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.
Adobe. Anything Adobe. Fuck Adobe.
Finding that Gimp, and Darktable are at least as useful as photoshop and lightroom is really satisfying
Microsoft Solitaire on Android. The ads were driving me nuts so I went to pay for the app. If I recall they wanted almost 10 bucks a month for that shit. Deleted, forgotten, until now.
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.
This has to be one of the lamest attempts at getting folks to subscribe. I couldn’t have imagined that watch faces could also be subscription based in the first place.
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.
The most useless I’ve ever seen was wallpaper packs for roku for $10/month
Is that why every TV has that god awful purple background photo?
Companies are using subscription models because it has proven to be far more profitable than a one-time purchase. Why sell the product to each person just once when you can sell it to them over and over again? You no longer have to constantly develop new products and versions, and you now only have to maintain your existing product.
And it works because people buy it.
I’m a big fan of the way Plex does it. I paid like 100 dollars a decade ago and all my apps stay up to date forever
What’s great about it is that it’s optional and not forced on you. I’m a Plexamp power user so it makes sense to me with my expansive music collection
Microsoft Office.
The subscription service is actually alright for businesses, but for retail users there is no compelling reason for it to be a subscription.
Microsoft only tolerates retail users, it has always intended its products to be for commercial entities.
The problem with one time purchases is that you might be investing time in an app that later will go out of business. Keeping an app up to date requires real constant work, before you even think of adding features and fixing bugs. People got used to paying 2 bucks for an app and keep it forever. That’s completely unsustainable.
But yeah, sure, some companies push it.
It used to be entirely free and the vast majority of its tablature was uploaded by community members for free.
The app used to be a one-time purchase. Thankfully I did purchase it back then and they grandfathered me in with a lifetime pro membership, but I can’t blame the people who would never want to use the site/app when they’ve effectively paywalled a ton of community content.
Fuck that site. Going there now is like looking at the desecrated corpse of an old friend.
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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YouTube is a weird one, personally. Why shouldn’t it have a subscription based service like any other streaming network? Because the content is not created by, funded by, or even necessarily supported by YouTube.
It would make more sense for the subscription to be put upon uploaders to host the content, since their business is hosting the files, not really the content itself.
Now, if they had a better or at least more transparent way of giving the creators a truly fair cut of the monetary gains earned through their videos I would have nothing against YouTube Premium aside from hating that a completely free service has to move to a paid service.
I generally hate them in consumer-targeted apps. Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with the model. Devs have to keep the lights on, especially if there is a cloud service behind the app. It’s all about what pricing model they set. However, pricing is hard. A lot of companies really screw this up right at the start. I also think a lot of businesses cannot resist the temptation to boil the frog and ask for more and more over time, until their pricing is way out of alignment with value delivery.
Might be a slightly unpopular opinion, but Volumio (software for a raspberry pi to run it as a headless audio system). It’s good, it’s relatively well maintained and works. But paying 7,50 a month for this software to get multiroom audio, Tidal integration and some other stuff is ridiculously expensive. That’s nearly 90 euro a year and the only thing that is actually an addition server side is syncing settings across devices and the Tidal integration (requires license fees iirc).
And sure, I can’t buy multiroom speakers for that kind of money, but damn, is it expensive.
That’s more than Duolingo costs and Duolingo is constantly adding new languages
Filebot, I like and use the app but it shouldn’t be a subscription. You can buy a lifetime license for $48 but it’s too expensive for what it is.
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.
Ok so I don’t completely agree… The thing is: mobile apps today have this approach where they don’t have “releases”, there’s one entry on the app store, and if you buy that you usually get updates for as long as it exists.
In the past, computer software always had periodic (usually yearly) releases, which meant that if you bought one version, afterwards you’d have maybe updates for bugfixes and such, but no new features. The result was that the development of new features was paid by people replacing the old version with the new one, because they wanted the improved version.
Nowadays you buy the app and you keep getting new features, sometimes for years, and that development is paid solely thanks to new buyers. Which is cool if you are the customer but it’s not great long term for the developer.
That’s true, but it’s also possible to release apps individually on mobile similar to PC releases.
We also currently get the worst of both worlds with stuff like Goodnotes. They had a one-time buy, but currently they’ve injected AI-related nonsense into v6. They allow owners of the previous version to still use v6, but it’s extremely crippled and functionally worse than 4 or 5. Constant nagging about the new version and features. V6 fully replaced v5 on the App Store, so we can’t do anything about it now. Even in my purchase history, my purchase was forcibly “upgraded.”
What I paid for was a digital notebook app that I could write down notes on with my Apple Pencil and iPad. It had a few nice features I didn’t really need, but were nice to have like writing-to-text replacement. It had cloud backups, but they were through iCloud or OneDrive on the user’s individual storage so I’m assuming it didn’t add a monthly cost overhead to the developer.
Now it’s a subscription model app with features I don’t want nor need that completely replaced the app I paid for.
Good notes has an option to revert to v5 and I haven’t had any issues so far staying on v5.
I thought they also had a one time purchase option for v6 but it’s been awhile since I looked.
They did the switch better then notability tried to do. Notability tried to switch otp users to their new plane after a grace period of a year. They caved to backlash and added a legacy plan for older purchasers.
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