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I've used most available services, but discontinued one after another along with promises that a better user experience will be provided with reduced content and removed functionality with the slight price hike. YouTube was my first and last video service I paid for, only Spotify remains on the borderline.
I don't have numbers to offer but the initial pricing may have been losing them money. Some big companies will offer a service at a loss to get more customers to bite, then when the price hikes hit many of the customers will be used to the service and just sign up for the hike.
This is the norm for the "X as a service" market. Since it's a recurring revenue stream you can offer your "product" below cost to entice people since they're going to have to keep paying up to continue using it. Then once you've hooked enough people you can dial up the pricing and dial down the costs/features. Fuck everything about this. I want to pay once and own for life.
"Cloud" based services I genuinely understand the need for a recurring service model. They are paying for hosting of infrastructure on a recurring basis and a one time fee wouldn't cover that.
Generally, though. I agree. If I'm running the software locally, I want to own my license fully.
The problem is that they keep making stuff that was formerly a purchase (download, physical copy, run locally, etc) into unnecessary cloud services just to justify the transition to "X as a service". I want to download it and keep it on my home server, not pay a recurring fee to access the same file over and over from a server.
Yeah. That's a different problem. 😁
I was more referring to the idea that subscriptions themselves are the problem.
I'm also ok with subscription prices increasing over time as costs increase. But I completely agree with removing services being a bad thing.