I use Google Workspace as does a lot of startups, including most of those now valued at more than $1 billion. And Google is the king when it comes to real time collaboration which is one place that Sheets really has an edge.
But I’d bet a shinny new quarter that the accounting department, in all those unicorn companies, is running Microsoft Excel. 
Since time is money, to me the main question is whether the extra cost of a productivity app’s subscription fee over a similar app’s free/one time payment/cheaper subscription cost saves me enough time to at least pay for itself.
The answers won’t be the same for everyone. Is 1Password worth the extra money over Bitwarden? For you the answer seems to be yes, for me absolutely not—functionally, they both do the same thing.
There’s also the matter of compatibility. I have to use Word, Excel, and Powerpoint because they’re the standard in my field, and I can’t afford compatibility issues.
I agree. As to time versus money, for my needs, the only app that may save me time would be OF. OF is faster for entering information and far superior to Reminders for converting emails to tasks. Because I have OF4 without a subscription, I spent a fair amount of time running Reminders and OF concurrently. At the end of the day, I decided that since I’m using Notes, Apple Mail, Calendar, Pages, and Keynote, the deep OS integration was more valuable to me then the small bits of time OF would save me.
I dropped my Adobe sub at the beginning of the subscription kurfuffle, bought Capture One and several other raw editors to try, and then returned to Lightroom Classic when they released their excellent masking and AI presets. Then I made a free website on their Portfolio product and realized what a good deal the $10 a month Lightroom / Photoshop subscription really is!
C1 has sessions, all based on sets of multiple folders, which works fine in a studio. But Lightroom Classic shooters file in folders, usually by date, and use collections to form smart and ad hoc groupings as they please.
And as far as Adobe yellows or other colors being wrong, objects give off (reflect) a mixture of colors. Foliage is often bluish-green or yellowish-green, almost never pure green so adjusting a yellow slider for leafy greens for example, could most definitely have an effect.
I think we might just disagree with each other on this, and likely have different priorities. That’s ok. I hear what you’re saying with colours and the reality that there’s usually some yellow-green happening in leaves. That’s not really what I’m talking about with Adobe software, where green might as well not exist in their sliders. But it’s neither here nor there.
I will add Adobe’s library management — where everything has one root folder — is not the same as C1’s, where one can decide where to put each session. That’s preferable for a lot of workflows, mine included. You can set up C1 to work just like Adobe, but it’s up to the user.
Now I really don’t know what you are talking about.
EDIT TO ADD: Perhaps you are talking about the limitations of the sRGB color space where green is concerned? Adobe does support larger color spaces, but they usually can’t be used unless you’re sure your work will be viewed on a similarly wide-gamut color display monitor. (But you know that. You are a web developer.)
Lightroom Classic supports the use of more than one catalog (database of images) if you want to partition your work photos from your personal shots, for example. Working in one catalog has benefits when searching for, arbitrarily grouping, and displaying images. I understand that Capture One has limitations in this area when images are stored by session.
My partitioning is more than just personal and work. Client shots can go in specific folders for specific projects, and be associated with specific jobs even. It’s much more granular than an A/B choice.
As far as the green slider goes, I’m exaggerating a bit to prove a point, but it doesn’t do much compared to the yellow slider (as an example), which does way too much. C1 also gives me another two or three stops of dynamic range.
I don’t hate LR, but I don’t like the automatic praise it gets in most circles. For too long, LR has ignored the basic needs of a lot of photographers. It only got pseudo-layers something like 2 years ago — ridiculous. And updates are infrequent. The AI masking is very good and getting better all the time (naturally), but C1 has the same feature and benefits, so I’d call that a wash.
It’s not that it’s bad software. It’s that it should be better. But Adobe is (for obvious reasons) not inclined to invest in it. Because of that, I think it’s easy to replace in a non-subscription based workflow, if one were inclined. That was my original thesis, anyway.
I am pretty much down to 0 subscriptions. Mostly stock apps have become good enough for my needs. Also, I use Notebooks for some PKM/file management.
For me subscriptions have 3 problems which have been partly discussed here.
although this would violate 2). So the value of third party software diminishes.Problem 4 could be addressed by upgrade pricing which many devs are doing although Apple does not make it easy.
Some comments… (In a random order.)
“1. Danger of abandonment”
I would think subscriptions would lower the risk of this? Because recurring revenue would make it possible for the development to be sustainable.
