Subscriptions takes a turn for the nasty.Your reviewer stayed quiet for a while and seeing this, had to blog about it.
The idea of subscriptions, was to give vendors an annual upgrade fee. Rather than spend ages developing and then showing new features, many vendors now just say, oh, your subscription expired and you need to renew soon or lose out on benefits.
- The newer trend is to start to back-date your subscriptions to when it expired and then force you to pay for it.[1]
- Some vendors are even nastier to link the subscription to ShareIT (not easily to cancel the subscription or well hidden so that when a year passes they charge your credit card again).
- Using ShareIT is also interestingly effective: When you buy another software product, they tack-on the subscription to your newer credit card,
- Some vendors link the subscription to Debit Accounts, where they ask for your ABN number and checking number, telephone records and driver license. The purpose, it seems, is when you don't pay up, they will harass you for the money or call you up and file a complaint to the credit card bureau that you have unpaid debts and this may affect your credit history.
This is very, very hurtful practice and is telling that you owe someone a living by using their product and to renew the "subscription", you need to pay the amount to renew plus when the subscription last lapsed.
Thus, if you last paid in Nov 2008 and want to renew in Nov 2010, you need also to pay for Nov 2009 subscription as well. Depending on where you live...if you don't pay up, they start to harass you to pay-up.
This hurtful predatory subscription practice deprives people of freedom of choice to choose libraries:
- Newer vendors who are developing competing components will have their revenues reduced because customers have no money to pay for their product.
- Vendors who practice this kind of subscription have no incentive to develop products anymore because their products have a monopoly in the market and this kind of pricing is like putting a tax on software development. Every dollar you earn seems to slip away from your hand.
- Newer people who want to use Delphi will get put-off with this kind of subscription pricing. It's like asking you to be a guarantor for a loan on somebody's behalf.
Lot of Delphi developers will get hurt.
[1] https://forums.embarcadero.com/thread.jspa?threadID=48097
The idea of subscriptions, was to give vendors an annual upgrade fee. Rather than spend ages developing and then showing new features, many vendors now just say, oh, your subscription expired and you need to renew soon or lose out on benefits.
- The newer trend is to start to back-date your subscriptions to when it expired and then force you to pay for it.[1]
- Some vendors are even nastier to link the subscription to ShareIT (not easily to cancel the subscription or well hidden so that when a year passes they charge your credit card again).
- Using ShareIT is also interestingly effective: When you buy another software product, they tack-on the subscription to your newer credit card,
- Some vendors link the subscription to Debit Accounts, where they ask for your ABN number and checking number, telephone records and driver license. The purpose, it seems, is when you don't pay up, they will harass you for the money or call you up and file a complaint to the credit card bureau that you have unpaid debts and this may affect your credit history.
This is very, very hurtful practice and is telling that you owe someone a living by using their product and to renew the "subscription", you need to pay the amount to renew plus when the subscription last lapsed.
Thus, if you last paid in Nov 2008 and want to renew in Nov 2010, you need also to pay for Nov 2009 subscription as well. Depending on where you live...if you don't pay up, they start to harass you to pay-up.
This hurtful predatory subscription practice deprives people of freedom of choice to choose libraries:
- Newer vendors who are developing competing components will have their revenues reduced because customers have no money to pay for their product.
- Vendors who practice this kind of subscription have no incentive to develop products anymore because their products have a monopoly in the market and this kind of pricing is like putting a tax on software development. Every dollar you earn seems to slip away from your hand.
- Newer people who want to use Delphi will get put-off with this kind of subscription pricing. It's like asking you to be a guarantor for a loan on somebody's behalf.
Lot of Delphi developers will get hurt.
[1] https://forums.embarcadero.com/thread.jspa?threadID=48097
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