Comment by trinix912
9 hours ago
That is true, but nowadays most paid projects end up being perpetual subscriptions. Which I kind of get, as on-going maintenance still costs, but it used to be that you paid for a tool once and only paid again if you wanted/needed an updated version. I'd gladly pay $15-$60 for a tool once (and again if I needed an update) but $10-$15 per month for 20 different things (that I will only use occasionally) is just out of reach for me financially and I live in a "rich" first-world country.
Working for a SaaS company is the greatest thing if you are a software developer who doesn't care about business: even if you don't care about business the business cares about you!
There was an article in Byte magazine circa 1983 describing this dilemma: you release a successful 1.0 of a product, get a pulse of money, hold back some of it to develop 2.0, N months later version 2.0 competes with not only your competitors but with 1.0 in the minds of your most satisfied customers. Now if you're planning for N months and it is really N+M they have to scramble for money to pay your paycheck or release the product before it is ready or both. If you're laid off you could be one of the lucky ones because working under those conditions can be a living hell.
I'm glad I'm working on a service because even if a project I am working on is critical to acquiring and retaining customers it's not an automatic crisis that a project is a little late.
In the last 10 years or so SaaS seems like an investor-driven fad driven by the ease of putting a valuation on a consistent cashflow, but I think it is more basic than that.
That's not to say that the 'anti-consumer' concerns aren't real. Also with generative AI we are seeing that some things need to account for the resources they use. In the 2010s I was looking at a family of proto-AI businesses where my business partner and I were struggling with pricing, like we could not set an $X/month price such that (i) some users might not cost 10$X or 100$X a month to serve and (ii) that $X doesn't exceed the value the subscriber would get from the service for many users thus you don't make the sale. Yet we also liked the idea of stable revenue and boy all the software biz people and investors we talked to couldn't see past the "S, M, L, XL" subscription model.
How do you imagine it used to be when everything was commercial?
On the plus side, at least there wasn't that many magpie development, and rewrites just because.
Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
If you're trying to make people cheer for the pirates, you're succeeding.
Some people will never pay, even if it was one euro, single payment.
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Programs were distributed on stacks of diskettes, towards the end of that era on CD-ROMs. There was no licence server to phone home to on the internet.
You bought Borland C++ compiler, installed it and used it - you were free to buy the next version when it came out or not.
There are plenty of programs where you can still do that, that gladly accept one time license payment.
However think on your own salary and how many copies you need to sell, at what price, per month, to receive the same monetary amount after taxes.
Add to it, the amount of new user acquisitions per month, to keep a sustainable salary level.
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> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
Adobe tools are subscriptions and they get pirated all the time.
They do, as did Autocad with key locks, the point is to make it harder, as long as it runs locally, there is always a way.
> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
I'm not so sure. If they can't pay for a one-time purchase, they won't be able to afford a subscription. Subscriptions are always more expensive in the end, that's why they exist in the first place. I don't see how people not using the software while still not becoming customers is a fix to anything.
Subscriptions look cheaper for many folks.
As for being able to afford them, yes it cuts people out, many of whom would pirated anyway.
Digital stores, API keys, and SaaS seem to be doing alright
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"Rent-seeking is the only way to fix piracy" is an interesting take.
It seems to be going very well for video and music streaming services. Piracy is certainly nearly dead at this point and not at all at record-high levels.
The sarcastic tone ignores that was much worse during Napster golden days.