But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.
And so few actually deliver $10/mo worth of value. If 1password and Fastmail - the two most important services that control my digital life - are each $60/year, that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do. The ones that do are like NextDNS where they cost $20-30 per year because the people running them aren't greedy lemmings trying to pay back VC.
Funny you mention Fastmail. I was happy most of the past decade until this week. I just had my email blown up by their new Paddle billing system with a ton of billing invoices since they decided it was no longer ok that I pay them a lump sump every 2 years, and that I must go onto monthly now. Initially I thought they were hacked but nope, just terrible communication.
I emailed them a few days ago and they only confirmed that Paddle is their merchant of record and they have been migrating accounts over slowly.
Tonight the CEO sent out a blast saying resellers need to be on monthly billing with their new system at new pricing.
Sorry Fastmail, I paid for 2 years back in October (I think this is my 3rd cycle with them). If you want me on monthly billing then you will wait until October 2027. That is a ‘you’ problem not a ‘me’ problem if you undersold the subscription this cycle.
Of course it isn't. Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. They can be anything from good value, to average value to low value.
And products / services are of course not comparable just because they are subscription based, or used on a digital device.
Gas has a fantastic value, one liter can transport me and my things a long way in short time. So does that mean that I can never buy a bottle of wine or some coffee outside of my home? They are after all liquids, and neither coffee nor wine can compare with the great value of gas.
Sorry, but no. If they're worse value than my email and password providers which my digital life revolves around and who only charge me $5/mo each, then yes those products are a bad value.
I pay $3,000/yr for Altium, $200/mo for Claude Max, $60+/mo for ad-free streaming, and begrudgingly $50/mo for Adobe so I'm not against paying thousands a year in nice fat profit margins if they provide actual value, like a shit ton of GPU compute time or a well made piece of professional software. "Value" here is obviously subjective relative to the beholder, but IMO the vast majority of SaaS I look at are hardly worth two bucks a month, let alone tens.
The BIG difference is that we didn't felt entitled to use everything that is fashionable or switch apps every couple of months.
We would do a research across several magazines, local computer clubs, and the few lucky ones that had online access, some BBS or Usenet groups, then buy that one package and live with it for a couple of years, regardless of their limitations.
