This applies to a lot of sites running on a a freemium business plan (for those unfamiliar with the term, a freemium model is when a service offers basic access for free, and then tries to up-sell you on premium features).
Most people are probably familiar with the concept: some new site shows up. It’s pretty cool, it’s free. You start using it. As you do, it’s constantly reminding (or outright nagging) you that there are lots of extra bonus features that you could get if you just sign up for a monthly fee (and get two months free if you sign up for a year!).
In an ideal world, those extra features are compelling enough that lots of people sign up. The company starts making money, investors are pleased. But then growth starts to level off, and although those paid users keep the company afloat, investors aren’t there for just a good deal, they want growth. They want to push to an IPO so they can cash out!
What’s a company to do? Easy, tap that free user base. The way most do this is to start clawing back on what’s free. For example, the unlimited length video calls that you signed up for are limited to an hour. Then later 30 minutes. And then ten. That’s enshittification.
Some users grudgingly switch to the paid model, investors are satiated for the moment. But all those other users start looking around for an alternative, and growth stalls again. Now the service gets sold to some bigger enterprise, folded in, and the free service either gets more crippled or discontinued. Remember when Slack was cool? Yeah. That.
For me, most of the time the cost of a subscription is just not something I’m willing to pay. Usually that’s because I don’t use the service enough to justify the cost, and sometimes it’s just because I’m a tightwad, and sometimes the pricing is so ridiculously high that it’s laughable. “Get this insight that might be meaningless for only US$249/mo?” No thanks.
What’s ironic is that often I’d be more than happy to pay something that gives the company a decent margin on the free stuff, but that option is almost never present. What if I have absolutely no use for those freemium features but I value the service enough that I’d like to see the services I have stay in place, instead of being eroded in a thousand cuts?
I’m going to use The Story Graph here as an example. I need to stress that this is an example. I am not picking on a site that I am actually enjoying. If anything, I’m looking for a way to help that fits my needs. StoryGraph plans are far more reasonable than most freemium sites. Their “plus” plan isn’t that expensive, just US$5/mo, or $50 per year. For that I get:
- Invest in a Goodreads alternative not owned by Amazon. Hey that sounds great! I can really get behind that, although the use of “invest” here is disingenuous. “Fund” is more like it, unless someone plans to send a share certificate.
- Custom Charts. Nah, couldn’t care less.
- Extra Stats Filters. Nope. Don’t give a damn about my reading stats, either. Just want to track some books and maybe get some recommendations that don’t suck.
- Compare Stats. Still don’t care.
- Exclusive Charts. Zero interest.
- Shape the roadmap. Be an unpaid focus group. Nope.
- Priority Support. I don’t know how to break it to them, but nothing about my reading is mission critical. Take a couple of days to get back to me. Whatever.
- (Unspoken) Get rid of the constant prompts to upgrade. Well, maybe not rid of them, but less frequent would be nice.
So there it is. The only thing I want is to see this site keep doing what I’m getting on the free plan. To take a chip out of Amazon’s dominance of the bookselling space. But that’s only worth about $15 per year to me. Do I have that option? Nope.
Truly, the fact that there’s no “just help us stay afloat” option makes me think that enshittification or sale is inevitable, and because of that, I’m actually more hesitant to put too much of my time into it. Pervasive enshittification has made me cynical. This is also why I have donated to my Mastodon instance, FreeCAD, LibreOffice, novelWriter, PHP, and others: I want them to be sustainable.
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