But isn’t the point of ads and all these tech companies with billions of data points, is to optimize ads to the people who are most likely to click them?

I hate ads, and I hate Facebook and all its products, but this just sounds like a bunch of people who misunderstand what ads are for and want equality for the sake of equality.

I never understood the appeal of AWS like cloud for non corporate. Sure, when you run a BigCo, you have all the money and people to throw at big cloud providers, obtaining pointless certificates, and configuring obscure IAM roles.

But why small businesses like them, I can’t I understand. I host all my stuff on Hetzner. It’s easy, it’s affordable and I “move fast”. I don’t need certificates to be able to manage the servers, and there is tone of information available online. But maybe it’s because I’m old, and I used to ssh to a Linux machine, git pull the latest version, and call in a “deploy”. But modern developed seems to be afraid of raw machines.

The only thing I miss is a good transactional email provider with PAYG pricing, and EU data residency.

“Hey bob from finance, I heard you want a new bi and dashboarding system to help us make better strategy choices? here’s 200k, hire devs, infra spend can be billed to this project id”

It’s a paperwork thing, not a financial decision.

People on HN act like it’s so easy to reach all the addressable market.

Most software, especially in the world of mobile/desktop apps are usually feature-complete. The problem is that developers keeps redesigning and refactoring them to justify development, rather than focusing on another product or marketing efforts.

Free bug fixes are generally expected. But nobody forbids you from releasing v2 and charging for it again (for example with upgrade discount).

Is it a “bug” when Apple releases a new OS/phone that either breaks backwards compatibility or does something like release the iPhone 5 and changes the form factor making your app look janky? This was when Apple released frameworks to allow phones of different sizes around 2012?

Or more recently should users expect a free upgrade when Apple deprecated 32 bit apps?

The Mac sees a lot less churn than iOS. But things do happen that cause apps not to work there. The most recent is that Electron was using a private API and all apps that used that version of Electron on Macs broke.

It's the cost of running a business.

If no one new is buying your product and you are just supporting one time pay users, why would a developer be incentivized to keep doing updates?

When you buy a physical product, do you expect the company to stand behind the quality of their product by providing (limited) warranty and/or support, despite the fact that this won't bring the company any new income?

Nobody forbids you from selling your software with an asterisk that says "works on X.Y version of MacOS, future releases will require a new license".

And if no one new is buying your product, I think you need to ask yourself whether you have a sustainable business or a hobby.

Define successful.

I run a SaaS that relies on one time payment. The income currently covers all the expenses, and leaves me some nice pocket money.

Is this model for everyone? No. The unique proposition of my service is actually the one time payment aspect. Does everything should be subscription? No. I avoid subscriptions as much as possible, unless there is a cost involved in running the service.

So YMMV. I wouldn’t pay a subscription for a MacOS app, unless there is an ongoing operational cost for the developer.

Feel free to email me (profile -> website) if you want to chat.

Is it really a SaaS if it doesn't rely on recurring subscriptions? I thought the definition of a SaaS is the recurring subscription model.

SaaS = “Software as a Service”, not “Software as a Subscription”.

I think it’s when the developer keeps providing a service.

Think of

  - being given a vacuum cleaner
  - buying a vacuum cleaner
  - renting a leasing a vacuum cleaner
  - paying someone to periodically vacuum your house

Only the last, for me, is “as a service”. An app that runs 100% on your system that doesn’t require the app developer to do something specially for you, for me falls under one of the other three (freeware, buying, subscription)

But yes, I agree the OP doesn’t seem to be doing SaaS, either, given that they say the one-time payment covers all expenses (that cannot be true if they are having costs after the sale and that payment is for all time)

Awesome, thanks, I will reach out!

But how will the company “maximize shareholder value” then?

Kind of a bummer. I paid for Affinity tools some time ago, but I guess my license is now worth trash, and if I want to use the new Affinity tools, I need to have "Canva account".

I mean, free tools are good. But I smell a road to enshittification (for example, by offering Affinity for free so you create Canva account, then they push Canva AI or whatever BS to you little by little, and in the end deprecate affinity so you would move to Canva web Pro Ultra Version with 90% off for the first 3 months). Could be wrong, will see I guess.

[Edit] Just to clarify something. It's not like I expect to pay for a license and get updates forever, but from what it seems like from other comments, the original apps are being removed from the App Store, meaning that the "free Affinity" is "Canva Flavored" Affinity, rather than the original tools.

