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.
JetBrains ran aground of this years ago when they introduced a subscription model for their (excellent) software. People (rightly) lost their fricking minds when they heard that if they cancelled their subscription, they’d lose the ability to continue using the software they’d already paid for.
So JetBrains went back and reworked their system so that a cancelled subscription would continue to have the rights to install all the software that existed up to the day of cancellation. Effectively meaning that if v3 came out the day before you cancelled, you can still install and use v3 10 years later.
JetBrains comes to mind as one of the fairest subscription services I know. It also get cheaper the longer you’re subscribed, incentivizing you to to stay subscribed. It’s both smart and user friendly.
The worst one is probably Adobe.
Adobe is the one company i’d never, ever, ever want to support, especially with a subscription. 🏴☠️ all day every day
I love JetBrains.
I do use JetBrains software. If subscriptions all agreed that when you cancel the subscription you can continue to use the latest version before you cancelled, I’d be prepared to consider them. Any software ought to be able to do this except software that uses significant server resources. I’d even consider rent-to-own where you get to keep the software after a certain number of payments. (Splice offers some music software like this.)
Roland have a ton of good software synthesizers but I will never subscribe to them because the moment you stop they take the whole lot away. Even their “lifetime license” requires an active Roland account and the software disappears if you ever close the account or they change their minds. Similarly I haven’t used any Adobe software since they went subscription only.
Yeah that was basically the sentiment of the developer community when JetBrains announced the change. Thankfully they heeded the screaming and fixed their model. I’ve been using JetBrains tools for around 10 years now and they continue to impress. I can’t recommend them enough.
Not quite - you get a perpetual license for the version that was released a year before you cancelled your subscription. And for most languages this is not really practical anyway, as they get relatively frequent updates that require IDE updates, so you will just stay subscribed.
This was a fairly low business risk, high PR value move by JetBrains.
Sygic broke trust like that with me . The software is/was excellent and very reasonable, so I bought licences for parts of world and suddenly they made it subscription based app, with ability to keep forever licence for only part of world you bought.
So even though I have fully paid software , i have to pay subscription for the feature of Android Auto and world maps.
It was the list betrayal of trust i have seen. I never used sygic after that at all.