If I'm buying a subscription, it's an obligation. I'll have to spend money from now until I die or I'll get reduced QoL.

Even if today I have spare $200/month, that might not be the case tomorrow. Maybe I'll get fired. Maybe government turn my cash into paper. Maybe I'll have to pay everything I have to doctors to save my live or health. I'll still have bought songs, but I'll no longer have access to the streaming service.

Because everything is a recurring automatic charge to my credit card, and one more thing to try and keep track of and continually reevaluate if it's still valuable enough to me to continue paying for it.

When you bought a CD you didn't have to from that point forward continue to think about if you want to continue paying money to have access to the CD.

I think when it was $10 or $15 a month for Netflix, and you got everything, that people did pay. The problem now is that it’s $20 a month for Netflix, and $20 for Hulu, and $25 for Disney plus, and $20 for HBO (ahem, “Max!”), and $15 for Amazon, etc. Fragmentation has meant we’re back to a cable bill worth of cost on top of the actual internet (and possibly actual cable), and half the time you still can’t watch the thing you want to watch (some seasons not currently in rotation etc).

(Also, the cable model was driven by bundling, you may not watch a bunch of discovery channel or scifi channel personally but you're paying for them regardless. Most people didn't buy that many optional extras, maybe an extra movie channel or sports or something, but, most people were never racking up $100 of ala carte services either. A lot of people would have spent a lot less on cable tv if they were allowed to unbundle.)

Anyway the “piracy is an availability problem” line isn’t always true. A lot of times it’s a price problem too. Even if Super Netflix came out with actually everything on it for $99 a month I don’t think you’d get a lot of takers. There is a number where it’s worth my time to pirate even if it’s available, it’s not like Best Buy didn’t carry music or movies pre-iTunes/Netflix, and you could always buy esoteric bands on the web etc. Netflix solved availability for $10/month and that last part can’t be severed while retaining the truth of the insight.

You might say it’s not just steam that ended piracy, but steam sales, and as they’ve slowed down so has my proclivity to spend. I’ll buy any old crap at $5 or $10 if it looks fun, and throw it on the backlog, but for $30 or $40 it has to be something I’m specifically interested in playing in the near future.

This summer sale was the first time prices have been decent in a long while, for the last 5 years the discounts have been meager and the base prices remained pretty high. 75% off a game you're still trying to get $60 for 3-5 years after launch isn't exactly the deep discount it's presented as. Konami and Capcom are awful about this.

Google is infamous for shutting down services. And the same thing regularly happens even to large companies when they get acquired by even larger companies who then shut down their existing services and try to force migrate everyone to the parent's offering.

Conversely, stalwarts like Oracle and IBM will often continue providing a service indefinitely. For a price. Because once you're locked in they're happy to keep taking your money. All of your money. Forever. This is... differently terrible?

> the old model was - PS pay $600 once, then $200 for updates every 2 years or so.

But many people would just keep using the original version indefinitely. Paying $800 once is a lot less than paying $150/year until you die. It also lets you choose whether you want to pay more for the new features or save money because you don't need them.

And you can't use the Consumer Price Index for software because software inflation is negative. As more people get computers over time the size of the market increases but the fixed cost of developing the software is the same, so the amortized unit cost goes down and in a competitive market that gets passed on to the customer. In the 90s people paid money for Unix and zip utilities and web browsers and now they're all free because they have such a big market that the unit cost is effectively zero.

SaaS things remain not because they don't follow the same cost structure but because lock-in through proprietary formats and training costs and migration costs keep people stuck on the thing they started with, which in turn keeps competitors from achieving the scale needed to get prices down.

The thing is those startups sometimes make very useful software while they're around. I ran Sparrow (an email client from > 10 years ago) for years after the company that made it was shuttered and acquired by Google. If Sparrow was a SaaS product it would be gone 30 days after the acquisition was announced.

> SaaS from established firms seems to be more durable & maintained.

I'm sure many other users have noticed this too. I wonder if it makes breaking into the software space as an upstart firm harder than "in the old days".

I'm willing to pay $10/mo to play music but that gets me access to near-all music I want access to, on all devices I use. A CD can be just in one place at once and needs a specific player. So it's a terrible comparison.

We buy thousands of items and for most people it’s impossible to know how much something “should” cost. So we anchor our expectations to what we know.

Web software was mostly free for years because it was either ad-supported or a speculative venture capital investment. Or a dev releasing it for free thinking that “if we get lots of users we can raise money and figure out monetization later”. The Social Network came out in 2009 and there’s a scene where Zuckerberg was made to look like a genius for rejecting monetization. People who wanted to be like Zuckerberg made stuff for free then hoped to raise money. Finally add in many developers made software for free for personal or ideological reasons.

The end result is that consumers are psychologically anchored to expect that web software “should” be free, an app “should” cost $1 at most, etc It’s not really about the $10 as much as people don’t like feeling ripped off and paying $10 for something that should cost nothing makes them feel ripped off.

An experience is burned into my brain when a friend who was an aspiring yoga teacher was doing a Twitch stream for 10k viewers as part of an online festival but at the last moment needed to stream to Twitch from his iPhone. There was an app that worked perfectly that cost $15 but he almost sabotaged his whole show frantically searching the App Store for a free alternative because $15 was a ripoff. He caved eventually and unhappily, then to celebrate the stream led friends and family to a sushi restaurant that was $200/person . It was never about his inability to afford $15 but his psychological feeling that a $15 app is a ripoff. But fancy sushi “should” be expensive so $200 is a fair price.

We are very slowly seeing this change as interest rates rise and everyone understands software monetization better but it’s a gradual process. For whatever reason it’s often devs themselves who push back the hardest against monetization, in their warped world view someone charging $10/mo for a SaaS is deeply unethical but going to work for some FAANG company and fighting hard to maximize TC is completely fine and in fact encouraged. That way your boss worries about monetization and you are free of any moral qualms about it. FAANG devs complaining about subscriptions, privacy , and paywalls are quite common and similar to vegetarians who only eat beef and pork but avoid eating cows or pigs.

It deliberately changes in the interests of the business at the expense of the customer.

Updates are forced, cannot be backed out, lock in the customer, degrade privacy, remove features, upsell, and more.

There needs to be a way to attract willing customers and maintain a respectful trustworthy relationship. Saas doesn't seem to do it.

coughPantonecough