The complaining is off the charts! Nothing in your life would have changed if you hadn't heard about this free product. Now you rest sleepless and grind your teeth because other people get to enjoy free high quality software.

Don't worry, I sleep tight and don't grind my teeth (at least not over Affinity).

What bothers me, however, is that I bought Affinity tools in the first place in order to avoid marrying myself with Adobe and their predatory business practices. I, and many people here on HN, shared this sentiment of Adobe. However, I'm kind of baffled by the amount of people who seems to celebrate these free tools, as this is a 101 in predatory business making: acquire a good product, make it free but with an account, deprecate said good product and force everyone to use your SaaS offering with monthly subscription. I might be wrong, time will tell.

I wonder when people will learn the real value of "free" offering by For Profit Big Corp (c)

They already were deprecating the original Serif suite, since it was clearly in part an acquihire.

You bought those licenses with terms that you preferred and those terms are being honored so it seems like everything worked well.

I bought Affinity as well. If Affinity remains free now for one year, that means that every person who needs them can make enough money during one year to pay for Photoshop for the next 10 years if they want to.

And if neither free nor paid professional software suits you, then program your own or use a physical photo editing lab. Or use your old Affinity software. It's not being deleted from your computer. That's what I'm going to do.

Yes, it did change: I want to use the old apps and I don't want to use a Canva account. I can still use them, but will never get any updates any more.

Nothing changed: you can still use the apps you purchased, as they were when you purchased them? That's the whole point of one time purchases.

What? How is selling a product with the promise of future updates under the same terms not owing us something? This is not some FOSS project we're taking about here.

bad take. your perpetual license was swapped under your nose for a freemium thing designed explicitly and specifically to get you to start paying subscription. that's the exact opposite of why I bought this software in the first place.

also remember, v2 is now NOT getting all the features people have been requesting for years like image trace. it seems basically calculated to get people to make an account and get the "free" thing instead of sticking with the "perpetual" v2

Your perpetual license is still valid for the v2 suite. Nothing was swapped - the product you paid for is no longer getting updates.

Just because people have been asking for features doesn't mean your perpetual license is owed those features??? That's an incredible amount of entitlement.

bro i just want to be able to buy the v3. as opposed to downloading the free thing and waiting for it to get worse and worse and more things pushing me to get pro subscription. is that so hard to understand?

we went from v1 -> v2 -> "free" + subscription, where "free" is unsustainable in the current economic climate and they WILL have to pull shady stuff once all the AI bubble money disappears.

Absolutely. "free" tier is just to grow a userbase with mandatory accounts.

Give it some time and suddenly that free tier shrinks or requires a subscription to continue.

I feel it spans way wider than just hobbies. For example, when people film in gyms, which is a private place. Or everywhere you go, there is a good chance you will be in someone's vlog/photo/youtube video.

I got used to naming files/folders with leading zeros when I want them to be sorted alphabetically (for example payslips/invoices, etc).

But I'm a tech guy, I know what does "alphabetically" mean in the tech world. And it probably is not what common folks mean when they think "alphabetically" outside the tech world.

Edit: in fact, if I recall correctly, the proper term for this kind of sort (the one OP wants) is alphanumeric sort.

I also got used to it, but especially when writing short scripts that generate numbered files it gets annoying to have to pad with zeroes every time, and also precommit to a specific amount of digits you want to allow (finding a compromise between adding a ridiculous amount, like 20, and using only 4 despite knowing the script might one day surpass 10⁵ files).

The natural numbers are ordered. Let me use its ordering instead of having to rely on an ad-hoc lexicographic fixed-length tuple representation of decimal digits, without any padding. My position is that numbers in filenames should always be considered atomically unless explicitly instructed otherwise.

If there were no issues of backwards compatibility, I would thus advocate for changing ls. Eza (maintained fork of Exa, Rust-based ls alternative) actually does sort this way by default, much to my delight.

shameless plug (though I don't get a cent out of this, of course): https://blog.vslira.net/2025/03/a-neat-approach-for-sortable...

I don't think hobbies are in decline. Anywhere I go, anything I do, it's packed with people, with a backlog of reservations that spans months. So I guess it's the "doom and gloom" of MSM.

As for me: programming, hiking, board games, reading, blogging, sports (martial arts / gym). And I'm trying to pick up some more.

I have this dream that one day I can write markdown files from my phone (or buy an iPad), and with some git software I can push it to GitLab, which will trigger a deploy pipeline. But sure, pushing from your local machine works as well.