Paid calculator apps.
Not only are many of them paid - but they are subscription as well. Imagine paying a monthly fee for your goddamn calculator.
I have mixed feelings here. I legitimately paid ($1, once, a decade ago) for a calculator app and feel it was a great value (I still prefer it to this day). But then again the free version was fine too and the one-time payment was essentially a donation to the developer for a great app that unlocked… Themes…
Yeah, I paid for PCalc because someone put in effort to make it, and it’s good. Don’t feel bad about that.
But I wouldn’t subscribe to one.
Yeah the subscription is mind boggling.
I like that model. You get to try the software for free and have a way to thank the developer and get something extra, rather than just a pure donation.
F-Droid has an Android port of the Unix maxima, which is a whole free and open-source computer algebra system, that handles all my heavier lifting. And I’m pretty sure that every phone that I’ve ever seen ships with at a software package that can act as a five-function calculator, if someone is just looking for something simple.
Both of those are very different use cases from what I have, though.
Money laundering? Or just going kids download on devices with their parents data to go unnoticed for months at a time?
In a sense this is great news. If you ever need to earn some money (somehow, anyhow) you now know that there are people out they who willingly pay a subscription for their calculator.
Soulver is the best calculator on my Mac and has been for more than a decade now.
I paid for the pro version of HiPER calc, well worth it as I use it daily.
90% of b2b software. They literally charge thousands of dollars while giving the worse piece of shit software you’ve ever used.
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.
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?
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.
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?
IBM’s IBMi products make you pay yearly to activate the cores.
It’s often per user, because the amount of support tickets usually scales with the amount of users.
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
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!
You pay for the support.
You wouldn’t need nearly as much support if they made a decent job in the first place.
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 $780 per year. To scroll some text. It’s the only app I’ve ever bothered to post a review for.
Sounds like a front for either blatant adware or malware with botted reviews/downloads to bring it to the top in search results. I can’t image there isn’t a free app that does this.
Could it be money laundering?
It’s just a rip off scam.
it’s not an entire app but, discord profile decorations.
The fact it costs money isn’t surprising, but the amount of money charged is hilarious.
17$ 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.
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.
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.
I can see that for a free game that you enjoy a lot, and want to reward with some money. You can make a donation, or get a silly skin for the same money (and have it visible that you donated some).
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.
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.
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…
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
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!?
watch face app, Facer I think is like this. and still bombards you with ads and banners.
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
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?
Workout timer that wants a subscription
There used to be an app that was a Dragon Ball Z scouter. You could point it at anything with a face and it would tell you a random power level. Apparently mine is 10,550 (I can barely lift a jug of milk).
Over 9000!!! 😱🤯
utter classic
I don’t know, not the worst in this thread at least.
Until we find out it’s actually a white supremacist thing and OP is just pasty af.
Wdym?
“Power levels” was/is a white supremacist dogwhistle for cryptofascists, as in “Don’t forget to hide your (white) power level.”
You’d see it referenced on their meme communities on Reddit fairly frequently. At least it was when I still had an eye on what cryptofascists were doing, which I have to say is the best part of Lemmy, not constantly seeing cryptofascist things.
With that app, and that in mind, there’s a (completely and mostly jokingly speculative) possibility that it was measuring albedo instead of just randomly assigning numbers. I’m mostly being a miserable cynic bringing it up without evidence tbh.
Oh, that. Worry not, I’m not a white supremacist (not that I could be, I’m half Pacific Islander half Scottish). It seemed to have a very loose definition of a face, like you could point it at a drawing or an animal and it would work the same. I take it that it was programmed to assign a number to how closely something matched anime pareidolia.
Bit of context for the power level stuff: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hide-your-power-level
It only became an alt-right thing because it leaked from /a/ to /b/ and to /pol/, but it wasn’t originally alt-right. /w/allpapers always has a “power level” thread running with anime stuff that isn’t immediately obvious to the casual observer.
Teams
I was legit baffled by how such a shit peace of software could become so ubiquitous – until I got to know SAP and realized that Teams isn’t even in the bottom half of enterprise software quality.
Near all paid apps on iPhone.
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.
The “pro” versions of common social media apps that remove ads or give you a useless check mark.
This list is too long
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.
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.
And in many countries downloading is just fine, sharing isn’t.
And in a torrent swarm you always share (yes there are modded clients, but they’re a niche), making it risky
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.
