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- Hacker News
- Interesting take. In my gut I hate subscriptions mostly because keeping track of them is annoying. But I’m semi-convinced. I mean, aligning the interests of the developer and the users is a nice benefit.
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.
by bee_rider - Thanks for reading. Totally agree Apple can do more a lot here and it's disappointing they haven't tried.by dabluck
- > 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.
That turns app icons into land-mines though.
Idk what the happy medium is, but there's gotta be something between "buy this kids game once" and "pay $13 a month until he gets sick of it," and I don't think we've quite found one that's equitable for all parties yet.
by RulerOf - I feel like I'd be more comfortable with subscriptions if accounts weren't consistently required for everything. I don't particularly like everything I do being tied to an email or phone or whatever. And all those accounts are consistently a pain in the butt to delete.
Despite their recent news, I do prefer the way Mullvad has done it re this: "Here's an id. If you make a payment, it funds that id.". Then you can use the id to login. They can still enforce limits like # of users, etc, but it still enables you to have an account where you can be sure the company isn't going to ignore your unsubscribe settings, send you upsells, and then leak your phone # in some db breach.
by bpev - No, thank you. As long as better options exist - and they do - I shan't.by robtherobber
- > I’m honestly not sure what that means. You can’t take Cal.ai and Flighty out of your phone and put them on your shelf. These things are only going to work as long as they’re maintained and updated. It’s not 1995 anymore.
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.
by cogman10 - Right, the issue is that we are owning our stuff less and less. You used to be able to even buy a copy of an OS on a CD. Thus, I don't think a subscription justifies the cost of maintenance, and a lot of app models don't do subscriptions for app updates.
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).
by thatxliner - I still have my CD for Office 97 and (somewhere) SuSE Linux 7.2, but I can't honestly say I can continue to use those.
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.
by mpyne - I addressed this in the post. I don't quite understand what people mean when they say they want to own their software. I mean okay you can put the CD on the shelf. Now what? I understand why they don't like paying money. But ownership just doesn't make a lot of sense when talking about a mobile app.by dabluck
- > Maybe for budgeting purposes you don’t want to lock in future obligations. And I guess I can understand that, but I can’t help feeling like you have in mind that this one-time purchase is going to be $5 total. And I’m here to tell you that’s not happening. For anything that takes effort it’s going to be more like $200.
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.
by BeetleB - Subscriptions are difficult to avoid for certain situations where the developer does a lot of ongoing work and where the work is expected to continue in perpetuity without there being a set-in-stone finished product somewhere in the future.
But in all other cases, or even many of the ones where it is 'necessary', the presence of a subscription is a red flag for predatory pricing. Minor ongoing work or maintenance really doesn't cost as much as the author thinks it does. Keeping the lights on and updating API calls can be covered by new sales of permanent licenses as long as the app continues to sell. But if they had to go with a subscription, the real per-user cost would probably be measured in cents per month. Maybe add a bit more for their profit margin and charge a nice $1/mo. Do you see that anywhere except the rare app by a small developer that doesn't want to price gouge? No, all software businesses want at LEAST $5/10 a month because they've run the numbers and figured out all the tricks to human psychology, and they know they can trick someone into spending 'just $5' without them internalizing that the company is charging them a ridiculous $50-100 per user per year for even the most trivial service, leaving with almost pure profit. This is why investors love anything with a subscription service.
The author just inflates the prices and adds zeros to numbers to make permanent purchasing seem dead in the water, ignoring that we had multiple decades of software development before the advent of subscription services, where those prices were reserved for big professional suites and not your everyday app or a minor service. It's not that expensive, companies charging insane prices has just shifted your perception of what's going on behind the curtain. We even had one-time purchase mobile apps briefly, and they weren't doing it for charity either. Video games that don't require external services are still overwhelmingly priced for a single purchase, and somehow they're making bank despite also having to release updates and bugfixes.
by tavavex - Speaking about paying for apps in general, I'm all for it. The moment a new app shows an ad, if this app seems useful to me, I'll go make a purchase if it's a single "remove ads" IAP with a reasonable price, where "reasonable" is a price that is less or equal to a price of a cup of flat white where I live.
