I hate ads, but you're actually right in this case. If done with moderation and purpose—like the YouTube videos that promote a high-quality cooking ingredient while meaningfully explaining why it’s better—it could work well.
All web-based software makes sense as a subscription because of ongoing maintenance costs. Servers, security updates, bug fixes, dealing with app stores, testing on new devices... it adds up in an unpredictable way.
That's not even considering the many subscriptions a developer has to pay, including to Apple.
That's... not the user's problem. This is a fine and cool project don't get me wrong. But the overall 'subscription everything' model is not really justified by costs. The subscriptions are usually orders of magnitude more than the true operating cost.
It's not the customer's job to pay you forever bc Apple wants a developer license. It's the business's job to make sure it's sustainable with the costs that it has / has chosen to bear.
That's the backpressure on business models - they're not all viable. Just because you _could_ add in a bunch of servers and cloud costs and whatever, doesn't mean it's inherently justified.
The problem is more that it's gotten _so_ cheap to run, that charging each user a seemingly-nominal 5c/day fee doesn't feel bad to an average person for a chance at value. And at scale you get enough people who figure "ah it's not that much", and end up with massive profit margins. Profiting off the disparity between the individual choice and the aggregate.
There doesn't need to be any justification. If that's what OP wants to charge then that's reason enough.
That being said, OP should probably realize a lot of people don't pay for software--even in HN.
That's why OP needs to make sure the users are the product and find some way to sell the user data to advertisers.
OP should contact restaurants and allow them to place ads in the recommendations. He should also sell access to user data and allow restaurants and advertisers to target free users.
He can have a subscription tier that gives you privacy.
> There doesn't need to be any justification. If that's what OP wants to charge then that's reason enough.
Yep, makes sense.
> That being said, OP should probably realize a lot of people don't pay for software--even in HN.
Indeed. Maybe people pay even less on HN, seeing as many of us can hack together something for personal use.
> That's why OP needs to make sure the users are the product and find some way to sell the user data to advertisers.
Er…
> OP should contact restaurants and allow them to place ads in the recommendations. He should also sell access to user data and allow restaurants and advertisers to target free users.
Wait, what? This is app for eating at home, restaurants have nothing to do with it.
> He can have a subscription tier that gives you privacy.
if and when someone invents microtransactions for real ... i still think being able to pay a penny or a nickel for a resource, instead of a subscription, would be an interesting experiment.
probably everyone would end up going broke but i would love to see a simulation of it, if not a real experiment.
i know nickel transactions costs a dime to process, but if it was cheap we could have new ways of having new things.
That would be kind of neat. Bc realistically the marginal costs on most digital things is negligible. But if it were practical to charge people the 1e-11 dollars per page view or whatever maybe could do some interesting things
It’s nice of you to consider the wellbeing of other users, but I think every adult has the right to make their own decisions about how to spend their money.
If it’s not a price you’re willing to pay, that’s fine. But if someone else gets value out of it and thinks it’s a fair trade, that’s between them and the app creator.
> But if someone else gets value out of it and thinks it’s a fair trade, that’s between them and the app creator.
Since we're apparently now doing Freshman Civics:
There are many sorts of transactions that someone would get value from and think are a fair trade, but are prohibited for one reason or another.
Even for those somewhat-antisocial transactions that aren't prohibited, there's no rule that says that you can't complain about how those transactions could be more pro-social.
> Even for those somewhat-antisocial transactions that aren't prohibited, there's no rule that says that you can't complain about how those transactions could be more pro-social.
Yeah, and there's also no rule that says that other people can't tell you to shut up.
Makes sense as a subscription for the developer, not the user. I’d not pay for this, subscription or not. It’s up to the person trying to sell me something to either convince me to pay (not happening in this case) or figure out other ways of making money (deals with restaurants, premium features, idk).
I get that there is work behind it, there is work behind everything, and I get they are reoccurring. What you mention is still valid, but in the real world, sob story about costs to run something are not something the customer cares about.
From a consumer’s perspective, paying for a product or service is an exchange of money for value. Even with a service, there’s a tangible result—like a fresh haircut or the convenience of not dealing with tax filing. Paying only makes sense when there’s value in return, which isn’t true for many subscription services. Arguments about “maintenance costs” hold little weight for customers who don’t perceive any added value.
