Of course, if there is a cloud component, that's a different story because there are recurring costs to hosting a server. Or maybe a user uses the service enough to justify the subscription (e.g. Apple Music subscription vs paying per song on iTunes or how Claude Code and Codex are actual subscriptions that are extremely worth it for the user).
On Android the solution is side loading if you have the APK. But on iPhone, unless you have the source code or IPA, you're stuck
We see the same pattern over and over again: (1) subscription service starts and operates at a loss, (2) people recognise this and sign-up, (3) the service gradually enshittifies to the point where there is no real value propisition, (4) company banks on having enough customers from 1 and 2 that enough people will put up with 3 that they can remain profitable.
How does this align with my interests?
I subscribe to a couple of apps (OnX, Strong) and some news sites (Tangle, local sports site); as far as I know none of them started on 1, and 3 hasn't happened yet for any of them. They all provide services that I think are valuable, at a fair price - a price that, as far as I can recall, hasn't changed for any of them in the 4-6 years I've been a subscriber.
OnX appears to be heatmaps as a service for outdoor recreation. They have to cover their opex costs.
These are not the subscriptions people have in mind when they say they hate the subscription model. People dislike obvious rent-seeking behavior; they really dislike it when there is no technical reason something can't be sold to them in a one-time transaction; and they hate it when a product that was offered as a permanent one-time purchase is then only available as a subscription service.
About the only argument for it having a subscription of any sort is the devs have to cover the BS from apple/google (mostly google) who don't believe in backwards compatibility.
It's the primary way most SW can work. Pre-subscription, you needed to make SW that was so much in demand that it could survive piracy. Once the worry about piracy went away, a lot more SW became commercially viable.
Even Sid Meier said in his memoir that while he hates subscription, the one time they released something on a subscription based the profits were significantly more than selling his games (but he went back to one time pricing on principle).
Yeah, that's a big problem I have with modern technology. It's true that there are classes of applications which need constant updates and backend infrastructure. However, there is a huge category of applications which don't need those constant updates and are perfectly functional without constant updates.
For example, a large number of games from the 90s and 00s are still fun to play, you can still play them with friends over the internet by directly connecting. The developers don't need to invest into those games, they are done. They might have bugs, but that doesn't really matter. In fact, constant updates is something that I don't even really desire.
The problem with the subscription model is that it's quite expensive and the entire reason it exists is to try and get users who forget about that subscription (and it encourages businesses to make canceling the subscriptions as hard as possible). It's the gym membership model.
The other problem with the subscription model is that it needlessly kills off software when either the developer loses interest or goes bankrupt.
Folks pay for all sorts of subscriptions, nobody cares about ownership, but when my mom finds out she's been paying $0.99/mo for a "countdown timer" app she used a few times over a year ago she swears off paying for apps for good.
But I really don't see a reason to pay for a subscription for the app I probably don't use that often. If it's impossible to use the app without signing up for a trial, I'll normally set a reminder to cancel it a day before its expiration.
I would much prefer if all services offered an option to buy only one period rather than always requiring manual deactivation - but I also understand they make a lot of money from people paying for things they aren't using.
It's far too common for me to download something ive never used before and for it to ask me to cough up 10 dollars a month. Thats what I pay for netflix or youtube or whatever, things I use for hours each week!
I suppose theyre trying to target some mythical user that checks the sun position every morning and evening obsessively or some nonsense, as though their strategy should be to capture the entirety of the value a top 1% poweruser gets from their software. No! it's expected that a top 1% poweruser will get a lot of value, if you design your monetization for them, they'll be humming and hawing and comparison shopping, and nobody else will ever even entertain the idea of paying. And then you'll get half of 1% of your addressable market.
But of course, the entire reason it really exists is to profit off people who forget about the subscription. This is clear to see when looking into the financials of it, or the number of people paying for things they havent used in a year. This also affects incentives!
Finally, the neccasary structure around the apps means for the most part, if a company goes bankrupt, decides its not worth mantaining, or plain gets bored, you lose access to the thing.
