Windows
And that despite charging for it, they fill many versions of it with adverts, install without asking bloatware and crap paid for by other companies to shove down your throat, and also sells your personal information to (checks) at least 801 third parties.
Hey! Those 801 third parties are trusted third parties. All of them were properly vetted when they said they wouldn’t misuse our personal data.
Crab Rangoon’s. I just don’t like them. I mean it’s just fried cream cheese.
There’s a Triad-backed Catonese place near me that makes crab rangoons with actual crab in them. They are fantastic.
Well, if it’s good enough for the triads,
I guess I’m on boardI won’t ask any more questions…
Where the crab come into it? Deep fried cream cheese sounds awesome
Fun fact, they aren’t called crab Rangoon’s because they’re supposed to include crab meat. That’s called that because when they’re folded up on four sides they look a bit like crabs.
THEY ARE GLORIOUS
There used to be apps in the iOS app store that were nothing but a big “I’m rich” symbol. They would be listed for some shit like $10,000 in the app store and all they did was,at best, have a button that played a sound to indicate that you were in fact rich lol.
Those “I’m rich” apps basically tested the app store price limit which was set to $9,999 (don’t know if it’s different now). Brilliant idea really.
I put this in the same category as the “Million dollar homepage” where some guy asked for $1 a pixel and hosted a page with the results. Something smart that if it gets enough attention could make someone good money for not a lot of work. And generally something that will only work once as copycats won’t be seen to have the same value.
It is expensive, but its not surprising that it costs money
Not useless as such but a wallpaper app or something that expects you to pay £5.99 a month to use. Fuck all the way off with that
watch face app, Facer I think is like this. and still bombards you with ads and banners.
Didn’t MKBHD launch some wallpaper app for $12 a month? I heard about it and just figured he was another tech YouTuber who lost touch
He then follows up that face plant by getting caught going 85 MPH in a school zone. MKHB is crashing out hard.
Pretty sure he lives in New Jersey, the rest of America doesn’t know he was being passed while in that school zone. Driving is different up there
He did actually do a really good honest apology for that, restructuring pricing and improving on the app, but then he did the thing of the commentor above me, which was worse.
How could you possibly apologize for charging $12 A MONTH for wallpapers!?
“I was trying to be the Netflix for wallpapers.” /s
90% of b2b software. They literally charge thousands of dollars while giving the worse piece of shit software you’ve ever used.
Oh fuck yeah! So much of my research into new tools is just checking to see if they have a demo, documentation, and price.
When I’m looking for a new tool, I don’t have the time to schedule a “quick” 20 minute call to do introductions and schedule a follow-up hour long meeting followed by a quote sent over in an email days later only to find out the price is so far outside the range there is no way it’s ever going to happen!
I’m not some useless middle manager looking for any excuse to look busy; I don’t have that kind of time to waste!
Sometimes the value add is security, sometimes scaling or uptime. Enterprise considerations aren’t necessarily the same as for individual consumers.
Sometimes it’s just a dogshit product though, and the sales team pulled the wool over some execs eyes.
Sometimes the value add is security
Bahahahahahahahahhahahahahahah
In this case it’s not “security”, it’s offloading the responsibility of security to a 3rd party.
If the enterprise app leaks data, they’re the ones responsible. Not you, the IT guy who chose it
Enterprise software/services/consulting in a nutshell. It’s all just shifting responsibility.
Precisely
They always want to charge per user too instead of just charging a monthly fee. They’d rather have no money than not charge per user it’s actual crazy. Imagine any other industry turning away paying customers when it doesn’t cost them anything to have the customer. Software companies are insane. Can’t wait until their funding runs out.
Per user licensing is nothing compared to the ridiculousness of per cpu licensing.
I don’t miss doing Microsoft license audits.
Per core licensing walks into the room.
Such shit really exists?
Oracle has entered the chat
Enterprise Linux distros, enterprise (Oracle-owned) database management systems, etc.
Unfortunately, at work we use a bunch of Finite element modelling software and all of them have that type of licence.
What the actual fuck?
It’s often per user, because the amount of support tickets usually scales with the amount of users.
