So you think that $640 over 4 years for a calendar for my family of 4 is sustainable? Or $960 over the same period If pay at the $5 per user per month fee? That’s not a money grab? There has to be a solution where users are willing to pay a fair price and as a result software developers can make a good, sustainable living, but this isn’t it.
1 Like
Ah why make it so hard, just make an option “Purchase 1Password” with its price. Either way no upgrade pricing available last time I checked…
Sustainable? That’s up to the market to decide - but clearly this is what enough devs are choosing to do, partly because of the unsustainable nature of extant pricing.
Not so hard if you google right! 
They want to migrate people to the software they’re supporting; and of course they want to be able to make the case for the subscription as well.
I think the “why” is obvious: they want to sell subscriptions.
1 Like
To keep with your example: what some apps going the subscription route are doing is:
- option to purchase the instrument $800 is gone
- add some minor update
- then you can get the great deal of subscribing for $24 (charged daily, but yearly cycle)
So, if the purchase option ($800) is gone, what would be a “subscription” you’d be comfortable with?
$67 monthly assuming a 1-year usage? $34 assuming 2 years? Instruments last long, so $17 might still be something you’d consider expensive, even if it’s “just some coffees”…
Moving to subscription is hiding some steep price increases. But there are examples of proper subscription pricing: LR+PS became CHEAPER with a subscription (as compared to buying the full product and buying the updates and calculating yearly cost).
1 Like
Exactly that the $800 one-time purchase no longer is an option at all is a problem in that hypothetical scenario.
Let’s append on that little tale:
Another problem is that you might have already bought a $800 dollar tool for your little hobby turned side-business, which would work perfectly fine for many years thereafter, if just for example a $100 maintenance would be performed to make it compatible with the new 64V electrical system, instead of the previous 32V one that the government of the U.S. of Apple just imposed on all inhabitants.
But instead someone from the government, called Mr. Auto Update or his colleague Mr. Accidentally Hit Update that brought the new intern Mr. Can’t Even Undo along, just came to your workshop and took that tool away. You can’t complain, because the state allowed it and created the legal framework for this.
So your only option—if you want to continue your work—is to rent the tool for $24/day, but only if you sign up to pay $24 as a daily installment, if you commit to a yearly plan. So now you will pay $24 x 365 = $8670 just to continue using basically the same tool that you’ve previously owned. You complain that this is unaffordable and the manufacturer points out that they offer a month-to-month plan. In that case your daily rental fee will be $48 instead.
There is no option to rent it for the time you actually use the tool, which might be just a couple of hours per week.
Even though you considered this option due to the lack of alternatives, it is impossible for you to cram all the work you would usually do spread out over the course of year into one month in which you then rent the tool ($48 x 31 = $1488). This is an unreasonable idea. You customers won’t wait for up to a year and also you have a main job that you can’t just put on halt to follow your small side-business.
After one year of sucking it up and taking the cut in earnings you realize that out of the 20 tools that you have previously owned and irregularly used for your little side-business, 15 have switched to a similar subscription model. Some now only offer a very limited free version and require a “pro” subscription to even export your work. The “pro” subscription is outpricing you from using it at all. Some are only compliant with GDPR rules, if you buy their business plan and others seem to now focus on a service, where you physically have to send your work piece in to their storage facilities, where they will paint it pink, which you neither ever needed in the first place, nor your customers want.
So you decide after long and tedious research to replace some of your previously owned tools with alternatives. Now you are using 30 instead of 20 tools, while still paying practically “a second rent” for subscriptions of tools that are essential to your work. You have to charge more for your work and your already small number of customers is decreasing.
In addition some of your little side-business’ customers are complaining, because the output you can created with those replacement tools is not 100% compatible with the quintessential industry standard anymore. You try to convince them, but it is a David vs. Goliath fight. You end up losing more of your customers.
