this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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So I read your comment and did some research. Mint seemed like the best example that a small team could reasonably get started on.
Some of the original people behind Mint founded Monarch and the CEO put out a very reasonable article on why your best bet would be to replace it with a subscription based alternative. Essentially - since anything free is eventually going to become an ad company, the company will never have your best interests in mind.
I hate the subscription model, but I somewhat agree - unless we're talking about offline software, there's always maintenance involved, also further development. If your software is ad-supported, it's on shakier ground.
I don't think we're likely to see another Mint. The more functionality you want, the more expensive it is to develop. BUT if what you're looking for is just the core functionality then yes, that could reasonably be ad supported, or even free and open source.
It's expensive but I like YNAB. All the functionality Mint had and more, no ads.
Subscription models are the thin end of the wedge of enshittification.
Imagine a world of television. No streaming, mind. Broadcast television. You had to orient your day around what you wanted to watch, if it was even possible. Or you had to buy expensive equipment to use terrible UIs to try and make an inferior copy of what you wanted to watch at a given time.
We weren't animals of course. We had this spiffy thing called "cable". With a cable package you could get a dozen channels clearly instead of maybe two clear ones and a half-dozen more fuzzy ones via the antennae. Life was great! But ... it was about to get better. Because the cable companies had cooked up...
PREMIUM CABLE!
And the centrepiece of premium cable was specialty channels, the most popular of which were the movie ones! Just think! You could get movies in their entirety, not hacked and slashed for television audiences. Not torn apart limb from limb by commercial inserts. You'd watch a movie from beginning to end, non-stop, and could do this 24 hours a day, if you liked, all for the price of seeing two movies in theatres per month. (And back then theatres were dirt cheap by comparison to today!)
O frabjous joy!
No commercials. You paid a subscription for these channels, so no commercials.
And then the commercials started.
It started off sanely enough. A scattering of "hand-selected" commercials between movies/episodes/whatever. (And, weirdly, despite the cable companies having opened a new stream of revenue, prices edged up a bit for the premium channels.) Then it was 10-15 minutes of solid commercials between movies/episodes/whatever and they didn't seem too discriminating in what they advertised. Almost as if it was "anybody who paid" instead of "hand-selected".
Then, in the more traditionally TV-oriented fare, with episodes, rather than full movies. the specialty channels started putting commercials during the episodes.
Salami tactics. Slice by slice. Prices edged up. Services got worse. And ads infested everything. Until today you can't even check out what's showing without being flooded with ads.
Subscription models are not a bulwark against ads.
They're no bulwark against ads, but how is a free service supposed to be sustained? Free only works if it's offline/self-hosted and open source IMO.
All depends on whether the company providing the service is public too I guess. As soon as it's public, you have shareholders to please and then you HAVE to squeeze every cent out of your customers. Tale as old as time.
I'll bring an example of a subscription service that still hasn't enshittified: Mullvad VPN. It's still a fiver a month and you can't pay extra for extra functionality. It just always costs the same.
That seems to me to be a powerful argument against "free" services. Because there's no such thing. Not even:
"Self-hosted" isn't free. You have to pay for the hosting site one way or another, even if it's on your property. (Those bandwidth fees? That's payment.)
What are the trade-offs associated with it? It was made in 2009. Fifteen years later it hasn't changed its prices, even as everything around it (including its network fees) has increased? Colour me a little … dubious.
There have been many times I've passed on something because it had a subscription fee but would have bought as a one time purchase. I feel like everyone's forgotten that it's an option.
Eh, we've also started expecting continuous updates of our games and apps. That's why SaaS is such a popular model.
You used to be able to buy Photoshop and own that version forever. Now it's a SaaS. Personally I prefer the old model too, but a lot of people prefer to get updates apparently.