In my mind this is missing the point. I am very pro-upgrade pricing because upgrade pricing actually forces the developer to think about what their users actually will pay for, or what improvements will make my workflow better, instead of just adding whatever fancy side-quest thing that you've decided I need today.
If users are asking for shiny new features and are willing to pay for them then fine. If we want refinements and are willing to pay for them then fine. If you want to optionally provide backend storage or backups or whatever then fine.
However, if my continued use of a specific version of your software has no continued cost to you, then be absolutely assured that I do not feel a moral obligation to keep on paying for it endlessly, nor should you assume that I do.
That's just it, it does carry a cost, at the least for security updates and allowing the application to continue to be installed on later OSe or key libraries.
That's why even open-source libraries that in actively being used will get forked if unmaintained too long, because there's always something to do to keep bitrot at bay.
Except he's forgetting that before subscriptions, most consumer SW cost $10-50 with a certain timeframe for support. Not every app is Photoshop, you know.
And stuff like music players? Free!
I think the real problem is the ecosystem keeps changing. The need to ensure there is an update after upgrading Android broke the app.
Something Apple could do is allow iOS to handle some of this stuff automatically. Establish a sort of “small app subscription” account. Keep track of which apps had been opened every month, only pay the subscriptions for the ones I’ve opened, and allow me to set monthly limits. It could also offer feedback to the app developers, “X% of your users didn’t use the app this month,” etc.
Software is, unfortunately, a living thing and when not actively maintain bit-rots and becomes unusable.
"I don't need a receipt for the donut, I'll just give you some money, you give me the donut. End of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this."
1. bug fixes and updates
2. Services to work in the "cloud"
Subscriptions have gotten ridiculous, but with the way we've come to expect frequent updates the pay-once model isn't sustainable for many products.
- Get the user hooked into their ecosystem
- Slowly make the service worse / more expensive / different over time
- The user is paying for a subscription which feels like an investment, so they put up with more crap than they would otherwise.
Trust me. If you have a subscription for something, and you like it, it will change under your feet. It will get worse, and in effect, it will be taken from you.
I'm not paying for the subscriptions. If everyone moves towards subscriptions, I'll move into a shack in the woods. I don't care. I don't want your subscriptions. If you think subscriptions are a good idea I don't want to hear from you, and I wish you had no say in how anything was built.
[edit]
If the counter-point is that mobile apps will suffer, then good. I don't like or any want any mobile apps whatsoever.
If it were a one-time purchase, wouldn't that encourage the service provider to make it worse over time because they've already taken your money?
> If it were a one-time purchase, wouldn't that encourage the service provider to make it worse over time because they've already taken your money?
Couldn't it encourage the provider to make it better because their revenue comes from new customers?
> if the service gets worse, simply cancel your subscription.
There's plenty of examples of subscriptions that are nearly impossible to cancel, or have a giant fee for cancelling early. Adobe, Comcast, siriusxm spring to mind. Anecdotally, streaming services are partly funded by people who subscribe for a particular film/tv show and just never cancel.
IMO, this whole 'article' has such a corporate bootlicky flavor to it. I pay for subscription (claude, gpt, netflix etc) since there are no real (pragmatic, convenience and financial) alternatives and it's not easy to rig a solution. otherwise the very fact that the only option is app subscription, i stay out of it on principle. even IDApro has perpetual license.
I thought the idea was, software is created with an open source and open license to it - so people know what the software is, and are able to make copies of it freely, and so that becomes hard to monetize.
If you are trying to sell software and make it proprietary with closed source, it's not software you can trust (could contain literally any insecure code) so you avoid it and it would lack people using it (not saying this happens in practice, but I thought was the open source argument).
Hence you're saying, just create / pay for insecure proprietary closed source software that can't be shared and isn't intended to be shared.
The subscription model lends itself towards abuses: namely, you can use something temporarily, then lose access. The open source vision was about creating software that can be freely re-used indefinitely without a required subscription and shared without as much of restrictions.
