A small or BIIIG thank you to the developers of Synthesia.

Have questions? Just saying hello? This is the place.
No explicit, hateful, or hurtful language. Nothing illegal.
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Bfh818
Posts: 3

Post by Bfh818 »

I am writing this post because the devs of Synthesia has avoided a highly toxic thing that loads of companies do nowadays. This being; a subscription based service. The fact this software is a one time buy; rather than a monthly payment, makes it 100% worth the money.

Needless to say; I am happy about it because websites like 'Musescore. org/com' have transitioned into this dirty scheme of basically saying "Here's a 30 day free trial". All previously free features have now been disabled and replaced with the paywall.

In actuality; they ask for your credit card immediately, and users reported that it essentially forces them to buy it; basically using the 'free trial' as a sick lure into paying upfront (basically meaning no free trial). Worse yet; many users contact the support team for cancelling to get no response.

Anyway; devs of Synthesia, you're awesome!


if this gets deleted for possible controversy; its understandable.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

It's wild how far gone the whole software industry is these days in terms of offering everything for a subscription and trying to slowly squeeze more and more money out of people.

I'm continually surprised by the number of people that leave 1-star reviews saying something along the lines of "you're crazy if you think I'm going to pay that each month!" because they don't realize it's a one-time purchase. Things have progressed to the point that a subscription is an assumption! It makes me sad. (When I started the project back in 2006, no one had really started talking about charging end-users periodically. The only subscription software was "Enterprise" grade stuff for businesses.)

In any event, thanks for your feedback! Sometimes I worry that I'm the only one left that thinks the idea of paying for something once and getting to keep and use it is normal.

The only subscription I could ever imagine charging for would be something that had ongoing costs (like some cloud-server-based synchronizing of all your stats and play history between all your devices or whatever) but it would be opt-in and the software would work just fine without it and without pestering you about it either. Even then, it would probably end up being $9/year or something for your entire household. It really doesn't cost much to "keep the lights on" for Internet businesses. Bandwidth is cheap. ;)

My goal is that 150 years from now you should be able to launch the app in some computer or tablet emulator and have it still work just fine without access to the Synthesia website or even the Internet. :lol:

(This is not an announcement of any cloud-saving features. That was me just brainstorming what it would take to actually require a monthly payment. The answer is "a lot".)
st5555
Posts: 38

Post by st5555 »

If this forum had the capability of giving a post a thumbs up, I'd do so here.
As mentioned, perhaps we'll have that feature 150 years from now. :lol:
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