there’s no processing done off my phone. There’s no reason to subscription lock features like 4k rendering and plugins. Especially when free editors are pretty good (after dealing with ads) or Lumafusion is great with a one time purchase.

Damage,

Ok so I don’t completely agree… The thing is: mobile apps today have this approach where they don’t have “releases”, there’s one entry on the app store, and if you buy that you usually get updates for as long as it exists.

In the past, computer software always had periodic (usually yearly) releases, which meant that if you bought one version, afterwards you’d have maybe updates for bugfixes and such, but no new features. The result was that the development of new features was paid by people replacing the old version with the new one, because they wanted the improved version.

Nowadays you buy the app and you keep getting new features, sometimes for years, and that development is paid solely thanks to new buyers. Which is cool if you are the customer but it’s not great long term for the developer.

janguv,

Yeah I think this presents a genuine problem for the active development of apps for smaller developers, for sure.

monz,
@monz@pawb.social avatar

That’s true, but it’s also possible to release apps individually on mobile similar to PC releases.

We also currently get the worst of both worlds with stuff like Goodnotes. They had a one-time buy, but currently they’ve injected AI-related nonsense into v6. They allow owners of the previous version to still use v6, but it’s extremely crippled and functionally worse than 4 or 5. Constant nagging about the new version and features. V6 fully replaced v5 on the App Store, so we can’t do anything about it now. Even in my purchase history, my purchase was forcibly “upgraded.”

What I paid for was a digital notebook app that I could write down notes on with my Apple Pencil and iPad. It had a few nice features I didn’t really need, but were nice to have like writing-to-text replacement. It had cloud backups, but they were through iCloud or OneDrive on the user’s individual storage so I’m assuming it didn’t add a monthly cost overhead to the developer.

Now it’s a subscription model app with features I don’t want nor need that completely replaced the app I paid for.

Luvon,

Good notes has an option to revert to v5 and I haven’t had any issues so far staying on v5.

I thought they also had a one time purchase option for v6 but it’s been awhile since I looked.

They did the switch better then notability tried to do. Notability tried to switch otp users to their new plane after a grace period of a year. They caved to backlash and added a legacy plan for older purchasers.

blakeus12,
@blakeus12@hexbear.net avatar

a VR app called “Supernatural” that was a fitness based beat saber clone

Drewski,

Filebot, I like and use the app but it shouldn't be a subscription. You can buy a lifetime license for $48 but it's too expensive for what it is.

LoganNineFingers,

I’m with you here. I figure I’ll buy the year when I need it. I did the math and figured the lifetime was about 10 years worth. I figured if I end up paying for 10 years worth eventually, they’ve earned it. Likely something free will come out and I won’t need it anymore.

I’ve mostly stopped using it because I have had no more issues with plex recognizing files now.

Cyberflunk,

Filebot is wildly useful. U cray

purple,

A subscription to a mobile game that gives more gold when buying gold

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

YouTube is a weird one, personally. Why shouldn’t it have a subscription based service like any other streaming network? Because the content is not created by, funded by, or even necessarily supported by YouTube.

It would make more sense for the subscription to be put upon uploaders to host the content, since their business is hosting the files, not really the content itself.

Now, if they had a better or at least more transparent way of giving the creators a truly fair cut of the monetary gains earned through their videos I would have nothing against YouTube Premium aside from hating that a completely free service has to move to a paid service.

timbuck2themoon,

Except Google is established. Paying a company that has shown complete disregard for users and privacy and ethics doesn’t work.

An upstart? Sure. They don’t have a proven track record of being assholes.

pathief,
@pathief@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t agree with this. It creates a monetary barrier to starting a new channel. If uploading costs money the number of uploads is going to reduce considerably, no one likes to throw money away.

Agent641,

100% onboard with this. Just like imgur before it went shit in like 2014. Free uploaders get basic hosting, limited to 1080p, 5 min videos, max of ~5gb uploads, low-priority authentication/verification/approval, monetization/in-video advertising not allowed.

Subscription for 1hr videos, 50gb storage, streaming (50hrs/mth) monetization allowed.

