Apple Invites

This tracks so well as an indicator, with many other products. As soon as the company starts making money, their product is going to become awful and it's time to find an alternative. Why can't tech escape this cycle?

Because there’s always someone willing to lose money by offering a free product without the undesirable stuff in the hope that they can acquire customers to mine for cash later

imo the most likely scenario is that they never charge and are acquired by Facebook.

In exchange, FB gets access into your offline graph: people you interact IRL but not on social media. They can approximate relationships through Plus 1 invites.

Work in an instagram component for sharing photos / albums / reels from an event. You’re pumping right back into the FOMOmachine.

It has. Apple escaped this cycle. Their software is great. Instead of you being the product, you buy the product. People then just complain the product is expensive. On this website, I roll my eyes.

I mean it does escape the cycle, lots of products charge money and aren't awful. The ones that are awful are mostly the ones people don't pay for, or things that use the freemium business model.

Most things that just charge a subscription are good and get better.

I want nice things, zero cost and complete privacy without adverts. Why is this so hard?

/s

Agreed - If you want good products, you should support the people who create them. That means paying. If you want a privacy destroying enshitified product, keep using "free" products.

The key here is VC-backed. The enshittification rate of bootstrapped products (especially solo or small team) is magnitudes lower. Ironic thing to say while on YC's message board, but there you have it.

Nowadays when I'm looking for a new software product or service with a good number of options, first thing I do is check how they're funded.

Funny thing is that teams are catching on to this! Very recently I've seen two products have a separate "Are you VC backed?" heading in their landing FAQ (both answered with "no"). I can see this becoming a trend - if I were to create a product, I'd do the same.

Apple stuff has always been expensive, and never once has Apple justified raising the price because they're 'privacy friendly'.

Apple has a multi-billion dollar ads business. You are still the product, even if the execution isn't as brazenly anti-consumer as Google and Facebook.

This isn't so simple. I love a lot of apps but I'm not willing to pay a monthly or yearly sub. I'll give you $5-$250 but I won't give you $5 a month.

> never once has Apple justified raising the price because they're 'privacy friendly'.

No, but they have made privacy a key selling point of their platform and communicated that clearly to customers.

Just because they never have formally stated “oh and by the way this increases the price of our products by X/unit”, doesn’t mean that feature isn’t included in the cost.

Because every way, say, the Partiful devs could ask for $3/mo for months you post parties (like Kagi’s new pricing) is gated by payment providers that will either take 30¢ of every dollar, be expensive to implement, or provide a bad experience for users.

Well then you won't get maintenance or support. People need to eat long-term, not just once.

It's pretty easy actually - most open source software fits the bill. Quality software can be pretty cheap to make per user.

The only problem is services where hosting costs need to be paid somehow and network effects mean that for-profit competition will win the market even if the product is inevitably enshittified. Doesn't matter how good your open and community funded event platform is if Apple and Facebook can afford to shove their solution in front of everyone you want to interact with.

More like most things that charge a subscription will eventually add ads and other anti-features because that's the only way to satisfy demands for infinite growth once the market has been exhausted.

What open source software is a "nice thing"? We're talking about high quality user experience here. I don't think it's controversial to say that's vanishingly rare in OSS.

Nice one, I'll add it to our Apple Invites, open source competitor readme: http://github.com/gruprsvp/grup

Actually it's proprietary software that's more likely to be full of anti-patterns and flows designed in the interest of the corporation rather than the user while advanced functionality is missing because it might confuse the lowest common denominator user. Looking flashy and retard-safe design does not make a high quality user experience.