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Comment by d_watt | Hacker News Reader

For me it comes down to whether the company is providing ongoing value with the subscriptions.

Asana as a subscription product makes sense as they provide hosting. The same for paying for backups for something like Obsidian.

However a single player game I play locally should not be a subscription.

Creative Cloud is interesting because they don't really offer ongoing value, but the price for purchasing it used to be so high the cost of "renting" it for a month feels better.

So, are you actually providing an ongoing service that justifies ongoing payment from your customers? On the flip side, are you pricing lifetime access at the true value of the software?

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Hard to say about Adobe CC.

For one thing the subscription model enables truly cloud-based products where you are paying for hardware as well as software, such as the new version of Lightroom. (I say "yuck!" I want to like Lightroom Classic but boy I find it is slow when it comes to Sony fully frame RAW files.)

Back in the day you spent a few thousand dollars for a particular version of the creative suite. Today you pay the same kind of money every few years but you always have the latest version. In the time that it has been "CC" there have been some major developments in the product such as the Flash editor being renamed to Animate and being retooled to output video, content for an HTML 5 player, etc.

I appreciate the steady stream of improvements made to Photoshop and Illustrator although I hate that it is always popping up windows to advertise itself just when I feel stressed about getting started on some project that's late.

I found Adobe's subscription was more painful in its execution than what actually is.

Back when I had subscription with them, I had to pay monthly but locked to their annual contract, so I had certain period of time I can cancel, and out side of that, they would charge me penalty.

I guess they now have prepaid option which works like most of other services these days, that you can essentially pay up front and if you cancel, would continue to end of the term.

Actually what worse is ones used by many Japanese services -- where payment date is always 1st of the month regardless of the date you established your contract (so if you start your service on the 31st of the month, they would charge for full month for <1 day of service), and the service deactivates at the moment the service is canceled. (You'll get charged for the full month even if you cancel on the early days of the month, for the full month that you don't have access to the service...)

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