Subscription software is projected to grow as much as 20% a year for the foreseeable future. Apple’s fastest growing source of revenue is Services, which includes the App Store.
Sadly, I think today will be considered the “good old days” of cheap software in a few more years. 
I keep hearing (not just here) that it’s a coffee a month or a buck a month. However, there are more countries and currencies in the world than just the USA. The price jump is considerable for many areas.
It does make me wonder where the revenue will come from. I keep paring my subscriptions down. If costs continue to rise by this kind of amount I’ll start moving to FOSS.
Edit
I wonder if this will become a reality. That everyone with the use of AI will just create their own solution? Just pay one subscription to AI and let it do all the work rather than paying for multiple apps? In terms of compatibility or sharing, let AI handle the conversion.
I also use MS To Do for work. But I find the input so clumsy compared to Todoist. Unless I am missing something, to set a reminder for a task in involves so many clicks with the mouse. Do you have any tips for quick task entry? The natural language processing of Todoist is unbeatable in my opinion. I am locked in at the legacy price of $36 / year. For the time being I am sticking with it.
Use physical to do 
I just type “work on object at 2pm tomorrow” and it works fine. It’s not instant like Todoist though. You have to wait 2-3 seconds for it to “recognize” what you wrote. Definitely not as accepting or fast as Todoist.
i am a legacy member. although i pushed very hard for their development of hierarchical teams, over ten years ago, which would have propelled them into serious enterprise, i couldn’t get it.
yet, i have stuck with them all these years, and they remain one of the best task managmeent cloud products out there.
i fully realize that AI plugs these days cost tokens. i hope they’ll revisit the inclusion of AI features at legacy price as Apple silicon matures and on-device models are able to take on LLM token generation at zero cost.
–Mike O.
Copy and paste works as well. Copy the image you want to the clipboard. Then in Reminders, highlight the task’s row by clicking on it (not in the text field), and hit Cmd-V or right-click to Paste.
This is in Tahoe 26, but I’ve used it in previous versions.
I also have to. One of the things I can do is to link Reminders with the Exchange account and apparently I can use Reminders as a frontend for Microsoft tasks.
But the biggest gripe with MS Todo is that it looks like a missed opportunity by Microsoft. Why can’t I directly create a todo from a Teams conversation? (Turns out you can, but going through MS Planner). Also, creating tasks from Outlook without having to flag the emails would be nice.
I cancelled Todoist some years ago when the price was increased - somewhat unreasonably in my opinion. I switched to TickTick and have never looked back. The free version offers everything I need. It’s rock solid and even with a free account, customer service is top notch if you need it.
$60 seems a like a lot. A less expensive alternative is Things 3. I bought the Things 3 iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps for $80 (?) in July 2019 and haven’t had to pay a penny more since then. And they frequently update the app.
I’m surprised they haven’'t gone to subscription model, but as of now, it’s the best value of any app I use.
I have tried to see if I can give Omnifocus 4 another go. I have had sync problems with OF4 so I completely uninstalled all apps on all devices. I also deleted all my data. I made a fresh install on my M1 mac and devices and recreatedd all my projects and tasks. Result: sync is not working properly. If I edit on my iphone the edits do not show on the desktop app until I restart the app.
This in the end is a deal breaker as I cannot trust that I’m working on the latest edits.
I will stay put with ToDoist, and will thankfully be locked into the Pro Legacy Plan. I am not too bothered about being frozen out of the newest shiniest (‘Ramble’), though that might change with a few more iterations of the app. Other services easily replicate Ramble, too – e.g. speaking to Wispr Flow, and copy-pasting the resulting bullets into ToDoist.
I am curious about other options though. Reminders, maybe. I’ve toyed with Omnifocus often, never really got along with it (too much complexity and optionality for my liking). Mostly I do this in a Christmas holiday or some other downtime.
But in fact, ToDoist fits me like an old pair of jeans; I’ve built a system I can forget about, natural language input is superb.
I have, though, had a few outages, and so have been frozen out of my tasks for a few hours. In the weekend: no problem, whatever. On a busy morning at work: not so much fun. So I am drawn to a local first, offline functional task manager.
The real killer at the moment is the time investment in learning a new app and migrating my data. I just can’t face it!
I have a completely different opinion about subscriptions. Projections are the reason why every other company is jumping onto the bandwagon but in reality people are fed up about paying monthly fees for something very simple. It just adds up and the economy in general is going downwards.
The market is getting overfed. You can see it in Netflix and co video on demand services, you can see it in video games where the indie market is going into a golden era and you can see it also in the rise of Linux.
There is a point where everything will change again towards the other direction.
You just have to look at the r/macapps sub. There are more and more indie devs everyday showing their open source or low cost alternatives.
@johnkree I would also agree with you. The subscription increases this year have not been trivial running at about 20% for me. I have for the first time installed libreoffice and Linux on an old MacBook Air. I’m preparing for the point when I have to pull my belt in.
I’m also recognising that an AI subscription can do the work of a number of other apps. I’m currently trialing different workflows. I do think that over time it may be possible to run an AI locally that can help you manage your workflow in a way that multiple apps do now. Though expensive, if all you’re paying for is an AI subscription that may be cheaper than multiple subs. Better still an open source AI model that can run locally may put a lot of apps out of business. You could get AI to code your own bespoke solutions.
All told, things are going to change and I think the days of many subscriptions are numbered.
I agree that people aren’t happy about prices continually going up, and that the economy appears headed for trouble.
I was an adult when personal computers starting arriving in people’s homes, so unless Pong qualifies, I was never a gamer. And I haven’t been a regular subscriber to Netflix since they quit sending me CDs in the mail.
But I did check out Linux in the early days, and started managing commercial websites running on Linux (and Solaris) in 2000. And later, after Avaya switched to Linux, I also managed call center phone systems using it.
My point being, in all the time I’m been watching, desktop Linux has gained slightly more market share than twice that of ChromeOS.
You may be correct, but I don’t see things changing in the foreseeable future.
I wonder though whether we’ll reach a tipping point sooner where things accelerate? AI is in its early stages, governments are hardening their systems with open source alternatives to stop the possibility of national data being intercepted by governments from mainline software venders, subscription costs are increasing well above inflation and people are feeling the financial pinch with utility bill costs and major food price increases. All this together may cause a more rapid shift.
I have no idea. When I started working for a Fortune 100 company in the late 80s we were using dumb terminals connected to a local DEC VAX and an out of state IBM mainframe. By the mid 90’s the internet had changed everything.
We have cloud computing, are close to having internet access anywhere in the world, and AI. I wouldn’t be surprised if it resulted in a major disruption in the way we use technology.
It’s been my experience that most people aren’t in love with computers. They like their iPhones, and Apple Watches, etc. but they aren’t reading about new apps, and listening to MPU when they leave work.
Would there be a market for simpler “phones” that worked everywhere, did most of what you needed right out of the box, and came with a ton of storage and conductivity for $100 a month? What if all your “screens” used the same service?
It’s a ToDo app which is no good for anything beyond basic tasks.