[HN Gopher] People Don't Like Subscriptions
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People Don't Like Subscriptions
We have a subscription product. People don't like paying for
subscriptions. If we offer lifetime access, they jump at the
chance. What do you do to convince your customers to purchase a
subscription?
Author : sumizeit
Score : 21 points
Date : 2023-01-13 20:22 UTC (2 hours ago)
| codegeek wrote:
| I think subscriptions make sense when you use a product that
| requires maintenance, support and other things. If you buy
| something that you can use as is and not need additional support
| etc except may be during purchase/installation process, then one
| time makes sense.
|
| Most SaaS these days are subscription because it makes sense.
| Companies like BMW trying to charge for heated seat subscription
| is bullshit. I have an Acura TL 2010 with amazing heated seats
| all paid for once when I bought the car. Still runs amazing in
| 2023.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Personally I regret that I paid just once for a Plex Pass because
| Plex decided to go in a direction that I disagreed with
| completely. (e.g. prioritizing spamming me about off-brand
| streaming services over reliable access to my own streaming
| library)
|
| Had they been a subscription product this action could have hurt
| them in their pocketbook and they would have had a reason to care
| what I thought.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I bought a Plex pass as well and also dislike the direction
| they went afterward.
|
| Even with that, the $75 pass in April 2018 was cheaper than any
| reasonable monthly fee that they'd have charged me over the 57
| months since then (or the 40-plus months until they started
| pushing their own content).
|
| We still use Plex almost daily. 95+% of our use could be done
| on the free version, but I still feel like the Pass was money
| well-spent and don't mind that I supported them directly for
| something that we've used to manage over a thousand hours of
| entertainment and that the whole family can easily and
| intuitively use.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I enjoyed Plex until I didn't, then I switched to Jellyfin. I
| can't say it was a bad value in terms of what I got out of
| it, but in the sense that so many of us feel out of control
| of technology I feel like I am part of the problem and not
| part of the solution when I am involved w/ something like
| Plex.
| seydor wrote:
| What about yearly subscription, non recurring
| jsemrau wrote:
| When validating a product it can make sense to gauge initial
| interest by offering a lifetime deal. If your product is valuable
| enough, having stable MRR is better.
| Qahlel wrote:
| make the subscription super cheap at the start and lifetime
| access should have the opposite: unreasonably high price.
| subscription will look like a value deal in comparison.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Well maybe the fact that your 1 year subscription is $41.70 and
| your lifetime subscription is $50 does not help?
|
| It seems like it's a temporary discount, but even then a lot of
| people will wait for the next time it is discounted. You are
| setting a precedent that makes it not worth buying the
| subscription.
| VohuMana wrote:
| I don't run a business so I can't directly answer your question
| but I can answer it from a consumer stand point.
|
| Assuming I find your product interesting a free trial or cheap (<
| $10) monthly subscription will get me in the door. After that
| everything depends on the product and price.
|
| Generally this is how things are in my mind: - I generally want a
| lifetime license if one is offered even if it is expensive
| because I want to pay once and never again.
|
| - If a lifetime license is not available, too expensive, or has
| restrictions like missing features I'll opt for an annual
| subscription
|
| - If I am going to use the product briefly I'll opt for a monthly
| subscription and then cancel it when I am done using it.
|
| Some things that will put me off of your product no matter how
| good it is: - Hard or impossible to cancel subscriptions, if I
| have to call to cancel you can bet I will call once and never use
| your product again and I will tell anyone else interested to
| never use your product.
|
| - Removing features or forcing me to pay more for a better
| subscription tier after updating, generally unless I can't live
| without your product I will be canceling rather than upgrading my
| subscription tier
| znpy wrote:
| As an individual, subscriptions bothers me because nowni have to
| remember every month or every year about making sure money is on
| my debit card.
|
| Last time i bought a piece pf software (SecureCRT) i just paid it
| in full, and it's mine forever.
| nhtsamera wrote:
| [dead]
| ozim wrote:
| For me as individual it gets less and less interesting to own
| things that I will throw away.
|
| Owning a flat or a house is ok. Car is disputable to own.
|
| Software I don't care.
|
| Well data I do care. So if I buy instance of software and it
| stops working because I switch OS - I lost access to my data.
| Which is really bad.
| d_watt wrote:
| 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?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| Sloppy wrote:
| You really have to ask?
|
| Don't force subscriptions! If everything I ran - occasionally -
| required a subscription, no matter how small, I would drop 99% of
| it. I have already done this for MS Office and Adobe Creative
| Suite. I don't need updates and certainly not their online
| "collaborative" features, which are pretty lame IMO.
|
| Not sure how this works for them. A customer doesn't need
| services or updates but they disable their SW so, what, the user
| will come back to them. No, they just force us to find pay once
| alternatives or stop using the functionality. Because of this
| baffling practice I no longer consider their formats the
| standard.
