So another sub or part of Apple Music? Please don't be another monthly payment.
As opposed to the last 100+ years of capitalism?
Sadly this seems to be the case, with SaaS/___ in a box everywhere in sight. I'm sure this subscription economy bubble will burst sooner or later... it has to. People have finite income. I'm already paying more for streaming than I did for cable.
The reason the subscription model is so popular is because people will bear it. People have demonstrated that 1) they like getting new features/content regularly and 2) they don’t want to pay a large up-front price. The good of the subscription model is that it provides a way of funding ongoing development and rebalances the software market after the App Store race to the bottom. People apparently don’t like spending more than a few bucks for software, but that mere few bucks once doesn’t pay for development, but people will pay a few bucks every month or year. This is the same reason why freemium games are so big. Of course, the downside is that people who want to buy to own are put out, and you usually end up paying so much more over the lifetime of the app/service if it’s a subscription. But, for something like a weather app, that API usage is a continuing expense, which is part of what’s good about subscriptions. So it’s a mixed bag, it keeps people using it (vs not paying for software) but it is annoying when an app you previously paid full price for changes business models and locks functionality you were actively using behind a paywall.
SaaS is a little different, incidentally (especially for businesses), as it usually is used with otherwise free products (think Fedora or CentOS vs RedHat) that use an ongoing support contract as its revenue stream, that ongoing support contract is very important to businesses, and it even provides them a way to get the features they need and ensure the product remains supported. Likewise, AWS’s software packages are mostly free and open source, but AWS manages the hardware, the demand loading, etc., which is valuable to businesses.
Edit: As for streaming, I think people consume more streaming content than is likely good for them. The fragmentation of the streaming market could be a good thing, if it forces people to reconsider their spending or media consumption. I’d argue that no one should spend more on streaming services than cable, it’s a pretty good indicator that you should reconsider the services you use and determine if that Discovery+ or CuriousityStream subscription is actually all that meaningful to you, or if your streaming usage is a digital media version of keeping up with the Joneses (“I gotta watch Tiger King just to understand all these memes and to say I’ve seen it”).
