Subscription By Minute

[Hexspa]

Who would want a subscription where you paid based on actual use? Let's say a normal subscription is around $40. That could be worth 20h/week or 80 total hours equal to $0.50/min. If you don't use your minutes, they roll over. With everything being always-connected (I know there are exceptions but then the time could run locally), I'm surprised this isn't seen. It's an old model but I feel like that might sway me toward keeping software installed vs. saying adios. I'm not going to develop plugins, just wanted to dump the idea here. Thoughts?

[Held]

Seems kind of stressful having to consider cost every time you add a plugin to your project. On the other hand, it would probably save me money because I rarely use the plugins I buy.

[Nspace]

Oh no! This is where the subscription business models are heading to...
With the burn out and broad accumulation of "small" payments, some are already feeling a rather large bite by the combined beast.
What this not-so-old idea you are refloating Hexpa, will provoke is more vertical & horizontal integration on the supply side. Those who offer multiple products (now services) in a single, hassle free, low transaction cost offering would have an advantage.

That whole tendency strives to "dress" customers with just-in distribution services, that are paid only when used. Eating most of what economists name as "consumer surplus", so giving additional gains to the vendors.
It is the utmost money extraction mechanism devised, which follows the so called "free market" */1 incentives, when pricing practices only follow the money profit trail, devoid of long-term, sustenance, social, communal, good neighbor, etc. considerations.

>>That is when the focus shifts entirely from developing, manufacturing, creating, sharing, enjoying... what you do, into doing what the biggest money delta advises, which in a healthy person's decision process are all part of the selection. It similarly happens with firms and companies investment and project decisions; they do not invest ONLY in the biggest money returning endeavor. There are tendencies as well that promote more inclusive enterprising, like the called B Corporations

Anyway, that was the long-range perspective and the philosophical view of an apparent innocuous pricing strategy.
As we should know by now, sometimes small turns end up having large consequences, so better be careful.

*/1 Instead of Free Market, should be called Capitalism, since it mostly defends the Capital side, not the exchange (market) where transactions occur.

[Hexspa]

I thought it would give more value to the consumer. The only gain that the company gets is that the customer still does business with them, albeit on a smaller scale. I agree it's microtransaction-like but it's still a fair exchange. Corporations, B or otherwise, would maybe see more profit and part-time users would need less up-front investment and/or long-term commitment.

In general, I avoid subscriptions. However, in Melda's case, the rent-to-own proposition put me in the buyer's camp. By way of comparison, I cancelled a 'media-creation' subscription because I used it too infrequently. Even though I'm happy with my replacement software, I'd have perhaps stuck with the company if they had a more flexible payment system - one that reflected my needs as much as theirs.

[Nspace]

I thought it would give more value to the consumer.

That's many times the impression it gives to temporary or unaware customers. However when you count the monthly Office 365 payments, it adds up. That is an example of a tool you'll use for decades to come. There are all kinds of usages, how often you edit pdf files?
The extreme are the classic villain firms like Adoble or Autocad, both do not offer software licenses for sale, they dropped them once they were the industry standard and required for work, so now they only rent, expensive rents...

I thought it would give more value to the consumer. The only gain that the company gets is that the customer still does business with them, albeit on a smaller scale. I agree it's microtransaction-like but it's still a fair exchange. Corporations, B or otherwise, would maybe see more profit and part-time users would need less up-front investment and/or long-term commitment.

From the Companies' point of view, the privileged ones are those that are able to squeeze themselves into your automated monthly bill. You set it, and forget it. That continuous blood pump is the investor's wet dream. They buy such companies because they can expect a steady % yearly return, and they organize top down right into the product design choices to keep that life support system.

Intel in the past two decades has become another case of the same. They kept a long sleep innovation-wise, while each term its market size grew, mainly driven by demographics, and kept delivering over $10.000mill quarterly returns. All the while, they lost their foundry relevance to Samsung and Taiwan's TSMC and their main competitor AMD kept innovating and now disputes them many segments hand to hand.

