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Apps that shouldn't be Subscriptions
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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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All of them. You should be able to buy a program and its yours.
Disagreed. If it requires a server side element, it incurs an ongoing cost and a subscription can be justified. And to clarify, by "requires", I'm referring to the functionality, not having it shoveled in. And the price should be realistic.
Some apps do this well, Sleep for Android is an example that comes to mind. Free with ads, ad-free is an inexpensive one time purchase. You can also purchase additional plugin apps that add functionality that isn't required or even useful for most people. And finally, they have a cloud plugin app to let you backup your data, you can pay for their cloud subscription which is $2.99 a year, but you can also just use other cloud for storage like Google drive.
But if the server side element is just cloud storage, you should be able to supply your own server.
Then the dev needs to build out a range of protocols and API's to enable users to "supply their own server", which can bring a range of additional headaches, like having to provide support for external dependencies outside their control, etc.
What if the users "server" fails? Should the dev waste hours of their life assisting a user with a highly specific Google Drive issue when they spent $5, 3 years ago?
I mean, there are pretty standard protocols for most of the cloud services, like S3 API - the defacto.
Hell, sftp is fine for most stuff. They just want your data.
But the developer doesn’t need to provide support if you opt to use your own data storage and the storage itself fails. And
Google would be the one to contact if Google drive has an issue.
Well yes, but that's not how your average user thinks and acts. They will either a) contact you as the developer of the app that doesn't seem to work and when your say it's not your fault give you bad reviews or b) directly give you bad reviews.
If you're developing an app that has you provide your own backend then I don't think you'll be getting many average users.
You could also hide it in advanced settings to weed out those unwilling to learn and offer users a fee to use your server.
Ultimately the only reason I can think of not wanting people to self host is because you want to make money off having people's data.
The average user doesn't work like that, also an average user does not always think he is average. There are many people thinking they are advanced, because they know where settings in Windows or Android are located. You will probably get bad reviews then emails, because quote "your app doesn't work". This comment is based on real experiences with Google Play Store and its users, thinking they know what they do.
You clearly haven't dealt with the "average user". Get ready for a boatload of idiots who followed some crappy tutorial for "how to get it for free" making a problem for support or review bombing the app when they lose all their data through incompetence.
I'm not putting my data up some random server run by some dev
Your commenting here is evidence to the contrary
That's my public posts, not my private data.
But why do that?
You're... Confused why software can require server side features?
Yeah. Not talking about providing a service, that's a different animal (my e-mail provider does it as a hobby on donations). But if you have control over the software and you make it open source anyway, why not make it selfhostable instead? An app bound to a service out of the users control is something with a short live...
For one, lots of software just flat out isn't open source. And plenty of it is far from short lived
Right, i was in a os thread before, my bad. But even then, why have the software run on your server if you can have it in the app? Only reason i see is to bind customers, which you do when you have a business model/income anyway.
For one, things like cloud storage are obviously not particularly viable to have the customer host themselves, on premise.
Secondly, some things can be extremely intensive to process, and thus performed on specialized, high end hardware rather than over hours on whatever shit phone the customer is using
Downvote instead of answer, nice.
I think people don't understand your question, or think it might be sarcastic. So to answer your question: server storage and computation power costs money. Depending on how your app's backend works, this can be cheap or very, very expensive, paid monthly or yearly. It also needs to scale with the number of your clients actively using the backend. Some of us just sit on the costs to give its users a free and ad-less experience with more functions without taking any money (by the thought "I pay for this server anyways, so why not share it"). But it costs me more, if I have more active users and I have to actively compensate this.
But there are also some greedy bastards, taking much more thinking to get rich with a single app (actually met one of this devs)
JetBrains ran aground of this years ago when they introduced a subscription model for their (excellent) software. People (rightly) lost their fricking minds when they heard that if they cancelled their subscription, they'd lose the ability to continue using the software they'd already paid for.
So JetBrains went back and reworked their system so that a cancelled subscription would continue to have the rights to install all the software that existed up to the day of cancellation. Effectively meaning that if v3 came out the day before you cancelled, you can still install and use v3 10 years later.
JetBrains comes to mind as one of the fairest subscription services I know. It also get cheaper the longer you’re subscribed, incentivizing you to to stay subscribed. It’s both smart and user friendly.
The worst one is probably Adobe.
Adobe is the one company i'd never, ever, ever want to support, especially with a subscription. 🏴☠️ all day every day
I love JetBrains.
