Kinda sped read the article so apologies if I missed it, but why does the author here feel so entitled to something that clearly the company feels unreasonable to continuously maintain? They're clearly a struggling business, it feels like this author has a personal vendetta against the company and would rather they go out of business than break a 14 year old promise made from an entirely different internet economy era.
People were promised they just needed to pay one fee to get the app.
Then, they went to a subscription fee, but grandfathered in previous purchasers.
Now, they've introduced ads.
Their overhead is their problem, they sold me something and now they are renegging. It's like the first thing in the article, not exactly burried.
You're demanding more than a decade of free app updates for a small sum you paid ages ago. Why can't you instead be happy with all the value you got from the app? We aren't born to be small minded and stingy, look up to greater goals and a greater attitude in life. We only have so many years before it is cut from us.
I mean... that was the agreement between both parties. Really not that hard to grasp.
I mean, everytime I see someone talking about them on Twitter, they are clearly struggling with _something_.
If the bank refused to return the money I loaned them, I would rightfully be very upset. I think it's similarly fair to be upset about a company revoking lifetime memberships.
This particular situation is more of a grey area, but I don't think maintenance and operating costs are a sufficient excuse.
We may need a law that regulates "lifetime" purchases. One part is standardised disclosure. The other is putting fees into a trust.
They promised a thing they could not deliver on and that was sufficient to get enough users that they could then sell the app onwards to a bunch of suckers. This is a classic play in the "sell dollars for pennies and then sell the dollars-for-pennies app to a guy with a lot of dollars who eventually gets sick of buying pennies with dollars" genre.
If you make a contract that involves you receiving a one-time fee for something that will cost you far more than that fee, then you will eventually go out of business for being stupid.
Yes, there are hosting costs and maintenance costs. So the original deal (pay once for something that costs us ongoing money) was a stupid business decision. Doesn't change the fact that they undertook to make that contract. So now they should be held to it.
And the fact that someone else bought them does not invalidate the contract. When you acquire a business, you acquire their contractual obligations. As it should be, otherwise contracts cannot be trusted in the long run.
For the concerns of contracts, you are not alone on the suffering side. Alltogether humanity elevated tolerance to this level, this is not a surprise.
We're talking about Automattic. It's virtually their business model.
Example: I recently wrote the T&S for my Finnish dictionary app (still working on it), and I make it clear in advance that the license was a one time fee for perpetual use for that major version. [1]
I can do this because the app is almost entirely offline, and because for the parts that are, smart cloud infra decisions means my recurring infra costs are low. If I add in features which imply a bespoke server down the line, of course that would probably be a major version upgrade - and a change in the pricing model to boot. But I'd still keep the old v1 stuff up for the lifers.
[1]: https://taskusanakirja.com/terms-of-service/#91-pricing-and-...
For apps that are growing, this is less of an issue, because users who joined after 2016 (when Apple expanded subscriptions to all apps) could essentially subsidize the costs of early users. But I get the impression that Pocket Casts' growth may have plateaued before then.
I'm not arguing that what they're doing is right -- just pointing out that stupidity is not the reason they originally chose this pricing model.
They added a new/better interface you have to pay money to unlock. When they add new features/services you now have to pay to unlock. What you paid for originally, still yours. Want to get access to the new stuff? You can either pay a subscription for "everything" or pay one-time-unlocks for features.
Then I look at serviecs like lichess where they just operate 100% on donations and users helping by adding their devices into the pool of compute for analysis.
"Shove ads in" is the low, easiest, tackiest way to "annoy" your users into paying. Those that already paid once are annoyed the goalposts have changed. Make the app worth paying an upgrade for, don't just go "well it's still shit but now there's ads unless you pay!"
we have come to a place where corporations are calling limited “unlimited” and outright just lying to people.
i have seen people unironically defend this as “well if they don’t lie, then how do you expect them to sell their product?” again, people have said this entirely unironically.
i think it’s far more reasonable to expect a company to be held to their contracts and agreements. normal people certainly are.
i’ll never understand how we got to a place where so many corporations can say with a straight face “we deserve to make money in any way possible and it’s unfair for you to hold us to any kind of responsibility for our own actions”
So, "a place where a business is held to their word" has never been existed.