In the music side, Pioneer was not long acquired by an investment fund, same as Native Instruments. First, flashy CEOs arrive and marketing strategies are replaced, delivering the pricing transformation so later the companies get bought by high $$ and are bound to remain that way...

//That is the Firm's side. and this talk matters to us, because them together form the trend outlined in the post above. Customers may get some tools cheaper, sometimes, while some of these get "commoditized". The price though, is that structure being build around us, reading and selling stuff. Not organicly, but more like matrix-wrapped basking on profits, and with incentives to perpetuate those whenever they may.

To me, if the playfield was open and clean it wouldn't even merit a comment. However, we are still far from free of predatory actions. We turn our heads and at the next look the company we love and work with is bought and transformed, many times not in a good way.
We truly have a say with our purchasing power as customers and so getting awareness may steer things a few relevant degrees.

[Hexspa]

Your point seems to be about greedy corporations implementing the idea unfairly. My idea presupposed that a use-based credit system would be more attractive in the case you mentioned: editing PDFs occasionally. The point of a business is to make money, more or less - that's a given. Though I understand that some companies would abuse their position, I still think the idea is viable and that some people would like it. I can't be so jaded as to think that a fair exchange is impossible.

[operator]

"You will own nothing and you will be happy."

[Nspace]

I agree with your point Hexpa that the above assumes greedy, out of equilibrium, behavior. That is my observation and also yes, it could be quite dragging idea to carry all the time.
However subscription models and charging by the minute are such extreme cases, that themselves actually aim for us users! to set and forget; they come as a solution for this, so we do not need to be checking every transaction. "Go this way and you won't need to evaluate every yearly update".

There are possibilities and solutions to brighten our way around all this. Melda is a good one. Pay once upfront (for a trusted and proven trajectory) and updates are free for life. This business model is based in increasing attractiveness and growing its customer base over time. But it is a very rare proposition. Normally, at big software tools, I do prefer to evaluate the quality and improvement of every version update and then decide (also budget wise) if I will skip this one or get it.

There is an underlying difference between Audio software and say production software (like Office), in that what we aim for are "sounds", or sound tools, alike owning and playing traditional acoustic or electric "real" instruments or gear. Something you get your musical or art project around. Something that might be dormant for certain lapses, years, decades, and you may want to retrieve later.
We musicians and producers learn, love and invest in a personal way of playing them. So the importance to keep a working version or similar for decades to come. Not to be disrupted or rendered unattainable because that subscription ended ages ago, or the new wrapper version is not compatible with said virtual instruments, as we know do still happens with acquired products.

Musicians and Audio customers uniqueness have been poorly understood by OS' developers (remember the shift from 32 to 64 bits?), by marketing and CEOs and investors coming to work or invest in this field. Together with the use of mentioned pricing schemes... call for some care in what we customers choose, imho.

Edit; provide an example for production software (Office), as meant above

[Scotty]

Some future computationally expensive process might be imagined that would support minute by minute rental charges but the time scale doesn’t work for most plugins. If I really stretch the thinking maybe some AI optimization that can only run on server farms would make sense but in the here and now measuring plugin usage in minutes is a billing solution in search of a product.

[smadger]

Just on a practical level how could this possibly work? For other applications and media perhaps, there are opportunities for this in media consumption and streaming for the end user, but for an audio plugins, tools? Like how do you define "in use"? Just therender time? Time active? Time lodaed in an application? Time loaded on a system? Arbitrary time between signing in and signing back out? No thanks.

[Hexspa]

All I can say is two things: when I moved to San Francisco in 2002, I was happy to have access to the internet in cafes that charged by minute. Without that, I couldn't have found all my failed jobs on Craigslist. This is why I don't think it's a billing solution in search of a product: it's been applied before and can be applied to anything - timeshare properties, cars. Hours, days, minute - whatever; it's a smaller fraction than a month.

I'm not a developer but people are talking about W3; decentralized internet. That plus 5G (bandwidth allocation) lends itself to on-demand/peer-to-peer services (banking, file transfers). Think of how an ADSR works: time ramps up, reaches a peak and then upon release has a time until it's off. That's how the billing could work. Open the plugin, time starts ramping up; with a certain amount of use, peak cost; not processing audio for awhile, billing stops. Fractions of cents are not unheard of, right Spotify?

