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.

nhgeek,

I generally hate them in consumer-targeted apps. Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with the model. Devs have to keep the lights on, especially if there is a cloud service behind the app. It’s all about what pricing model they set. However, pricing is hard. A lot of companies really screw this up right at the start. I also think a lot of businesses cannot resist the temptation to boil the frog and ask for more and more over time, until their pricing is way out of alignment with value delivery.

speeding_slug,

Might be a slightly unpopular opinion, but Volumio (software for a raspberry pi to run it as a headless audio system). It’s good, it’s relatively well maintained and works. But paying 7,50 a month for this software to get multiroom audio, Tidal integration and some other stuff is ridiculously expensive. That’s nearly 90 euro a year and the only thing that is actually an addition server side is syncing settings across devices and the Tidal integration (requires license fees iirc).

And sure, I can’t buy multiroom speakers for that kind of money, but damn, is it expensive.

lemmyingly,

I thought about using it a few years ago but their pricing was just too expensive.

ghen,

That’s more than Duolingo costs and Duolingo is constantly adding new languages

vortexsurfer,

I tried Volumio recently, and was prepared to maybe get the paid version if it was as great as it seemed. But the user interface was so god-awful! Absolutely unusable for me. Would never pay for it.

Instead I googled a bit and found Moode - a million times better, and free. Don’t remember if it does multiroom audio, but personally I don’t need that currently.

speeding_slug,

That looks good! I think I’ll try it out soon, thanks for the tip 🙂

NuraShiny,

No app should be a subscription

Scrollone,

Keeping an app up to date takes time and work. Especially if it needs cloud services (e.g. multiplayer games).

Good luck trying to maintain an app forever if people just pay it once.

NuraShiny,

I don’t care

buskbrand,

Then you’re paying for your user account with the cloud services, not the client apps (which you may not even use, e.g. if there is a Web version or a third party client).

A subtle distinction, I know, but it matters.

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

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.

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.

Anders429,

Companies are using subscription models because it has proven to be far more profitable than a one-time purchase. Why sell the product to each person just once when you can sell it to them over and over again? You no longer have to constantly develop new products and versions, and you now only have to maintain your existing product.

And it works because people buy it.

blakeus12,
@blakeus12@hexbear.net avatar

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

No_Ones_Slick_Like_Gaston, (edited )

Apps that provide server time either synchronizing data and storing information or providing an api to bring info to the device.
Data intensive apps like windy can charge whatever they need, now MF like Strava pushing an $79/yr for routes is about BS.

LeylaLove,
@LeylaLove@hexbear.net avatar

Adobe CC. They’ve added new features recently to justify a subscription, but it’s still not that good of a pitch. Some editors will have offline PCs so that their software doesn’t get fucked up by anything (SUPER common in music), so having a subscription model works against professional users of their software.

ilco,

id rather pay a webhost a monthly fee and host most things i need myself your better of donating/buying a opensorce project /app than pay for a licensen to a company whom enforces always online apps . if possible sadly its not always an option as not all things have an alternative or a lacking

nicetriangle,
@nicetriangle@kbin.social avatar

Yeah the Pocketcasts pricing is stupid as hell. I've been having some issues with Overcast and was looking to switch but there's no way that price is worth it.

Rizoid,

I purchased pocketcasts years ago when it was a one time fee and when they moved to a subscription model they gave everyone who purchased a lifetime pass on the subscription model but that rubbed me so wrong I moved away from it. Currently I run Audiobookshelf on my server and have all my podcasts in a library on there. Works really well and I have control over it.

nicetriangle,
@nicetriangle@kbin.social avatar

Yeah I've recently gone the self hosted route for video and may go for audio soon too, but not quite there yet. I think for now I can deal with the few minor annoyances I have with Overcast.

What I'd really like to see someone crack is an machine learning prodcast player that can snip out ads. A few of the podcasts I like have gotten fucking insufferable for ads lately.

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