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Comment by tsukikage | Hacker News Reader

What should they choose? Today's more user friendly products are just tomorrow's unreasonable price-hikers that haven't captured enough customers to start enshittifying yet. Meanwhile, even without network effects, migrating to a new product is usually a hassle; the frog has to be quite thoroughly boiled before it's worth it.

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> What should they choose?

Products which aren’t subscriptions to begin with, so the company can’t hike the price from under them with little notice and leave them in a position where they’re forced to pay and bleed money every day they fail to find an alternative.

I did that with Affinity software which was purchased by Canva. Currently they don't have a subscription but I give it a year or two and they'll either have subscriptions or it gets folded into the Canva subscription.

Even if they do that (they explicitly said they won’t), that doesn’t stop us (I also have Affinity apps) from indefinitely continuing to use the versions we already have. So buying non-subscription software was provably the better choice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41434110

Software does not exist in isolation. I am acquainted with a number of people and organisations who deliberately keep otherwise obsolete equipment running obsolete operating systems in order to indefinitely continue using old software instead of paying for new versions and/or switching to a subscription model.

While it is certainly a choice, and one people demonstrably make, it comes with downsides and tradeoffs - it is not unambiguously better.

I don’t think you did it on purpose, but that’s a straw man. Most software that works on one version of an operating system doesn’t break on the next, and they’re not released that often anyway.

And if you really need it, you’d be fine not upgrading until you find an alternative. Which with non-subscription software you can do at your own leisure. That’s my point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41434030

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