For what it's worth, I like stuff that I can buy - I'm not a fan of subscriptions; I think I mentioned this. There is one caveat, though: if I just need something on a limited basis and a subscription is the only option (someone mentioned Adobe) then - unlike a guitar sitting there for years - I'd rather pay a shorter time than get into a yearly contract or pay for a single month. I understand that some projects have their own timeframe and I'll probably need that software May 1st even though I only paid for April.

[MeldaProduction]

Sorry, hardly possible and indeed stressful imho. There are so many problems with that...

[Starship Krupa]

I've worked in software development (including Macromedia before Adobe got it) and then in IT as someone who evaluated software for purchase and also of course as a hobbyist audio and video creator.

I understand the arguments for subscriptions (big-company software development thrives better with steady revenue streams, and it helps avoid feature-based license grubbing), but I would never wish to purchase one in any way but possibly the Meldaproduction subscribe-to-own model. The reason for this is as Hex says. I'm not a professional daily user of creative tools. I don't have a revenue stream that can justify a subscription, I go months at a time without touching Vegas (for instance). If my interests happen to wander, it might be the same for Cakewalk.

The idea that my stuff stops working if I miss a payment is nasty.

I think subscriptions are viable for daily user pros, such as graphics people who use the Adobe Creative Suite. For someone who takes photos as a hobby and just wants to use Photoshop every so often, it doesn't work.

For this reason, I like the idea of companies like Adobe or Avid selling different versions, one subscription, another with a single purchase license (a la Photoshop Elements).

[Hexspa]

Whoa, Macromedia. I wanted to learn flash back when I was 14 but didn't. Regarding 'lite' versions, I'm not a fan. Adobe had some almost-cool (imo) phone apps which they dropped support for. Often, it seems, lite versions quickly become unsupported temporary promos - like buying a license to a stick-on tattoo. Honestly, I avoid them and almost never install any now.

[Starship Krupa]

Whoa, Macromedia. I wanted to learn flash back when I was 14 but didn't. Regarding 'lite' versions, I'm not a fan. Adobe had some almost-cool (imo) phone apps which they dropped support for. Often, it seems, lite versions quickly become unsupported temporary promos - like buying a license to a stick-on tattoo. Honestly, I avoid them and almost never install any now.

I was working there when John Gay and Robert Tatsumi (creators of "Future Splash") showed up in the San Francisco office to turn their original package into Shockwave Flash. They were nice guys, no ego about being newly-minted millionaires. Which proves my theory that a person's actual importance to an organization is inversely proportional to how important they act.

As for lite or LE versions, they have long had a bad name for turning into what you describe. When done correctly, though, they provide their own revenue stream, prevent less affluent people from being tempted to pirate the main program, and maybe act as a stepping stone to purchase of the full product.

The problem is when the marketing dept. believes that sales of the LE version merely cannibalize sales of the full version. Then they push to keep it crippled and eventually, they hope, abandoned. But it doesn't have to be that way. I've long been a fan of Adobe Photoshop Elements, for instance. I've never even learned everything Elements is capable of, because I'm a casual user. But I paid for it, and it kept me in the Adobe ecosystem rather than going for another company's more reasonably priced product. Because if it comes down to someone buying another company's pixel editor for $60 or paying $20 more to get the undisputed industry standard, I would think that Adobe would prefer that they collect the $80.

Marketing have to understand that they're collecting money that would not otherwise be spent on the full version. And they get tunnel vision about that. If the peasants are denied bread, they aren't going to buy your cake, they're going to buy bread from Corel.

Not incidentally, I happen to have licenses for, and love, multiple Meldaproduction FX in their "LE" editions. Notably MTurboReverble, MTurboComple, MTurboEQle. and MSpectralDynamicsle. The only one I wish for more from is the last one, and that's solely the ability to take a sample of noise for noise reduction. Otherwise, they're all so feature-packed that I'll never fully explore everything they can do. Vojtech, as with so many other things about his business, does "lite" right.