All of the SaaS I looked at would not be a situation where the end employee would generate tickets. Only I as the owner would and even then the software is kind of set it and forget it for my use case which I made clear to the salesman. Many of them to their credit did kick it up the management chain to get a different quote. Only 1 company out of four or five went for it.
The problem I’ve run into is SaaS companies typically white collar companies who are used to paying per seat where employees generally make 6 figures, where as my blue collar company is full of dozens of part time employees where the per seat model breaks down.
Yah me too, for my small company per seat pricing is really painful. For some services we just have one account and share access; only one person logs in at a time and tells everyone else when they’re done.
You pay for the support.
You wouldn’t need nearly as much support if they made a decent job in the first place.
You understand the model, good job!!!
And the support sucks.
At least you can shift the blame.
Sometimes. Sometimes whatever executive demanded we use this doesn’t want to hear about it and will throw you under the bus because otherwise it would be their fault.
Oof. Yes!
The proprietary cloud crap usually has worse or non-existent documentation, fewer features, and a terrible or non-existent API.
But it comes with a salesperson. So there’s that.
But people with cloud server orchestration skills are terrifyingly expensive right now, so self-hosting a better product can be a very hard sell.
The Salesperson is incredibly important. They take the person responsible for making the purchase decision out to lunch and for rounds of golf, after all!
Hmm really? Would proficiency with Terraform and knowledge of the services offered by at least one major cloud provider be considered “cloud server orchestration skills” or do you mean something more/different?
Yep! My best guess is that maybe 1 in 10 organizations currently has any in-house orchestration skills on staff at all.
(I’m just annecdotaly guessing based on my professional network, which is actually heavily biased towards organizations that have orchestration skills, but also based on job offers that my peers with orchestration skills are seeing.)
And the ones that have it get to charge a premium for shitty cloud services to the ones that do not.
That’s pretty crazy, good to know. We had a hard time hiring a “cloud engineer” last year ourselves, though for the client in question we were looking for deep Azure chops. I’ve been learning some Terraform for this reason so we can respond a bit better, sounds like I might be well served to focus on it. Feel like DM’ing with salaries / offers you’ve been hearing about, if you have?
I remember when the iPhone was new and my friend paid money for an app that simulates a mug of beer on the screen so you can pretend to drink it.
That, but the entire genre of those fucking things cuz there are assloads of them now.
Novelty apps were practically the majority of what was out there in the early days of Android and iOS. I remember a lighter app, and an electric shaver app.
My favorite novelty app was that marble maze game on iOS they used the accelerometer. I got really good at finishing those mazes in seconds, which upset my cousin because it was his phone and I demolished all his best times, lol. Only video game I was ever good at.
I’ve never really understood the imitation app developers. Like your first little run of the novelty, sure, makes sense, minimal effort that might pay itself off or even go viral, but why do the imitations think they have the same shot?
Spotify and apps like it. Imagine paying a subscription to a subpar selection of music when you could just download mp3s. Imagine having skipping a song being a privilege. Are you an abused kid? Is drinking water a privilege too? I paid once for BlackPlayer simply because it’s my favorite music player app. The most important features were free.
Imagine paying a subscription to a subpar selection of music when you could just download mp3s.
Imagine having to go through the hassle of being at a computer and using whatever program you need to use to find the correct songs and then transfering them to your phone, when you could just find the song instantly, no matter where you are.
I used to download tens of thousands of songs back in the day, Spotify is way more convienient, a price I’m perfectly fine paying.
Im with you on this one. I listen to wayyyy too much music to go back to downloading constantly
I forgot I time traveled to 2006. The politics never changed so I thought I was still in 2025.
Anyway in the future we have a thing called cloud storage where you could upload your whole music folder and download it on any device.
As someone who makes music and listens to my own nonsense, I set a onedrive folder as my default location so I can export an mp3 while I’m showering and getting dressed and download the mp3 on my phone when I’m outside.
Downvoted for hating on Spotify. That’s just sad.