I do use JetBrains software. If subscriptions all agreed that when you cancel the subscription you can continue to use the latest version before you cancelled, I'd be prepared to consider them. Any software ought to be able to do this except software that uses significant server resources. I'd even consider rent-to-own where you get to keep the software after a certain number of payments. (Splice offers some music software like this.)
Roland have a ton of good software synthesizers but I will never subscribe to them because the moment you stop they take the whole lot away. Even their "lifetime license" requires an active Roland account and the software disappears if you ever close the account or they change their minds. Similarly I haven't used any Adobe software since they went subscription only.
Yeah that was basically the sentiment of the developer community when JetBrains announced the change. Thankfully they heeded the screaming and fixed their model. I've been using JetBrains tools for around 10 years now and they continue to impress. I can't recommend them enough.
If you want a worse example than Roland, let me tell you about my solitary experience with IK Multimedia. I bought a secondhand hardware synth of theirs off marketplace. Get it home and try to download the software tool to control and update it. It tells me to set up an account, and then lets me download it, awesome. Plug it in and fire up the software, and it tells me I’m not licensed. Wait, what? Search through their support site and it turns out that to transfer the “license” for this piece of hardware you have to pay them $49. Sunk cost fallacy got the better of me at this point and I sent an email through to support asking if I could pay the transfer fee. Nope, only the original owner can transfer the license. I was so immediately turned off it that it sat around as a paperweight for a few months. Ended up selling it to a pawn shop.
Meanwhile, Arturia are the exact opposite. When you buy a digital license of the Arturia V Collection, you own that license. Which includes being able to sell it to someone else, and transfer it to their account for free. I bought a secondhand MIDI controller of theirs, which had some bonus licenses for their software originally included. They transferred the license to me with just a picture of the serial number label. But I could still download and use the software for setting up macros and updating it without doing that.
I hope Arturia don't change. They are one of the most reasonable companies out there when it comes to licensing and pricing.
Licenses for hardware are a concerning trend, because it's unnecessary, and because the terms are never made clear before purchase. I suspect it's mainly there to sabotage the second hand market.
Yeah, I hope they don’t change either. I wouldn’t have been surprised, or particularly disappointed, if they said they wouldn’t transfer the bonus licenses. These weren’t needed to use the device at all. The license was originally for Analog Lab 3, this was a Minilab Mk1, but they’d given free upgrades so the license I got was for Analog Lab V. Having that license meant getting a cheaper upgrade to the V Collection 8. I got a 50% off upgrade to 9 as well, and I just checked now that X is out and they’re offering me the same deal again until late January.
They did deactivate my license for 8 because I’d used it to upgrade to 9, but I think that’s pretty reasonable. You can also absolutely choose to pay the full price and keep the previous version. You can still sell and transfer it too though, and their system will happily let the new owner re-download it. They’ll let you activate the license on an offline computer too, and as far as I can tell, it’s indefinite. You could absolutely take advantage of that, but they don’t punish all of their users because there’s a chance a few are bad actors.
Honestly, in my opinion, they are the platinum standard that software companies across the entire industry should strive to be.
Oh I just remembered another thing. You can buy individual V Collection instruments without ever being worse off. The price of it will be discounted off the full collection. Then, after 4-6 instruments, they’ll just upgrade you to the full ~39 for free. I don’t think even when you could still buy the Creative Suite from Adobe, that they would let you upgrade like that.
(Sorry for the lengthy reply. Arturia is just one of the few companies out there that I will legitimately praise.)
Someone linked them up thread and it doesn’t quite work like that. You need to have been using a version for 12 months before that becomes your “fallback license”. So, if v3 came out the day before, your fallback license would only be v2 if you cancelled.
Oh! Good to know. I guess that's there to prevent people from reaping 2 years worth of development for a 1 year fee. That still seems reasonable to me.
Yeah I think so too. They give it to you immediately if you pay for annual too.
Not quite - you get a perpetual license for the version that was released a year before you cancelled your subscription. And for most languages this is not really practical anyway, as they get relatively frequent updates that require IDE updates, so you will just stay subscribed.
This was a fairly low business risk, high PR value move by JetBrains.
Sygic broke trust like that with me . The software is/was excellent and very reasonable, so I bought licences for parts of world and suddenly they made it subscription based app, with ability to keep forever licence for only part of world you bought.
So even though I have fully paid software , i have to pay subscription for the feature of Android Auto and world maps.
It was the list betrayal of trust i have seen. I never used sygic after that at all.