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Comment by LapsangGuzzler | Hacker News Reader

Every developer understands how subscriptions work. A product may provide value today, but there’s no guarantee that the payoff will be worth the cost in the long run as the company increases its prices.

With a subscription, you’re agreeing to let a company tax you to do your job in the hope that it pays off instead paying upfront one time for a product.

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>but there’s no guarantee that the payoff will be worth the cost in the long run as the company increases its prices.

You can cancel a subscription

It's a problem, though, to become reliant on something and then experience a rugpull. A lot of people seem to think that you pay for a product and then in exchange you get increased productivity, and the only "cost" is, well, the cost. But it's not. Once you start becoming reliant on something to do your job, you orient your workflow around it. There may be alternatives, but it costs your time and effort to switch. It differs per tool: imagine switching text editors though. That's a very non-trivial endeavor for many software developers, even people who use fairly stock editors will have become pretty integrated into how their setup works, with hundreds of hours of muscle memory and re-orienting yourself to the "mental model" it has.

That's exactly why people selling products love subscriptions so much. It's not JUST reliable income. It's sticky. If I own something for real, as in it works offline with no activation garbage needed, I can just not pay for the new version if I don't like it. Maybe the old one becomes obsolete eventually, so it's not risk-free, but nonetheless. But, if a subscription fee increases, my options are typically 1. Go to hell.

Am I exaggerating? Well, yes and no. For one thing, I have really truly experienced the rugpull. It doesn't even have to be malicious, it can be as simple as "company disappears". The more established and trustworthy a company has proven to be, the more willing I am to put up with some loss of control. But monthly subscriptions to random products I see on HN? No thanks.

I'm not even asking for a perpetual lifetime license, which I already find sketchy from a sustainability standpoint. I am fine with the old-school "upgrade license" concept employed by say, VMWare and friends, and the less DRM-heavy the solution is, the better.

I’ve not seen the research but is suspect the average cancelled subscription goes far beyond “when it was no longer worthwhile” before it is cancelled.

Which reminds me I have a few airline card to cancel.

Right, but what if your subscription tool that you want to cancel is pipelined into your workflow in such a way that you’re paying a technical or operational cost to cancel beyond just severing the account itself, i.e. vendor lock-in?

This is why it’s often better as a solo dev to not rely on these tools in case you have to jettison them and break your workflow.

Another way of wording what you just said: "What if cancelling the subscription is more costly than keeping it?"

Uh... then keep it, because that means it's providing value to you.

If the insulation in my building was asbestos, it could be more costly to remove it than to leave it there and pay for regular testing and extra maintenance. But that doesn't mean it would be providing value.

Switching software has a cost. Avoiding that cost is not value.

Then factor in switching costs or find a way to reduce them when initially making a purchase.

Y'all are twisting yourselves into pretzels trying to justify why you can't easily cancel a subscription.

> Then factor in switching costs or find a way to reduce them when initially making a purchase.

That's what people are doing!

They're saying that there are many pieces of software that could be helpful, but with that potential switching cost looming in the distance they won't buy a subscription at any price because it can't be relied on.

They're not saying it's hard to stop paying, they're saying it's hard to stop using, so permanent license or bust.

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