In some cases, subscriptions are reasonable, such as when software would be a heavy burden on personal devices, like power-intensive language models, or when it needs to stay compliant with evolving legal requirements, like an accounting software or something.
A larger issue is Apple’s push for subscription-based software in almost everything, often to bolster its bottom line, while damaging the industry as a whole for the reasons mentioned.
Also subscription to a developer is a product for them, it has nothing to do with the product they create for others
Even if the service can't be delivered indefinitely for a one-time payment, subscriptions as the only option are a hard sell at this point, because most people are feeling the effects of subscription fatigue
A 1-year pricing option or 30-day trial with the option to pay up front for a year or a month, without it becoming a subscription is way more compelling to the user than signing up for a subscription that one then has to remember to cancel.
I personally subscribe to Amazon Prime and that's it. A service has to meet an incredibly high bar for me to consider a subscription, and I wouldn't have considered it with Amazon until after they had set up their global prime delivery infrastructure/network and video streaming service. I'm not going to give my credit card to a company that makes picking out a recipe slightly easier to keep on file, that's a ludicrous proposition.
The point of commercial software shouldn't to satisfy the need of their developpers to get paid for it but to reach that intersection where it is useful enough for many users to accept paying a decent price for it and allow dev to make a profit.
If that intersection is unreachable in the first place, there is just no sense to mention maintenance costs.
It's baffling that people can still think this way in 2024. Almost none of Musk's forecasts, estimates, or product promises have been delivered on time. His history is basically a long list of missed deadlines. Believing that Musk is a good leader is pure delusion, especially now.
As a reminder, the sitting POTUS announced the suspension of their reelection campaign on X. It wasn't announced on CNN or the NYT or via WH direct broadcast, it was on X. These events will be written about without any political rose-colored-glasses in 100 years from now.
You can regurgitate your genuinely stupid rhetoric all you want, but I hope you understand that nobody of any importance, relevance, or power agrees with you -- in fact, they haven't for a few years now if you've been paying attention to anything in reality.
Nobody cares about the things you're enumerating. But, even if they did, Musk is better on those points than anyone you're going to suggest.
I care. I'm sure Musk cares. I'm sure the private investors care. I'm sure the 500M+ paying users of X care.
You should be genuinely embarrassed at your brain dead and stupid reply.
We can only have intelligent discussion here if you're willing to. Dismissing the conversation so severely suggests you're a liar, propagandist, demon, and/or retard (possibly, all of the above) acting in bad faith.
The onus is on you to demonstrate the ad hominem fallacy here, not me. If you can't even imagine a world where the owner of X cares, you're so disconnected from reality that derision the only means of bring you back down to Earth. The bar cannot be any lower.
I can see why the elite view people like you as slaves.
I think the more correct statement would be: "The world is moving away from imperative programming altogether, towards declarative programming".
IMO functional programming is just a special kind of imperative programming. I think real distinction is between "imperative/functional", where you describe how to do thing, and "declarative" where you don't care about the hows, but you specify what is the end result you want to see. For example: html (declarative) "I WANT A RECTANGLE AT THIS POSITION AND SIZE": <div style="top, left, height, width">, while imperative, you exactly tell the how, like <for i> then <for j> draw a pixel at that position i,j. Making drawing a box as functional does not make too much sense, because that is a task, which does not benefit from the functional paradigm, but it does helps a lot with cardinality and null checking problems when dealing with other kind of problems.
I think it is already changing into this. Basically every single framework is one kind of declarative wrapper over an imperative language, or you can say every single function library makes the way how you work a little bit more declarative (like in the box drawing demo, you can just use function to write a box. I think in 20-30 years, in a very twisted way programming will be completely declarative by you telling an AI to write a code, first at a very low level of abstraction, but in time more and more complex ways. We'll see
i checked them, but libredirect removed the twitter option from the config menu (i guess because of the changes in the twitter api) and the other just a generic url to url redirect. but thanks anyway
It's not monopolization when you can just buy the alcohol yourself or (in AU/NZ) the supermarkets themselves do alcohol delivery. I'd be surprised if more than 1% of all alcohol is delivered by Uber. To use monopolization like this is to strip it of all meaning.
Afaik any food delivery app can also deliver alcohol these days, so I am not sure what the whole monopolization hubbub is.
And for all it’s worth, it is much easier dealing with UberEats or Doordash customer service than it used to be with all the fragmented separate small apps. So as a customer, it definitely feels like a win.
