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Comment by stakhanov | Hacker News Reader

Can I just vent on how extremely annoyed I am about normal bits of software, that aren't even genuinely a service, being priced on a subscription basis at ridiculous price levels?

5$ per month is $300 over a five-year time period, which might be the lifetime of, say, a newly bought laptop computer. Now imagine you're at an electronics store, looking at laptops, and there are two identical laptops sitting in front of you. One has a pricetag that says $1000. The other has a price-tag that says $1300. You ask the sales clerk: "What's the difference between those two?" The sales clerk answers: "This one comes with a piece of software that lets you SSH into remote machines." You answer: "But there's free software to do that." The sales clerk goes. "Well... But it's colorful and shit." Seriously?

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A related point that bugs me is how subscriptions exclude many people because of the costs. People in countries with lower income and weaker currencies, as well as people in developed countries with lower incomes, may save up for a few years to get a relatively good machine or phone (probably used or an older model), but yet they get stung with subscription prices that don’t consider these aspects.

Every time I hear “for less than the price of a cup of coffee”, I groan, thinking that some people are so stuck in their tiny worlds that they don’t know or don’t care about the cost of coffee elsewhere and what people do with their money other than sipping expensive coffee with free WiFi or whatever.

I clearly get that the developers need to sustain themselves so that they stay in business and the customers benefit from their staying in business for longer. But somewhere in all this, I feel there’s some empathy missing, and also missing is some thought on a larger (and segmented) market with tiered and lower prices based on different factors.

I share the frustration. I can get office365, with 1T of onedrive, mail, office apps etc for 15 / month, a subscription of even 5 a month is just nuts. Especially since the subscriptions seem to be just stacking up.

I’m glad you guys are making a living, but I can’t justify yet another subscription.

Yes, thinking back to the days of e.g. F-Secure, or all in ones like Coda that included terminals, $10/year or $0.99/month would be a more appropriate revenue stream for the feature work on an ssh client sized app.

Termius is free if you just want a nice terminal emulator. You only need to pay if you start using the features that securely sync your connection details between devices, and frankly that's a really useful feature.

> You only need to pay if you start using the features that securely sync your connection details between devices

That is its one advantage over regular ssh and e.g. JuiceSSH for Android. I can also sync my connection details over dropbox (host+port) and authenticate each device using public keys. Yes, Termius would be a lot more convenient, but the parent's point stands that "is this convenience worth 60$/yr".

I suspect the answer is yes to a big enough portion of sysadmins, especially if they can get their company to pay for the license. The rest of the poor folk get to learn how to build it themselves, as usual.

There’s this catch though, that iCloud, Dropbox, One Drive, Box, and/or Google Drive also securely sync between devices and carry connection details. Almost everyone in target demographic already pays to sync one way or another. Apps like Ulysses, Bear or PDF Expert that simply ride on top of that understand this, and charge for genuinely differentiating features.

You need the $5/month subscription to use SFTP, a basic feature of SSH. That is ludicrous.

Actually, ANOTHER trend in software that annoys me is cloudifying things that don't need to be cloudified and even things where cloudification is more of a liability than an asset. An ssh client is something I trust with passwords that I type in on remote machines, private keys that unlock all kinds of security sensitive stuff, send back and forth pieces of code that are valuable intellectual property, etc. etc. -- I really really really, don't want that thing to start "calling home" under any circumstances, period.

> You only need to pay if you start using the features that securely sync your connection details between devices,

SFTP, multiple sessions, agent forwarding, pasting passwords, autocomplete

These are pretty basic features that don’t require syncing that are not available on the free version.

All you saw in Termius is that it is "colorful and shit"? Seriously?

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