Premium subscription for 4k, arbitrary length, 500gb (can be increased as required for additional cost)

r_se_random,

Nope, that would be horrible.

One of the biggest draws of YouTube is that anyone can go and upload their stuff. We literally have youtubers who started out in their rooms with a webcam, and became big because of the quality of their stuff. This would put a barrier of entry for new youtubers to enter.

AVengefulAxolotl,

The best subscription model I have seen so far is for the JetBrains products. They call it the perpetual fallback license.

Quote: “A perpetual fallback license is a license that allows you to use a specific version of software without an active subscription for it. The license also includes all bugfix updates, more specifically in X.Y.Z version all Z releases are included.”

quo, (edited )

deleted_by_author

    •
    AVengefulAxolotl,

    Because you need to pay for further patches / newer versions, and need to pay 12 months worth to be able to use without a subscription.

    It gets cheaper each year, so it incentivizes you to pay year to year.

    Their explanation of the license

    bitwolf,

    Is that only for certain editors? Because at work, the second I go offline I’m forced to close Idea.

    AVengefulAxolotl,

    I dont know really, havent used paid versions of JetBrains products. I was always just eyeing with them.

    sukhmel,

    Maybe you use the corporative version? My products don’t ask me to close when I’m offline, and even when I’m not logged in with JB account they start asking to log in after some weeks

    lemmyingly,

    This is standard perpetual licensing seen across many software.

    One off payment = you get a perpetual license for the major version of the software including all patches for it.

    Subscription = you pay a smaller fee than the one off payment per annum. You get all updates and patches. But when you stop paying, you don’t get anymore updates or patches and you can lose access to the software.

    AVengefulAxolotl,

    Yeah i guess you are right. Did not even think about it.

    stardust,

    Only subscriptions that make sense to me a cloud based ones that can’t function at all without access to the internet due to not being able to retrieve content needed to function. Examples that come to mind are netflix and spotify, since even though you can download content to watch or hear offline you need internet to retrieve new content. Means there are hosting costs, and I’m basically paying to not host all that content myself.

    But, anything else doesn’t make sense to me. If app wants to charge again then they can do another version release, and let people keep using the old version if they want while stopping updates for it. I don’t do subscriptions.

    Kit,

    Duolingo. Why can’t I just pay $100 or whatever one time? Languages don’t change to the extent that it needs to be a subscription.

    thoughts3rased,

    They do update the learning material over time as recommendations for teaching the languages changes, plus they do have server costs to keep in mind.

    yamanii,
    @yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

    Yeah, the japanese course had a total reboot, I think I lost some progress because of it? It’s been years so I don’t remember exactly.

    timbuck2themoon,

    Yeah and every update seems worse than the last.

    They don’t let you at all skip around so I’d never pay. It only gets worse with them.

    Remotedeck,

    If you pretend your a teacher and create a class then you get infinite hearts for free.

    Hiro8811,

    Don’t remember the name but there was a magisk module manager that had ads and didn’t even install the modules. Just downloaded them after an ad. It asked money for removing ads

    spyd4r,

    Geocaching. Like come on.

    fender_symphonic584,

    $30/yr? $2.50 a month? A hobby that gets you outdoors, exploring nature, exploring cities, learning the history and culture of an area, getting you to spend time with your kids in those same spaces if that’s applicable to you isn’t worth that?

    spyd4r,

    $10 a month or $50 a year in Canada. Aren’t all the caches community created? Where does the $50 a year go?

    fender_symphonic584,

    Well, Canadian costs change the equation, even for me. $10/month is significant compared to $2.50. Caches are community created. But no one would known they were there unless someone published the information. So the money goes to a team of developers working to maintain the app and website, and the API they share with other 3rd parties. They have an office in Seattle as well. They have office staff and a foyer that is maintained for geocachers to visit and earn the find of Geocaching HQ.

    slightperil,

    I do miss it, that changed very much killed my koy for the past time. The alternatives were never as good.

    somegadgetguy,

    Wow yeah. I LOVED hiking around looking for caches.

    thomasloven,

    Awww I had forgotten about that. Now I’m sad.

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