| Semaphor wrote:
| A text editor I use costs 40 (20 after the first year) per year,
| or $260 lifetime. That's 11 years. I'd wager that makes
| subscriptions a lot better looking for most users.
| hirundo wrote:
| Find a middle ground, e.g. offer a three-year license.
|
| I don't want another klingon creeping onto my credit card, and
| you don't want to make a commitment for the lifetime of your
| business. So pick a duration in-between that allows both a one-
| time payment and an acceptable commitment.
| crecker wrote:
| I really prefer to pay 1k$ to get a full time license, instead of
| 10$ per month.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| No you don't.
|
| $1000 is more than 8 years of subscription. And that's without
| counting the 26.69% of inflation that the US had in the last 8
| years, making it actually more than 10 years.
|
| Not only is this a long time to keep using the same software,
| you also have good chances that the company has gone bankrupt
| by then.
| nithayakumar wrote:
| Does this hold true if you charge $150 for lifetime license vs
| $50?
|
| I think you have a pricing problem. This is what I see for you:
|
| Subscription Monthly = $84 / year
|
| Subscription Annual = $50 / year
|
| Lifetime = $50 One Time
|
| If I see myself using this for about half a year, I'm just going
| to get a lifetime sub.
| sokoloff wrote:
| When people say they don't like subscriptions and companies want
| to push subscriptions, it's almost always a pricing-vs-value
| issue at the core.
|
| If you want to sell me a subscription where I have a new Porsche
| for $1/day, and I can trade it in every 2 years for a new one,
| I'll take 3 or 4! If you want to sell me a subscription to
| _heated seats_ for $1 /day, I'll take zero and take pains to find
| a way around it and publish that.
|
| It's not that _subscriptions_ are bad, but rather than
| _overpriced subscriptions_ are bad, IMO. I'd love to "buy" an
| underpriced subscription for many of the things that today I own.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I mean, yes, if I negatively value subscriptions, that's a
| pricing thing, and you can overcome it by choosing a ridiculous
| example that vastly overcompensates for how much I negatively
| value subscriptions.
|
| But I still negatively value subscriptions.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I strongly prefer purchases as well, but it's still a matter
| of price vs value. Nearly everyone who prefers subscriptions
| and nearly everyone who prefers perpetual purchases can be
| flipped based on nothing but changing the price.
|
| For the right price, I'll sell all of our (totally paid off
| and perfectly usable) cars and lease cars forever.
| shostack wrote:
| I'll add that locking things behind a subscription also means
| that I lost access if I stop paying. Which puts me in an
| adversarial position against the company if they keep raising
| the price to see what the market will tolerate. And at some
| point people are likely to question if they continue to receive
| the value that justifies the ever increasing prices
|
| With a one off purchase I don't immediately lose my access if
| for example, I get laid off and need to cut back on my monthly
| spending. I may lose support, eventually run into an OS that
| won't run it, etc, but for the most part I don't lose my data
| and access.
| sokoloff wrote:
| True, but if the subscription is priced roughly equivalently,
| you will have enough money _still in your pocket_ to keep
| paying for that subscription even after you're laid off, at
| least for a while.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I would point out Adobe's Creative Suite which was a few
| thousand dollars in the day. I think many people couldn't find
| that much money in one place but more people can afford $65 a
| month. That $65 a month is starting to add up, it will be a lot
| more over the course of ten years, but with the subscription
| you always have the latest version.
| nhtsamera wrote:
| [dead]
| comte7092 wrote:
| I like subscriptions just fine, for example, I'd rather pay a
| monthly fee for a streaming service rather than have to buy media
| individually.
|
| You've stated nothing about why you think a subscription would be
| attractive to your customers, and that's likely the reason why
| they aren't interested. It might be good for you business, but
| what makes it good for them?
|
| Edit: I looked up your product in your other post. I'm not sure
| why you are surprised that people would prefer to go with the
| lifetime subscription. Even at full price, would you seriously
| think that people wouldn't just give Spotify $600 one time just
| to stream music _forever_ from their full library??
|
| If you're having trouble getting people to sign up for the
| subscription, it's probably because the free trial is too
| limited.
| __rito__ wrote:
| For me, it's a lot of things.
|
| - It's about trust. I pay once, and I get to "keep" it for as
| long as I want. Same reason I will never buy anything that is
| web/cloud based. I like paying once and getting a binary file
| that I can keep on my hard disk. I see plenty of serious
| photographers using Photoshop CS6, and some even Photoshop 7.0. I
| would like to own the file.
|
| - Company might just increase subscriptions price in the future.
| With one-time pay, that's not a problem.
|
| - A lot of companies just set subscription prices by converting
| from Dollar/Euro. That doesn't make sende where I live. The ideal
| way would be take the Purchase-Power-Parity into account.
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(page generated 2023-01-13 23:01 UTC)