The best analogy for me is buying versus leasing a car. I purchase my cars and keep them for 10-14 years. This means my TCO is much less than if I lease (rent) a car or buy another vehicle every 4-6 years. The savings in interest alone are significant. The bottom line, literally, is that in the long term, the TCO for app subscriptions is higher than that for one-time purchases.
Just as important to me is that subscription-based apps stop working if you stop paying.
That’s a good way of looking at it. If an app saves you time and/or money or brings you enjoyment, then it probably is worth paying for either with a sub or one time purchase. Regarding the “free” apps from Apple, don’t kid yourself. You’re paying for those. They aren’t creating them or updating them out of the kindness of their heart.
Indeed, which is why I was careful to point out above:
I realize that one has to update apps when new OSs break them or if they have new compelling features. There is no free lunch. I have to pay for my apps either directly or, in the case of Apple’s default apps, the price is baked into the hardware and or the services I purchase from Apple.
Nope. I am paying for the features and functions that app provides today and to use them for as long as I like.
I’ve spilt enough electrons here and elsewhere on the web, so I won’t rehash all those arguments. But this is a false equivalence.
When buying a license via a one time purchase one gets a known set of features and functions that can be used as long as one wants. There is no need to have any future interactions with the developer. Thus the “goes out of busines” or “sells out” scenarios are irrelevant. With a subscription I am financing potential future enhancements that may be of no value to me, and if the “out of business” or “sell out” event occurs one is SOL. Only one of these is a gamble.
Nope. I am paying to use the features and functionality available now, with no concern for the future of the developer. Of course I’d like the developer to stay in business and provide future enhancements and value to me, but as I’ve written elsewhere, it is not my responsibility to keep any developer in business. Rather it is the developer’s job to convince me that any new functionality is worth my hard earned cash.
And I stand by my statement that unless there is an ongoing direct cost to the developer for my use of their app, there is no reason for a subscritption.
I will let Fantastical expire in October. Thats about all I can do. My yearly software subscriptions heading into the New Year.
TextExpander
1Password
Airmail
Carrot
Copy Em
DayOne
Drafts
Fiery Feeds
Goodnotes
Reading List
Radarscope
Adobe YEARLY/Paid MONTHLY (Yes it is clear for me)
I have Grammarly and I have the Developer beta with Apple Intelligence. Unless they make the writing tools much more aggressive, for my purposes it’s not even close to replacing Grammarly.
I had hoped it would be so, since Grammarly is a fairly expensive subscription. But unless they make radical adjustments to the proofreading tools, I’ll still be paying for Grammarly.
I was a long time reader of this forum and have read through your journey of going subscription free
I must say, your journey really inspired me to relook at my subscription and cut down on lot of subscriptions. Although I am nowhere near going subscription free (or not willing), but it was an exercise which ended up saving me a lot of money lol
I see what you’re saying, but paying for software isn’t like paying for a hammer. Unless you’re never going to update your operating system, an app with unmaintained code is going to eventually get buggier and eventually break. And that may happen long before “one wants.”
It’s a great point that with a subscription, if the dev goes out of business or sunsets the app, there’s no guarantee that they’ll let subscribers keep using the last version of the app indefinitely.
But if a dev (especially a new or solo one) offers a choice of, say, a $30 per year subscription or a $125 “lifetime” payment, you are gambling either way. If the dev goes under in a year, you’ve lost the bet compared to someone who just paid the $30. Even if you can keep using the abandoned code for a while, you probably would have been better off spending your money on something else.
Regardless of whether it’s a traditional model or a subscription, I think it’s wise to focus on whether you’re getting adequate value from the app as it exists now. If the answer to “Is this worth paying for now?” is no, it doesn’t matter what vaperware is promised for the future.
But when it comes to core productivity apps, I do want to know that the developer has a viable business model and is likely to be around in the coming years. I’m not convinced that subscriptions are necessary for that, though, despite what devs switching to them tell their customers.
I’m very sympathetic to this argument, but I’m not sure it’s true. The dev always faces the risk that customers will stop buying and cut off their income, and that includes canceling their subscriptions.
Unless a dev has other sources of income or investment, customer payments always fund development, regardless of whether they use a subscription model or a traditional one.
I agree conceptually, but if a dev can get enough people to pay the subscription anyway—and apparently quite a few of them can—then from their standpoint there’s a business reason, and my railing against its unreasonableness isn’t going to change their mind.
Again, regardless of the payment model, the relevent question for the user is whether the extra money over a less costly or free alternative (or simply doing without) provides enough added value to be worth the cost.
For me, when it comes to subscription apps, the answer is almost always no. You have four, but I only have one, and I’m not sure I’m going to keep it.
The reasons for not subscription is simple: not worth! Can’t trust developers. Can’t commit.
Theoretically subscription can make an app sustainable and keep being reliable, however most apps opt in adding (unnecessary) features instead of as less as possible overall. Because when you just maintain it well, customers can complain why I pay every year but nothing new. Thus, there are more and more bugs. Yes, they do fix but it’s not top priority: fixing one will create another. Endless. Just an app but because of subscription model, they need more costs to drive it. Believe it or not.
My experience told me some apps just one-time purchase can be doing well. iA Writer (I believe Things can). You may say Bear but there are still many annoying small bugs today. I can’t tell which apps with subscription can do well. They just do too much. They try to make it as a service which links everything and only online is possible, and the whole system can be vulnerable.
Yes, reliance on Apple apps also needs money because you will need to buy a new device to keep your OS up to date. But at least their apps are okay, no big problems, usable. When my MacBook Air 2018 can’t upgrade to macOS 15, Apple won’t keep urging me to trade off my laptop.
@Bmosbacker Nothing targetted to you. As a general comment –
You can lower the TCO by buying 3-4 year old devices which still will run another 3-4 years.
At the same time even for music you don’t have to subscribe for Apple Music/Spotify/Tidal or similar straming services. Over the air FM will be $0
Instead of owing a car for 14 years, Uber would be cheaper. Factor in maintenance, tax, insurance. Even if you primarily work from home you still cannot get past the fixed costs.
Many books have been written just on standard Text Edit too.
I align with your approach but also have some entertainment apps which i have pruned back to Netflix and Amazon. I am sadly trapped with Kayo (sports) in Australia (an outrageous A$360/yr). All I want is to watch the Formula One but Foxtel (read Newscorp/Murdoch) has the license.
Apparently though Foxtel is being sold and carved up. Seems all the major sports (read multi-billion dollar sports) are now being packaged up as independent streaming services…So much for cutting the cable, now I just have more “wires”.
I would also love to kill Office365 but not confident that using Apple’s pages/numbers etc plays well if you need to export to Excel/Word etc which sadly my work needs dictate. Anyone abandoned Office365 and managed with Apple pages/numbers etc?
Based on my own experience, if you need to exchange Word, Excel, etc. documents with others professionally, especially if multiple people will be editing or marking them up, I recommend sticking with MS Office.
As of 2018, we had no problem sharing or linking LibreOffice and MS Excel spreadsheets (that were not password protected) but I never found any program that could exchange complex MS Word files successfully.
I have to pay for my apps either directly or, in the case of Apple’s default apps, the price is baked into the hardware and or the services I purchase from Apple.
