You will own nothing and be (un)happy

Personally, being somewhat technically inclined I find there is rarely much of a reason to pay for the ongoing use of software. The large majority of software I use is open source and self-hostable. The JetBrains IDEs are good enough that I would consider paying for them, if programming was my livelihood (and I didn't have an employer to pay for them). But programming is just a hobby for me so I'm not inclined to pay for an IDE. Really the only class of software I occasionally pay for is games, but that is always a once-off payment, I don't subscribe for anything.

When I pay for subscriptions, it tends to be for ongoing access to content (music, movies, etc) or infrastructure (storage, server usage, etc). Often that stuff comes bundled with proprietary software but if anything I would much rather it didn't and I could just interact with the content/infrastructure using open source software.

I'm not generally thrilled to be paying a subscription for content, which I would rather own, and indeed I am getting more and more into taking ownership over it. But admittedly there are other benefits to things like music subscriptions, like discoverability and the fact that you don't need a load of storage.

Note taking apps are something I see discussed a lot on HN and there seem to be loads of fancy subscription based services in that space. I don't get it at all - I use Joplin to keep notes and already I feel like that is an over-engineered solution and am considering just going back to text editor + .txt/.md files.

Subscriptions make companies lazy and it degrades the product. I'm looking at you: Foundry, Adobe, Maxon, heated seats on BMWs ...

They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.

Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.

Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.

Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.

> Yesterday, I checked out the Goodnotes app because I’m planning to buy an iPad to give note-taking on it a try again.

You're setting yourself up for failure from the get go, stop chasing gadgets and 99% of your problems will go away

"It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion. You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore."

That's your decision. I've published an music album on Bandcamp. You can buy it, I'll send you a real physical tape and you can _download_ high quality FLAC you own then.

If you like to own things, you have all the possibilities.

But I agree, we maybe tend to forget about high quality stuff, if we consume conveniently low quality streaming content for example on Spotify.

I sympathize with not owning stuff, but I don't get this part:

> I bought the previous “lifetime” version of the app, but for WHAT, since I have to pay for the subscription to access the newest features.

Yeah, that's how "ownership" works. When you own something, nobody else changes it–for better or worse–out from under you.

It's asymmetrical, you publish something online, immediately it is used by social networks or AIs for profit. Vice versa you get an app, it's not even yours.

I think we should strive to avoid playing this game..

But in the end i feel in this particular case, it’s ops fault. He can avoid using that app there’s a world of alternatives for writing apps and organizing apps.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You can’t be expected to get a subscription, but you also can’t be expected to charge for an upgrade.

Now, I hate subscriptions as much as the next person, but I can’t leave this blog without feeling that the op is a bit entitled.

For what it matters, my opinion is that GoodNotes is doing everything correctly. If you bought a 5 lifetime, you can still use it. It’s the same app (that’s interesting, there is a toggle to go between 5 and 6) so I’m assuming it’s still getting bug fixes for new os releases and similar. 5 was a free update to 4, and 6 was released in 2023 (!) so that license was good for a while. They offer discounts if you bought 5, so op point of it being cheaper on a subscription might be wrong. And according to their website they still offer lifetime licenses for 6, bar the AI stuff (which is probably an ongoing cost for them? No idea if it’s local or not).

Plenty of scammy apps and it would be nice to go back to owning things, but this is the same experience if not better to when you could buy software on a cd and keep it a couple decades ago.

True ownership of software requires the ability to tinker and repair via open or at least licensed source code. But source code almost never makes sense to release for commercial products that must grow to survive and requiring funding to do that.

In the little software business I have been working towards creating, my desire was to offer a educational product for aspiring programmers as a monthly subscription.

Then, once the subscription product is paying the bills and successful, create a single seat offline version of the software and sell that as a package with a book. The book would be a user's guide for the programming language with fun example programs to type in suitable for families and schools who don't have internet to connect to my site.

I have planned networking and sharing features for the online edition that the offline book edition wouldn't have, so there'd be an incentive to pay the subscription to get all that. Nevertheless, I feel an offline version should be made available with a perpetual license in case my company dies, taking the website and web-based programming environment with it and leaving people with nothing.

Just earlier this month I was at a recording studio and no ILok plugin worked because of a connectivity issue god knows where. Plugins that did cost a lot of cash for them and were in the advertisement material of the studio.

Now even hardware things that used to work for decades need apps. Some guitar pedals need apps to operate. The first generation of those has already become paper weight: after Digitech was bought by Samsung, all the app servers died.

Apps that need a server are never for my behalf, they are purely for creating a dependency. The real feature is allowing an actual backup of the data.

Streaming has the even worse issues. It promises to pay creators, but after listening to only two bands in a month, as an experiment, no visible fraction of the $10 didn’t went to neither of those bands. It probably went to some major label, of course.

I am 100% disillusioned on anything touched by tech and see piracy as a way to resist this crap. So far only piracy has been reliable in having things work as they should when they should.

We used to own tools that made us productive. Now we rent tools that make someone else profitable. Subscriptions are not about recurring value but recurring billing and at some point every product decision starts bending toward dependence instead of ownership.

If others control the things that are important to you, they will at some point find a way to abuse that power. A very important point to keep in mind when making technology choices.

Why would you trust any company Google, Apple, Microsoft, any company like them, to be in control of stuff that's important to you.

There's really no excuse if you're talking about notes.