If that’s the case then (and this is for any company) give customers the option of a lower price than today’s without the (generally invasive and poor) AI experiences.
Something I feel like I have something of value to share…
My kid has a birthday coming up and wanted a unique invitation. They wanted to just use canva to make it and I was almost onboard until everything they wanted to use in it needed a subscription. So instead, I used procreate(which I only had to pay for once) on my iPad to design it and free bing account to generate a few things for it.
In the end, I didn’t have to spend anything extra and got something my kid loves and is completely unique.
Overall it was a much better experience than canva and much more open.
I really hate how disconnected subscription prices are from actual value delivered. Imagine a world where you're billed proportional to usage! What a halcyon dream.
It discourages experimentation and use. It also adds significant mental overhead when it comes to using something. One can imagine this mental overhead when using Canva or Photoshop. But if evrry app was like that the complexity would rise exponentially.
Metering leads to reaching local optimal states at best, and makes it very difficult to reach a global optimal state.
There is very little marginal cost when software is concerned so metering isn’t even reflective of the costs of using a product.
However, this isn’t currently true of AI. AI has significant marginal costs so metering probably better aligns with the expenses, but metering is so bad for other reasons that most companies are choosing to forgo the “reflective of costs” benefit and just charge flat prices anyways.
> There is very little marginal cost when software is concerned so metering isn’t even reflective of the costs of using a product.
Well that's my point, isn't it? Neither are subscriptions. The transaction is presented as for a service, but you're really paying for a workforce that might not be providing any marginal value to you at all.
> Metering leads to reaching local optimal states at best, and makes it very difficult to reach a global optimal state.
I don't see how subscriptions are more likely to get us there. Certainly closed-source software (or paying for access to a closed-source service) makes it much harder to find globally optimal states—we're reinventing the wheel over and over and over again, which is tremendously inefficient and presumably would be a problem you'd expect market forces/technological progression to correct.
> Well that's my point, isn't it? Neither are subscriptions.
> (…)
> I don't see how subscriptions are more likely to get us there.
Your whole response hinges on the assumption that the person you’re replying to is defending subscriptions, yet they haven’t even hinted at that being the case. They explained what they see as the problems with metering and nothing else, nowhere in their response do I see an argument in favour of subscriptions.
Welcome to The Hammer™ OS®! Your privacy is valuable to us. The Hammer™ is billed for every use — the amount we bill you depends on your class within The Hammer™ Club membership system (ask our sales experts for more information). Welcome to the future of tools with The Hammer™!
> Imagine a world where you're billed proportional to usage!
I see a world of even more surveillance. One where people frequently install uBlock-like tools to stop the counting and apps install invasive “cheat prevention” DRM mechanisms like some AAA games. A world where someone is billed astronomical amounts because they forgot to close an app, where people are constantly nervous the whole time they use a tool, and unscrupulous companies make programs run just a bit slower to rake in more money.
I don’t like subscriptions either, but that doesn’t sound like the solution to me.
Canva's moat is their pre-made templates, clip art and other design elements. They have such a huge and ever expanding library that it is difficult for competitors to catch up.
They underinvested in R&D, and now they're scrambling to integrate the same AI platforms as everyone else. This isn't moat for them.
Didn't work so well for Dropbox because they failed to emulate the 40-year-old technology of WYSIWYG editors. Then again, GDrive still makes desktop users suffer the touch-first interfaces and non-customizable gigantic touch margins, but at least their spreadsheets and doc editor more or less work. Some day, one of the most valuable companies on the planet will finally solve the intractable problem posed by filling in PDF forms in a way that works every time and allowing them to be printed as-filled. I'm sure a few more trillion in AI will solve this some day.
I mean, seems like there are a whole lot of companies that came before them in the same space.
Increasing their price by 300% is making the Adobe Express individual plan look like a steal, and it makes them vulnerable to startups that have a new price ceiling target.
Article is block-subscribe-walled for me.. so not reading.
However I have avoided signing up for the pro version of canva mainly because it's a subscription, this at $10 / mth
I use it, and I recommend it, I like it.
I've watched videos showing some of the power of some of the AI things, I have told others of some of the use cases like smart object replace.
However if they go to $30 / mth I'll never go to the pro version.
As much as I hate 'credits' and 'token usage limits' because it's like trying to figure how many games you can play at a davenBusters with $40..
I would prefer a plan that gave a limit of usage and stayed at $10 / month.
I've even been looking at ways of doing some automated things with canva, but can't imagine paying $30 a month or more as a subscription service for canva or adobe or anything similar.
Hearing this increase possibility makes me appreciate the options that cyberlink and https://skylum.com/luminar/pricing have - as much as I dislike limited use addons and such, it's better than everyone being forced into a bigger data pie they don't need, and will likely get stuck into a never-to-end subscription for many people and businesses.
Stuff like this makes me glad that, gulp, 'rocket money app' is doing a find and auto remove your wasted subscriptions thing.
when the friends you like make you gravitate to liking your enemies because they are more friendly to your lifestyle ways. meh.
I wish them good luck with it haha, especially given the reliability issues. why would anyone want to 300% given the current reliability challenges ? (https://www.lycee.ai/blog/ai-reliability-challenge)
I'm not saying it's right, but... The people making spending decisions are vastly disconnected in most cases from the people who content with reliability issues.
