January 2014

Economics of software and website subscriptions

It’s a truism that people won’t pay for online media, except for porn. That’s a little unfair. I’m one of many people who has long had a pro account on flickr, which costs $25/year. Despite flickr’s ups and downs, I’ve always been happy to pay that. It also set the bar for what I think of as a reasonable amount to pay for a digital subscription: I give them $25, they host all photos that I want to upload, at full resolution. Back when people still used Tribe.net, they offered “gold star” accounts for $6/month, which removed the ads and gave you access to a few minor perks, but mostly it was a way to support the website. The value-for-money equation there wasn’t quite as good as with flickr, in my opinion, but I did have a gold-star account for a while.

Looking around at the online services I use, I see there are a few that are offering some variation on premium accounts. Instapaper offers subscriptions at $12/year, or about half of my flickr benchmark. The value for money equation there isn’t great—the only benefit I would get is the ability to search saved articles—but it’s a service I use constantly, and it’s worth supporting. Pinboard (which has a modest fee just to join in the first place) is a bookmarking service that offers an upgraded account for $25/year; here, the benefit is in archiving copies of web pages that you bookmark. I can see how this would be extremely valuable for some people, but it’s not a high priority for me. I use a grocery-list app on my phone called Anylist that offers a premium account for $10/year; again, the free app is good enough for me, and benefits of subscribing don’t seem all that relevant.

In terms of value for money, none of these feel like great deals to me. Perhaps because the free versions are as good as they are, or perhaps because the premium versions don’t offer that much more, or some combination of the two. But I use and appreciate all these services, and maybe that’s reason enough that I should subscribe.

At the other end of the scale, there’s Adobe, which has created quite a lot of resentment by converting its Creative Suite to a subscription model, for the low, low price of $50/month. This offends designers on a primal level. It’s like carpenters being required to rent their hammers and saws. The thing is that $50/month is a good deal compared to their old packaged product pricing, assuming that you would upgrade roughly every two years. The problem is that the economic incentives are completely upside down.

Once upon a time, Quark XPress was the only game in town for page layout, and then Adobe InDesign came along and ate their lunch. Quark thought they had no competition, and the product stagnated. Now Adobe Creative Cloud is pretty much the only game in town for vector drawing, photo manipulation, and page layout.

With packaged software, the software company needs to offer updates that are meaningful improvements in order to get people to keep buying them. Quark was slow about doing that, which is a big part of the reason that people jumped ship. With the subscription model, Adobe uses the subscription as a ransom: when customers stop subscribing, they lose the ability to even access their existing files. Between the ransom effect and the lack of meaningful competition, Adobe has no short-term incentive to keep improving their product. In the long term, a stagnant product and unhappy customers will eventually encourage new market entrants, but big American companies are not noted for their long-term perspective.

I think that’s the real difference here, both psychologically and economically: I can choose to subscribe to those smaller services, or choose not to. They all have free versions that are pretty good, and if any of them wound up disappearing, they all have alternatives I could move to. With Adobe, there are no alternatives, and once you’re in, the cost of leaving is very high.

Good reads, 2013

The following are some of the best stories, articles, essays, blog posts, etc, that I read during 2013. They weren’t necessarily written in 2013. I’m including them in roughly the order I encountered them.

Circle of Useful Knowledge

Gwen’s parents brought her a book from a library sale in their small town, The Circle of Useful Knowledge, published in 1888. It’s filled with bizarre recipes for cocktails mixed in 10-gallon quantities, tips on animal husbandry, etc.

I’m posting extracts from it in a separate blog, titled Circle of Useful Knowledge. I’m going to try to post a couple of entries a day. Enjoy.