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.

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Brendinooo 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

As I said in a different thread[0], the fact that some subscriptions are predatory doesn't mean subscriptions are necessarily predatory.

> 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.

Then I can move on and find something else. If I really think I can't, then it's probably providing me with something I find valuable enough to keep. That idea has its limits (again, I don't disagree that subscription services can be predatory) but it's certainly true sometimes.

>If the counter-point is that mobile apps will suffer, then good. I don't like or any want any mobile apps whatsoever.

Right. And if you don't like or want magazines, you shouldn't subscribe to magazines. But there's no reason to think that because you personally do not like magazines, no one else should like them and no one else can find value in them.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48846637

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Funes- 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hmm... To my mind, the best way to commercialize software is the old way: pay for the binaries of every major version. This, of course, bars the option of using the software online, and makes pirating it easier, but I think it's the most fair.

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jmpz 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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etrautmann an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m with you. I generally refuse. There are way too many things that I’d like to use extremely intermittently that beg for recurring revenue. I just opt out for the most part, aside from a tiny subset of indispensable apps.

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ur_tech_friend an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

	▲	fusslo an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I agree with you in theory > 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.
	▲	miyoji an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> This feels backwards—if the service gets worse, simply cancel your subscription. It's not backwards. I've canceled many subscriptions because software has gotten worse. I occasionally check back in with those services to see if they've gotten better, or at least back to as good as they used to be and they are always, inevitably, worse. I'd love to hear about a subscription that gets better over time but I haven't had that experience. I've also heard how product managers talk about subscribed users and I don't like being thought of that way by the businesses I give money to.
	▲	zetsurin an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's the rub, numerous times you can't cancel until the x is done (for gym memberships it used to be a whole year). Or alternatively look at prime cancelling is made difficult. 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

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dabluck an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

If you don't like or want any mobile apps whatsoever, I completely agree you should not pay for them.