The city of St. Ore (APP) doesn’t care. They earn their 30% sales tax from the sales that were generated by locking you into some of the yearly plans. The tool manufacturer also doesn’t care. They consider you not worthy enough to use their tools, mock you and point to their revenue charts, which for the moment actually increased. (No wonder with a over 10x mark up). Blind to the fact that they significantly decreased their potential market size and therefore will already reach market saturation in just merely a year, they feel assured.
However what all three, the tool manufacturers, the city and the state are not seeing is that there is an ever growing dissatisfaction amongst their inhabitants and users …
1 Like
If one logically thinks about these matters the extant pricing model can be made to work, if you look at Agenda for example. The subscription models are clearly unsustainable in the long run, and I suspect most of the Apps that have gone this route wont last long (perhaps 1Password. Office 365 excepted)
Hope that helps
1 Like
Agreed. I don’t think it’s necessarily better or worse, just different.
Quick, tell all the developers of subscription apps they’re being illogical before they all make fatal mistakes!
There is market for both types. Some categories of Apps don’t warrant subscription. Use case in this instance for Fantastical what improvements do I get over subscription model when I’m least bothered about their sync feature. For now they do retain all the features for the existing customers. But down the line the updates will only be for the subscription payers.
The rant is why not have an upgrade option for those who don’t want sync feature but still would want other features for a upgrade fee.
I think we all understand what the rant is all about. I’ve never had any interest in Fantastical (so I’m really just an observer), but I think they handled this very poorly. Thus the ranting.
Subscription made sense for me since most of the software that I used were expensive as a one-off.
You also have to take consideration third world countries with average salaries that are a quarter of what the first world countries earned. This is also the reason why our music and video streaming are cheaper because if it’s price the same as the US, no one will be able to afford them. But most apps are priced the same but it made sense because they don’t operate like music or video streaming that relies on local distribution for licensing.
Subcription make software affordable for us and economical. Especially if you do freelance work like I do. Of course, there are apps and services that I don’t think warrant a subscrition model like utility apps (except 1Password IMO).
Also, one thing that has changed why developer has to change to subscription is because the rate of changes and development on platform. Back then, there’s only a few platform to support (Windows, Mac, Linux) and OS updates take years. You don’t need to work around the clock making sure that your software runs perfectly. Not to mention the devices that they have to support. If you are Apple-centric, there’s only a few devices you need to support.
Every time Apple pushes new changes every year or quarter (small minor updates), developers need to keep up. New features need to be supported, new devices and sizes of the screen. Consumers expect that developers keep up to those changes and add features or support features that the OS added. That means more work each time. Either they raise their prices or charge for every OS update to be able to support the hours they put up.
Sometimes, we forget that we demand those changes and we still expect them to work for free. We need to understand why developers goes to subscription. If subscription is not the answer, what then? Because if one-off purchase of apps doesn’t secure the development of their work. What are we willing to pay then?
I look at subscriptions this way:
- looking at the price of buying the software products, am I paying more or less with the move to a subscription. Lightroom+Photoshop became cheaper for me, so pricewise a no-brainer. Fantastical would cost +300%, so huge price increase. TextExpanders original subscription pricing was also too high, but they decreased it.
- is this somthing complicated? Huge code base, needs to be backed up by server infrastructure, etc. Adobe’s products or MS Office are a good example of very complex software products (to which I subscribe). On the other hands, several one-trick ponies are trying to get into subscription models. A monthly payment for a simple tool is not something I’d like to have.
- Does it meet my needs? Are there alternatives out there? If an application I use moves to a subscription model (and increases it’s price by doing so), there may be similar alternatives out there (cheaper, FOSS) or I might not even care anough about it to get a subscription (as compared to: care enough for a one-time purchase at a lower price).
So, somewhere between pricing, usage, complexity, need, possible alternatives I draw the line.
In think one of the contributing factors to subscriptions is the inability of the App Store to offer upgrade pricing. In-app purchases fixed the issue of how to handle demos or free trials but upgrades sit by the wayside.
1 Like