I don’t care what crap Spotify offers; it’s well known they go out of their way to avoid paying royalties to the artists. They’re a leech, nothing more, and I will never support them.
Yeah, on lemmy if you’re not constantly deepthroating Xi Jinping’s cock, you’re practically digesting Spotify’s cock.
Piracy pays them more though?
Sometimes it does. Piracy drives up sales of traditional media (think: vinyl), as well as increasing crowd size at live performances. Also, merch sales scale with awareness of an artist. All of these things equal the payout of millions of plays on spoffy.
Except that using spotify does all of that as well.
I’m not saying that spotify is good. But thinking piracy is better for the artist than spotify is delusional.
I’m delusional, then. Spotify hasn’t paid me a red cent, but piracy has indirectly put money in my pocket and food on my table.
And Spotify hasn’t paid you indirectly?
I down voted them for the weird tirade about privilege and being an abused kid. Idk wtf that has to do with hating spotify, but lemmy would look much better without that garbage in the comments.
I like Spotify. I don’t often want to listen to an album. I want to listen to a vibe. It’s good for that, and for introducing me to new bands and music.
But yeah, if you’re just using it to listen to one album at a time, and you know which album you want, then you’re using the wrong service.
What if you want to listen to something you didn’t have the foresight to pirate locally first?
Music streaming is very convenient, even easier than piracy.
I agree with you in theory, and in practice for most people. I have weird enough tastes in music though that I haven’t found a single streaming service that has what I want.
If I like the song, I download it when I have internet or mobile data. I support the creators in other ways if possible. $1 from one fan is the equivalent of like 13 million streams from them. I’m not paying to avoid ten minutes of obnoxious ads every time I want to listen to music. Anyway, they found Like the Wind, and it absolutely slaps so I’ll download it on my phone.
How do you play a novel song on demand? How do you find new music you have ever heard before?
I’ll seek it out when I feel like it. I’m not paying to force myself to sit through stuff I’m not interested in.
There’s an Android port of Soulseek.
I sail the high seas quite often. I also pay for spotify because it’s stupid easy.
Subpar selection? I can count on the fingers of one hand the songs I have found on other sources but not Spotify.
I don’t even pay for Spotify, but I still use it to find new music because it’s hands down the best way to do so. I create a playlist of all the new songs I want and then purchase them all when Bandcamp Friday rolls around. I’m getting all the benefits of Spotify without paying them a cent (my ad blocker even works on it too), plus being as supportive as possible to the artists themselves.
What adblocker are you using? I got to the point where on FF with uBlock Origin Spotify just fails and mobile apps are 50/50 with NextDNS
It really is a shame that blackplayer is not being updated anymore afaik
I haven’t had any issues with it. I still use it today
Boost / Sync for Lemmy
huh? i use boost (and used to use it for reddit before the whole API thing) and haven’t ever seen it ask for money or anything
Same, it shows ads, but they’re pretty easy to block. I paid for it just to help support the dev, he seems pretty cool.
wait- it has ads?? i had no idea xd
gotta love network ad blonking lmao
Can you teach me how to blonk ads?
omg I’m not good at spelling T-T
in my defense n kinda looks like a rotated c? kinda?
Thanks 🫂🥲
If you’re really the dev, please add support for spoilers, it’s the only thing that makes me consider a different app. I’ve also been using Boost since Reddit, and I have a feeling spoiler tags worked there, but that was long ago and my memory is not that good.
Oh shit, what’s up? Great app, thanks for all you do!
I read your comment, I thought a sec, and I just paid to remove the ads for boost.
Love boost.
What’s wrong with Sync, lol
Workout timer that wants a subscription
I recently tried out an “LED banner” (called LED scroller in the google play store) app that lets you scroll text on your screen. Pretty cool, I would totally pay $5 or maybe even $10 for it. In the free version, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many ads in such a short period of time. The paid version was $15 PER WEEK. That’s $780 per year. To scroll some text. It’s the only app I’ve ever bothered to post a review for.
Sounds like a front for either blatant adware or malware with botted reviews/downloads to bring it to the top in search results. I can’t image there isn’t a free app that does this.
Could it be money laundering?