1. A few kb of playlists and accounts 2. Probably a search service 3. Likely artwork caching
It's not free to run this.. but it's not exactly expensive either.
Many users pay and don't use the app very much. I am sure there are some super users who use a lot.
And most apps continue to sell, make enough income to fund a few devs and keep the services on. Even with a one time payment.
It's not like pocketcasts is paying the podcasters or producing content.
The problem is seeing every single dumb thing as some kind of mega-growth M&A deal when it's not. No, your podcast app won't make you hundreds of millions, sorry.
I used to subscribe to PocketCasts Plus, but I stopped when they raised the price. It's so expensive.
They do not host any media -- The volume of post searching fulltext is so small single PSQL instance can take over -- your listening progress is a single integer ...
[[ I do understand there is a small distinction here, in that the Dropbox reference is for a user that will self host the storage server, but in the context of this message I refer to the SAAS host or owner of Pocket Casts I cannot imagine to be losing 800k a year even at AWS pricing given what the app does or something is written very wrong ... ]]
You know. I approve the pushback on enshitification. But there’s something weird about righteous fury over an app which literally costs money to run didn’t provide free updates for literally decades on what probably cost like $5.
I dunno. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way.
Release Pocket Caste 2 and they’ll complain. Sub and they’ll complain. Don’t update and they’ll complain.
HN is highly sympathetic to the plight of the open source dev who rage quits because people demand too much for free. This is basically the same thing.
I know this will get downvotes. But I’m not wrong.
The company is stuck in a bad place where the most loyal users, probably those getting the most value out of it in the long run, aren't paying for it. Subscriptions for newer users are one way, or trying to upsell existing users, but this subscription is exceptionally expensive for what it is, and they can only monetise the non-standard feature set.
I'd like to see a return to versioned software. Call Pocket Casts done, fork it, release Pocket Casts 2 for $20 with all these features. Next year release Pocket Casts 3 for another $20. People can update or not, up to them.
I'm also not a huge fan of the way hovering over the link turns it into a highlight on the word, but that's not a huge readability issue because the highlight covers the entire character. But having the non-hovered link underline be fat, so that it partially overlaps the baseline of the characters, means that those characters are superimposed on two different backgrounds, pale blue and pale red, and that harms readability.
This site isn't the only one that does this, or I might not be complaining. It's a style that seems to be popular, and I really don't know why. It's a bad idea and people should stop doing it.
Most beneficial for me is its customizations that can be applied to all shows or configured for individual shows. For example, all episodes for all shows can be set to play at 1¼x speed, but one show could be set to play at 1x speed. For me, the interview format can be at the faster speed, but the music podcast is better at regular speed. Similarly, users could set all shows' episodes to start at the 30-second mark because of, say, opening ads, but a specific show could be set to start at a different time because its opening is unlike the others.
I listen to enough shows that these configuration options make the app great for me. It's been a long time since I tried alternatives, but none of them ever stuck for more than (at most) a few days because the presentation or lack of customizations were less satisfying or convenient.
Truthfully, just writing this has compelled me to give the developer another in-app tip. It's been years since I did that and I must average at least 20 hours of use a week.
Are they rehosting all the audio and that's bandwidth costs? Even then it seemed high.
You get very little extra for the $15/year subscription fee. That’s not a complaint. You get all of the features that most people care about in the Fred version.
It’s available for the iPhones, iPads and the web with full CarPlay support and it syncs podcasts to the Apple Watch.
He did learn from his mistake of making Instapaper a one time payment and sold it.
For those who don’t know, he was the cofounder of Tumblr.
I use it every day. It's smooth, seamless, and FOSS.
Note that I am just a user, and not otherwise linked with them.
zmmmmm•1h ago
To be clear, it's not just that they added ads, but they are obnoxiously in the main active screen while things are playing. Made me also disrespect Automattic as well as this seems very poor behaviour on their part.