What is the most useless app that you have seen being given as a subscription?
For me, I tried a ‘minimalist’ launcher app for Android that had a 7 day trial or something and they had a yearly subscription based model for it. I was aghast. I would literally expect the app to blow my mind and do everything one can assume to go that way. In a world, where Nova Launcher (Yes, I know it has been acquired by Branch folks but it still is a sturdy one) or Niagara exist plus many alternatives including minimalist ones on F Droid, the dev must be releasing revolutionary stuff to factor in a subscription service.
Second, is a controversial choice, since it’s free tier is quite good and people like it so much. But, Pocketcasts. I checked it’s yearly price the other day, and boy, in my country, I can subscribe to Google Play Pass, YouTube Premium and Spotify and still have money left before I hit the ceiling what Pocketcasts is asking for paid upgrade.
Also, what are your views on one time purchase vs subscriptions? Personally, I find it much easier to purchase, if it’s good enough even if it was piratable, something if it is a one time purchase rather than repetitive.
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There’s only two reasons an app should be a subscription.
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The app requires constant server connection that is an active cost to the developer.
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The app requires constant updates for maintaining functionality/ relevancy.
There are a few subscriptions I pay for (Nabu casa for one). There’s real merit in the subscription model, but it should only be about 1% of things not 80%.
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A watch face for a smart watch.
This one guy made a really popular Android Wear watch face that mimicked the Pixel lockscreen. It only cost a few bucks, and people loved it. Due to some personal things in his life, he had to sell the app to a new developer to make ends meet. The new developer then started charging something like $7/WEEK subscription for a watchface that he didn’t even develop in the first place, and runs entirely locally on the device so it’s not like he’s maintaining any servers or anything.
Absolutely absurd.
I too ran into an Android Wear watch face that mimicked the Pixel lockscreen. However, it was priced X INR(Indian Rupee) per year in my country and was decently cheap. However, I soon ran into another app, which was a one time purchase, that did what it did mainly(sync and show phone and watch battery on each other) and worked on most lock screens. So the latter was a proper kind of app design amd atleast not subscription hell.
Geocaching. Like come on.
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Duolingo. Why can’t I just pay $100 or whatever one time? Languages don’t change to the extent that it needs to be a subscription.
There really should be a free and open source alternative for Duolingo. I know that there is Librelingo, but that is currently only doing Spanish for English speakers.
Any app that doesn’t require any backend to function.
If you ask for a subscription for an app without the need to support a backend… I won’t subscribe. I’ll find something else.
Mostly anything else is fine.
Though, if it’s something like a Note-Taking app where the cloud infrastructure for backups and sharing would cost pennies and you’re asking more than $1 a month, I’m out. Looking at you, Evernote. $64 a year to replace the built-in Notes app? No thanks.
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All of them. You should be able to buy a program and its yours.
Disagreed. If it requires a server side element, it incurs an ongoing cost and a subscription can be justified. And to clarify, by “requires”, I’m referring to the functionality, not having it shoveled in. And the price should be realistic.
Some apps do this well, Sleep for Android is an example that comes to mind. Free with ads, ad-free is an inexpensive one time purchase. You can also purchase additional plugin apps that add functionality that isn’t required or even useful for most people. And finally, they have a cloud plugin app to let you backup your data, you can pay for their cloud subscription which is $2.99 a year, but you can also just use other cloud for storage like Google drive.
Wow… lots of people in here bashing the subscription model, but let me point out it’s maybe not as bad as you think…
If you sell a product under a perpetual license model (I.e the one-time purchase model). Once you’ve sold the product, the manufacturer has almost no incentive to offering any support or updates to the product. At best it’s a marketing ploy, you offer support only to get word of mouth advertising of your product which is generally a losing proposition.
Since there’s little incentive to improve the experience for existing customers. Your main income comes from if you can increase your market share which generally means making products bloated often leading to a worse experience for everyone.
If the customer wants support, you need to sell them a support contract. If they want updates you have to make a new version and hope the customer sees enough additional value to be worth upgrading. Either way we’re back to a subscription model with more steps, more risk, and less upside than market expansion so it takes a backseat.
If you want to make a great product without some variation on a subscription. You need to invest heavily upfront in development (which most companies don’t have the capital to do, and investors generally won’t invest in unproven software)
From a product perspective, you don’t know if you’ve hit the mark until people start using your product. The first versions of anything but the most trivial of products is usually terrible, because no matter how good you are, half to three quarters of the ideas you build are going to be crap and not going to be what the customers need.
Perpetual licensing works for a small single purpose application with no expectation of support or updates.
It works for applications with broad market needs like office software.
For most niche applications, subscription models offer a better experience for both the customer and the manufacturer.
The customer isn’t facing a large transition cost to switch to a competitor’s product like they would if they had to buy a perpetual license of it, so you have a lot more incentive to support and improve your product. You also don’t see significant revenue if the customer that drops your service a couple months in… even more reason to focus on improving the product for existing customers.
People ought hate the idea of paying small reoccurring fees for software instead of a few big upfront costs. But from a business model perspective, businesses are way more incentivized to focus on making their products better for you under that model.
This seems to be the model I’ve witnessed with many apps over the years. Free at first to get traction and users, then ads, then pay one time fee to get rid of ads, then subscription to keep using the app.
Then there are those that wouldn’t even pay a single fee and get upset at the thought as everything should be free.
The part that is upsetting is the contributions the early community made is monetized when they were
theythere for the benefit of the community.I do see there are costs to maintaining and updating these apps so I can understand a need to keep revenue flowing for these future costs. The one time payment is a hell of a deal for years with updates to accommodate the revisions needed for each system update let alone functionality improvements.
In the old days we would buy software for our PC and that was it. There wasn’t really any updates or further support for newer versions of Windows. The software would become very insecure or just stop functioning altogether with enough changes to windows.
It’s hard to find the right balance. I know I only want to pay once, or heck never, but I want these upgrades and updates too.
Enshittification :(