So I think basically people object to this increased limitation of "indefinite reuses" which you can get with open source software that you "own", and maybe the proprietary closed source tendencies of these locked down subscriptions.
Now granted, some of the newer "spaces" we operate in may look a little differently, with lots of things needing or desiring constant updates and we recognize we only have so much time so a question comes up if we even want or need "indefinite reuse" or to even have open source software or to understand how the software works.
But, there might not even be disagreement here... if you just "donate" to an open source nonprofit project, that could still be framed as a "subscription". I think it's maybe not conventionally how we're referring to subscriptions, but I think I could see your case for reframing the subscription towards being something "good" or "ok".
There are open source monetization strategies, but if code tends towards being less able to be monetized, how can software projects be funded? I think in this "post-intellectual property" open source scenario I'm suggesting at, the funding might shift in other directions (maybe like from selling hardware or tangible physical goods).
But anyway, I guess we would just probably distinguish between "unwanted" and "desired" subscription practices: limited locked down subs versus unlimited maybe subscription-less or limited open source subs.
At least these were some thoughts this essay was generating in me.
Why shouldn't it?
Why does my calculator app need a subscription? Why does it need constant updates?
There's no reason the ownership model shouldn't exist for apps. There's also no reason why all apps should need constant development.
OK, if you're running something with a cloud component, I might not get all the functionality. But if you decide that you don't want be in the app business any more, I still want to use what I paid for.
The way to get around that is either continually releasing feature upgrades with one-time payments, or paying for access to the software only while you need that access.
Both models have strengths, one is not inherently evil and the other inherently good.
It's easy to say app updates should be bundled into the one-time cost but even that needs to have a time bound on it. When software lasted 3 years that potentially made sense, but now the release velocity is so much higher that there would be an explosion in complexity to try to keep up with all "one-time" releases going back for years.
Even completely Free software packages struggle with the balance with how far back to claim prior releases are under maintenance (e.g. LTS is popular, but so are 'rolling releases'). That's because of the underlying economic complexity with the costs to maintain what has gone before vs. the cost to develop what will come next.
It's far down the list as to why I decided to subscribe, but I do like the idea that if I lose my phone, my data won't be lost forever.
>This is exactly the sort of app that should have a single $10 purchase.
If you cloned the app and offered it as a one-time $10 charge, I'd be interested in that for sure!
> So why is there a subscription?
Recently they pushed out some updates that made the Watch experience a lot better. If you were the developer, would you have delivered that to $10 one-time purchasers for free, or would you have charged for a major version bump that had the feature?
I mean, I guess in the sense that any software that stores data is in competition with a spreadsheet? It's in competition with pencil and paper too. And if those things work for you, great!
The app runs on my watch, which tracks my heart rate through the workout and ultimately passes data to Apple's Health stuff. It syncs the workout to my phone so I can more easily input data. It keeps a database of exercises with video instructions (WAY better than trying to run down stuff via search or YouTube), keeps track of my history and records per-exercise, as well as doing one-rep max calculations. It has built in timers and a bunch of little conveniences that make it easy to log weighted exercises.
If you don't see value in that, that's fine, but it's hardly a grift, especially when the cost is just $2.50 a month.
>These are not the subscriptions people have in mind when they say they hate the subscription model.
Right. This why I replied saying that I think you're overgeneralizing, and why I provided examples of subscriptions that are eminently reasonable and in the spirit of the post we're commenting on ("talented individuals work hard on making great software like craftsmen, and they just get paid for it." - though I'll admit I don't know the size of the team that make Strong, they're certainly not Adobe-sized).
Just because a business model can be made around something, does not mean a business model needs to exist to sustain that thing
Another issue is they tend to get more unnoticed as time goes on and little additional fees start creating in.
Just avoid subscriptions when possible has served me well
vlian2088•1h ago
dabluck•1h ago
plagiarist•8m ago
Unless you mean people are forgetting to use the maximum amount every month, or forgetting to cancel?
bbg2401•50m ago
Someone should tell the vibe coders because the vast majority posted here seem to include poorly considered subscription plans.