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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine plumbers charged hundreds a month for toilets, came in once a year to rip out perfectly functional ones to put in new ones, and told you that it's a deal because of "value add".

Seriously, I don't know how we let software pull the wool over our eyes.

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Worse than that, they change the design and location of the handle every other year, and then replace your toilet paper with 3 sea shells.

That sort of exists. You heard of home service plans? You pay a fixed fee to some provider, and they the cost to send a plumber/hvac guy/whatever if something breaks. For software, instead of getting your toilet unclogged, you get small features and bug fixes.

Exactly this.

All of our local plumbers and electricians were bought out by a PE firm and merged together.

So now to call the electrician, I need to be a “member” and pay $25/mo (annual commitment billed monthly) for the privilege of calling their call center to schedule an appointment.

They offer “free plumbing inspections” annually as a way to find problems to charge you to fix.

Private equity is an underrated danger to society.

Had one (thankfully not (directly) paid for), we had a heatwave and AC died.

So I call...

They "are having trouble" finding someone for "emergency service". Their idea of "emergency service" is "we have a company that will be out there in four WEEKS".

So I found someone who could come out that day, for a surcharge. Reasonable. And the AC was dead. But this company were nice - the tech said "no promises, no commitments" and he did some shifty magic and got it running for about six more hours before it was permanently to the graveyard.

So we started getting quotes for a new HVAC system.

Responses from the plan:

- we won't pay if you don't use our suppliers

- we won't pay if you don't choose from our list of models (which were all low end, 80%, 1 stage systems)

- even if you use our supplier, we won't pay above $X. If they quote you higher, the difference is on you.

- if you used another contractor for ANY maintenance work on the existing system, we won't pay

- if the maintenance schedule wasn't followed (whether you owned the system/property at the time), we won't pay

There's a common phrase in each of those statements.

Any way we could fight this? It seems things are getting worse and worse and I don’t see any solution

DIY it. Our dryer stopped heating, so I popped the screws off and it turns out the heating coil had burned out. Like $20 on Amazon. Our kitchen sink's faucet cracked and started leaking down the hose into the cabinet below so I bought a new one at Lowe's for like $20. Our oven stopped heating and the clock area where the control circuit is located kept clicking so I gave it a good smack like the primate I am. Free.

Too bad the heating coil wasn’t DRM paired with the dryer, forcing you to have to contact an official repair shop, we could have gouged you for way more than $20.

The examples you gave are much lower in scope than replacing an HVAC.... At various times I have done all of your examples. I do not dare to replace my home's HVAC system.

The "Uber for dogwalkers" service had a problem that people would do an arrangement with the dogwalker outside of its 30% (or whatever) rent-seeking, it even had scary clauses trying to prevent this.

So maybe the solution is to ask the electrician, etc, if you can contact them directly next time, and to ask them if they know any other tradespeople when you need one.

Done this with a similar service, worked fine. Of course YMMV and not everyone is open to it.

As comment below mentioned, DIY it. While the problem is "PE bad, hurr Durr", what usually happens is veteran plumbing, HVAC, etc businesses with loyal clientele get bought out for a pretty sum by the PE firm. I wouldn't fault them - why would you "work for yourself" when you could just take a nice 7 figure sum and retire or do something else? If your employees don't like it, they can go the same route and start their own thing - which will eventually get bought by PE too.

These are people who never had an exit opportunity before finally finding a way to sell their business for a nice lumpsum, instead of having to live job to job.

The only losers here are the customers and some of the employees, especially those who are undocumented.

Become a plumber

Before we downsized from our home to our condo, I had a home gym with a treadmill, elliptical and a rower and I paid a fee each year for maintenance.

With so many moving parts and sweat getting on parts, things always needed replacing.

Also when I did have our home we paid service contracts for the yard, the weeds, termites and pest control.

When we turned it into a rental before we sold it, we also had a monthly home warranty.

But, in the case of MS Office, unlike Adobe, they still sell a copy with a perpetual license that you only pay for once.

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