“4. The nagging feeling of a returning cost/ongoing issue.”
We have to separate what an app/service cost, and how it’s paid. Like, if an app costs $10/month, paying for a year upfront might give a discount, so $100/year. Buying something “for life” should also give a discount, but what would be a fair price? If we expect a lifetime of five years, how much is fitting? $300?
It’s just a bit weird to me, that everyone is hating on paying $10/month, but love to pay $300 for an undetermined amount of time and where you don’t know how well the app develops (if at all). 
Now, some might say “No, I want to pay $30 for life”, and that’s fair. But the main thing you’re asking for then is cheaper software - and that’s an entirely different discussion. Like, then we could flip it around, and go back to that I don’t think $1/Month and $10/year is that terrible either.
To me, this thread seems to mainly be about spending less money on apps - and that’s completely fair! My point is that I think the whole “subscription” angle is a bit flawed.
“2. Taking my data hostage. I dislike having my data in their database and format. Often the claims of easy export are more cumbersome than promised. Then devs or VC behind the startup wants ROI and increases prices at will.”
This brings me to this point. 
I hard agree on this. And I only use apps that deal with regular files, for this reason. But if this is relevant at all, isn’t it more of an argument for subscriptions than against?
Like, let’s say we have an app, that does have easy export. And I can choose to either pay $10/Month or $300/Life.
Then, after a year, I found out that I don’t need it anymore, found something I like better, the developer didn’t update the app enough, or something else. If I paid a subscription, I’m out $120/$100, and I can stop paying if I want. Also, if I email the developer, they have a real insentive to keep making me happy.
However, if I’ve already paid $300, I won’t get any of that back. I can’t “stop paying”. Also, doesn’t the developer now have less insentive to keep me happy, as they already have all the money they’ll get from me?
Like, I’m not saying everything should be subscription. I just think some of the criticism is a bit short-sighter, and mostly conflated with thinking software is “too expensive”. (Which a lot of stuff is - but as I said: Different discussion.)
Now the elephent in the room here, is: “What happens when I stop paying?” And the biggest problem with subs, in my mind, is that Apple doesn’t allow for developers to keep giving access to the app (but without updates) after you’ve stopped paying. There really should be a system like “if you’ve paid this amount, you “own” the app enough to keep using it, without updates, after you stop paying”. Nova has the perfect model I guess, where you pay $100 for the app + a year’s worth of updates. And then you can pay another $50 every year you want an update.
Agenda uses this model. Agenda 19, with better search, is coming out soon.
Since I’ve paid for Agenda, I can export everything in Agenda in any supported file format (PDF, Markdown, RTF, RTFD, HTML, TextBundle, Agenda File) forever.
Thanks for the thorough response. Fair points.
Rereading my post, it most points are more related to third party software vs stock apps. But I would maintain that having an ongoing cost for an app feels worse than a one time payment.
So thanks for helping me to clarify my thoughts on subscriptions. Because of improving Apple apps and services (I am thinking of E2EE in iCloud) many apps are not worth the money anymore for me.
I don’t happen to use Agenda, but I’d have much less of an issue with app subscriptions if everyone used their model.
If an app stops working if you stop paying a subscription, they’re still holding your workflow hostage, regardless of whether you can export your data in a useable format.
That’s why, if an app has to go subscription, I prefer Agenda’s and (as you point out) Nova’s models.
I don’t quite get your argument.
Like, if we both paid for an app a year ago: You paid $300/Life, I paid $100/Year. I don’t see how I’m much more “held hostage” than you. Yeah, you could say to me: “Hah, you have to keep paying!” But I’m still far away from having paid as much as you. And if we don’t think it’s worth it anymore, I could just move to something else (free or paid), while you have more money locked up.
If we both ended up using the app longer, after a while you would have paid less than me, of course. But to me, that’s just the next step of “a yearly discount” where you pay less by binding yourself. And this is a nice option to have! But I also think there’s a freedom in being able to switch easily, without thinking too much about sunk cost.
I’m not saying “everything about subs are better”. But I think the criticism is overblown and conflated with higher prices, and that the negatives of the alternative often gets overlooked. For instamce, I absolutely see the appeal of not having recurring costs - but as you don’t have rights to updates, a new OS could make it stop working (and then forcing you to either abandon the software, or study on old OS version).
BTW, what is a fair multiple for a “lifetime” option in this forum’s opinion? Let’s stay with the $10/Month $100/Year example - what should the “lifetime” be? And what should it mean?