It’s just a rip off scam.
It’s just fishing. For every 10 users that notice the deceptive “free trial then bills per week” model, there’s a guy who doesn’t notice until he’s been charged $15 and cancels. And for every ten of that guy, there’s a guy that doesn’t notice for a month, and for every ten of that guy there’s the rare whale who looks at their $700/mo “google bill” and goes yeah that sounds about right.
I remember writing one of those using a bitmap font from some Arduino LCD driver program and publishing it for free on the Android store. Someone offered £50 for the source code and I wonder if they’re related.
it’s not an entire app but, discord profile decorations.
The fact it costs money isn’t surprising, but the amount of money charged is hilarious.
17$ for some graphics that some look like they took about 20 minutes to make. Just to make your profile look different than everyone elses. Then the “discount” given for having nitro for it is even more laughable.
Whats equally insane is that people fall for it. I know some people that have easily spent 60$ on profile decorations. Spending equal or greater than the cost of discord nitro is insane to me, even if the decoration doesn’t expire.
On a similar note, skins and other cosmetics in video games that do nothing to help with camouflage—or worse—make you stand out more. Never understood why people waste money on that.
Difference is that that shit sometimes looks cool as hell and you see your skin constantly while playing(at least if you play in third person). You won’t stare at your profile picture for hours.
Early days of of micro-transactions did help you blend in more, but I noticed they started diverging away, leaving the more natural camos to be unlocked by gameplay, and the obnoxious/distracting ones as a premium.
Holy fuck, as if I needed more reasons to hate Discord… back when I thought it was just a new iteration of xFire I still hated it but could at least see a purpose for it, but it doesn’t even do all the shit xFire could
Xfire was the shit. I’d have paid a couple bucks a month for it, instead of it just dying. It was so crazy ahead of its time. Text chat, voice, game detection and tracking, clans, server browsing, broadcasting, pic and video hosting…
what bothers me even more than the price is that they all suck, and none of them fit my aesthetic. I could make my own decorations, and I’m offended that discord won’t let me.
Also how discord dœs stickers . Like custom emojes , they’re tied to discord servers , unless you have nitro then you can use them everywhere . Such BS system , shoulda done them how LINE dœs them : you only need to buy the sticker pack once then you use them anywhere , no shitty subscription needed !
The thing that I find insane is having to pay for Nitro to have an animated .gif as your profile pic.
…The animation is played client-side, so literally costs Discord nothing to do this, and as a matter of fact it’s actually more effort for them to intentionally block animations from playing until you pony up than just letting the browser container the app runs in natively do its thing. Given that the Discord app itself is basically just a glorified webview container with some stuff bolted onto it.
I don’t want to sound like I’m on Discord’s side (I dislike nitro too), but that’s honestly just how a lot of paid add-on features on free apps work. They take away some functionality from the free one to incentivize people to pay.
Near all paid apps on iPhone.
Sims freeplay. Haven’t used it for a long time but it sure asks for a LOT of money for a free game 😂
Real Debrid
Touted as necessary when it isn’t, apparently if you have it you have access to a huge cache that you can use to continue to torrent dead files
The issue is that most files nowadays are torrented anyway, so it’s essentially just a ‘do it because I told you so’ step for torrentio users.
Other torrent streaming software don’t even need real Debrid.
I discovered it only a while ago and during that time it has been clearly neutered. It just doesn’t work for stuff like it used to.
Most likely copyright strikes caught up to it
A few months ago they got told to quit it so they were like “oh shit apparently there are PIRATES using our piracy service. We never wanted THOSE GUYS as our customers!” and started neutering piracy, which was clearly their main source of income.
Isn’t it kind of a middle-man service so you don’t get narc’d on by your ISP for large amounts of p2p traffic? That way all your ISP sees is you downloading data from one source rather than lots of.p2p traffic.
Unless you use vpn obviously, that doesn’t have issues with p2p traffic or whatever.
For me, any office apps. Never worked in an office, never wanted to. None of that stuff. Even if it’s free, if it gets installed with the distro, it’s the first thing that gets tossed.