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.
by ventana - You can cancel immediately and still get that initial trial/month! I always do this, especially for apps i aspirationally purchase a subscription for a year for (fitness/language apps).by hellisothers
- One great genre of HN comment is where people insist subscriptions are the only way a software business can work, as if commercial software sprung into existence fully formed in 2012.by acheron
- A growing problem is that there are whole generations of younger people who have no lived experience with or imagination about certain benefits we used to have, so the world you're describing is all they effectively know. It's so easy to fall for the midwit take that the past could not have actually been better in some ways, that it's only nostalgia when people claim it was.by gdulli
- > One great genre of HN comment is where people insist subscriptions are the only way a software business can work,
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).
by BeetleB - In my experience the only genre of HN comments is that subscriptions are evil, so I'm glad to see there are other perspectives. While it's true that software has been around a long time, it's also true that the world changes and building software in 2026 is much different than even in 2012 let alone 1995.by dabluck
- Every other business has figured out a way to operate on a single transaction model where I give them money and they give me a product and that is the end of our relationship until I need something else that they make. Somehow we have managed to operate in this manner for hundreds of years. Why is software development any different?
- Because your fucking bananas aren't connected to servers in a datacenter that require you to pay monthly bills and engineers need to get paid more than people stacking rocks for living.by bellowsgulch
- I mean, software is absolutely not the only business where one pays money to gain access to the thing for a certain interval of time...by Brendinooo
- Agreed.
"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."
by carimura - > Why is software development any different?
It's not. Software subscriptions are a relatively new thing. For a long time before this madness came around, software companies made money hand-over-fist by just selling software in the normal way.
by JohnFen - That might work if the software platform vendors kept compatibility with old versions, but they're quite poor at this. Windows used to be quite good at it, but Android and iOS are really bad at it, and macOS is not a lot better.
Software is, unfortunately, a living thing and when not actively maintain bit-rots and becomes unusable.
by wffurr - My water heater once emitted a cryptic warning light. I called a local contractor, the person came and spent 10 seconds inspected the appliance, then start dialing the appliance vendor's support number. Support asked him to press some buttons in a fixed sequence and the tiny display on the water heater showed an error code. Support said "yeah, that means part X is not working, but we don't know why" and the solution was replacing that part entirely.
"Wouldn't it be nice if the water heater comes with hundreds of sensors monitoring each part and emit metrics? You can diagnose with historical data and see what was working and at what time which part showed anomaly". As a person doing SRE in my day job, this was what I had in my mind at the time.
I am not saying that I want spyware in all the appliances in my house. But if I am an appliance manufacturer, I would always want the capability to manage appliances just like how software engineers managing software lifecycles.
by zzyzxd - Software used to work like this. You'd pay for a shrink-wrapped product, and the only updates you'd ever get (if you're lucky) would be for major bugfixes.
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.
by organsnyder - Because people expect:
If you bought a piece of software, received precisely that version and never got updates, and didn't expect your data to magically follow you around, then we could have that model, as evidenced by that model working well back when software largely did work that way.1. bug fixes and updates 2. Services to work in the "cloud"by xnorswap - No, no, never. Subscriptions never benefit the consumer. They all work exactly the same way:
- 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.
by everdrive - I don't get the connection between a subscription and getting a user hooked, making the service worse, or ensure worsening of the service.
All of these things can be true, all without a subscription.
Not having revenue certainly makes it impossible to sustain a business to work on a service, without some other kind of monetization path, like ads, or data harvesting and sale.
by jmpz - Then how do you pay?by Gud
- This feels backwards—if the service gets worse, simply cancel your subscription.
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?