Again, I’m trying to separate what we pay and how we pay - so try to come up with a lifetime price that’s not “more cheaper than a reasonable discount for paying more upfront”.
For me, as I noted in a post above, if there is no direct cost to the developer for me using an application, then there is no reason to charge a subscription. Full stop. The subscription model transfers the business risk from the developer, where it belongs, to consumer, where it does not. As Marques Brownlee noted in his recent review of the Humane AI pin, one should pay for what something does today, not what it may do tomorrow.
And it is not my responsibility to keep any developer in business. Really, this should be pretty obvious, but any business needs to earn my custom. Only in software development is it expected that the consumers keep the developer in business.
Provide ongoing value, be it in features that are worth the upgrade cost to me, or changes required because of OS or architecture changes, and I’ll have no problem paying an upgrade fee. The poster child for this for me is BBEdit. I’ve been using it for over twenty years, and have gladly paid the upgrade costs. An no, this is not a subscription, as the software does not stop working if I stop paying.
And as you note in your post, “… I could just move to something else …”, which is also true if the developer goes out of business.
And for this bit you left out an option …
… which is to pay an upgrade fee.
And this phrases the question wrong, as it assumes a subscription is a valid option in all cases. When in fact it rarely is a valid option.
The correct question is what is a valid price for an application. Long ago I enjoyed a book by Andrew Tobias, The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need. In which he relates the story of a question posed in an economics class about how a gas station should set the price for gas. And the answer was basically commensurate with the value provided and competitive with other local providers.
Price an application commensurate with the value it provides, as BBEdit has, and you’ll have a viable business for years, as BBEdit has.
Cheers.
I’m not disagreeing with you about subscription apps that have very expensive one-time payment options, especially when they’re new apps from a solo developer that might not survive very long.
Here are some examples of what I mean:
Scrivener and iA Writer don’t hold my workflow hostage. Ulysses would.
Bitwarden doesn’t hold my workflow hostage. 1Password would.
Obsidian doesn’t hold my workflow hostage, but NotePlan other notes apps would.
Agenda wouldn’t hold my workflow hostage, because it keeps working even if a user stops paying the subscription. They just wouldn’t keep getting updates.
I pay the reasonable $20 a year subscription for Drafts, but it doesn’t hold my workflow hostage, because the free version is so generous I could easily fall back to it.
Things seems to be doing just fine without a subscription—it’s still the #2 productivity app in the App Store. And they even have the ongoing cost of running their own servers for syncing their users’ data.
I’m not necessarily against the concept of app subscriptions, but I think most of them are overpriced for the value they deliver compared to other alternatives. Some of them went to yearly charges higher than the one-time payments they replaced.
I also find the argument that users are somehow obligated to wholeheartedly embrace app subscriptions absurd. It’s a commercial transaction, and it’s up those selling apps to convince buyers that what they’re selling is worth the price they’re asking compared to competitive products or simply doing without.
I’m not saying that those who use the subscription apps I mentioned (or any others) should stop using them. If they find the benefits to them exceed the costs and restrictions, they should pay up and enjoy, regardless of anyone else’s choices and preferences.
They just shouldn’t try to guilt the rest of us into supporting their favorite apps for “the good of the app ecosystem.”
What should lifetime mean? A “lifetime” guarantee/subscription cannot exist longer than the business that created it, so it means nothing. For example, more than half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list in 2003 no longer exist.
One time fee or subscription? That depends on how much I’m willing to bet, each time I pay, that the product will continue to work.
I was thinking about paying for a lifetime subscription for Agenda, but I figure since this is the first notes app that I truly love, I would rather have the program last as long as possible. I’m going to keep paying for the yearly subscription.
Huh? I recently converted my two years of NotePlan to Obsidian just to see if I liked Obsidian better. (Spoiler: I’m sticking with Noteplan for now.) It was easy. I simply copied my Noteplan folder structure and files to a new Obsidian vault. Even the images I have embedded in my Daily Notes worked although the folder convention for embeds differs between the two apps. Noteplan has really good sync between my Mac and my iPhone. Good sync with Obsidian is kind of expensive compared to what I’m paying for Noteplan, which gives me an excellent Mac and iOS app and syncing between them for one price.
What I really proved to myself is that if Noteplan disappeared today (not expecting it to), I would be able to continue quite nicely in Obsidian.