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.
Haseba Calc on iOS is amazing. Well worth it.
After a long time of using CalcES on my android phone and cheating the ads away with PiHole, I finally spent the very little fee for the pro edition. The app is amazing and the creator absolutely deserves it.
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.
Calculator emulators are the way. Wabbit for ti-84 and similar, and hp prime (official) for a full CAS.
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…
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.
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.
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.
I paid for the pro version of HiPER calc, well worth it as I use it daily.
Pretty sure I paid for some Ti and HP calc emulators at some point. Only a couple bucks each, worth it at the time. Would not pay to subscribe though.
Money laundering? Or just going kids download on devices with their parents data to go unnoticed for months at a time?
They 100% bank on people forgetting cancelling
Also, Apple gave iOS a default calculator just a few months ago. When I had an iPad I had to download dozens and dozens of calculators to find one that didnt have ads or subscriptions
Edit: I meant iPad. They sold iPads without the calculator from launch until Q4 2024
A few months ago, in 2007?
i think they meant ipadOS
Is it not the same OS? I had one iPhone and came back to Android.
apple brands them as totally seperate os’s but basically ipadOS is just ios with some extra features and different default apps.
One of those differences was the lack of a calculator on ios until recently.
What an interesting omission. Thanks for pointing that out!
Soulver is the best calculator on my Mac and has been for more than a decade now.
The “pro” versions of common social media apps that remove ads or give you a useless check mark.
I know you are talking about Xhitter.
But I would Donate my Lemmy Instance go get some funny feature xD.
Custom lolipop emoji to add to your username.
I can do that for free.
Sucker…
I have been creating ad removal patches for 2 apps this week. Revanced is truly amazing
All the free widgets that used to come preinstalled in Android before Google killed them to save the extra $2 of development cost from their yearly interns.
This list is too long
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 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
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
watch face app, Facer I think is like this. and still bombards you with ads and banners.
Crab Rangoon’s. I just don’t like them. I mean it’s just fried cream cheese.
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.
Huh. Damn today i learned…something awesome!
THEY ARE GLORIOUS
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…
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 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.
It’s just a rip off scam.
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.
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.
It is expensive, but its not surprising that it costs money
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.
90% of b2b software. They literally charge thousands of dollars while giving the worse piece of shit software you’ve ever used.
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.
Per core licensing walks into the room.
I don’t miss doing Microsoft license audits.
Such shit really exists?
Oracle has entered the chat
IBM’s IBMi products make you pay yearly to activate the cores.
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.
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!
In a lot of cases, you only see the final price after signing up.
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
You pay for the support.
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.
You wouldn’t need nearly as much support if they made a decent job in the first place.
You understand the model, good job!!!
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?
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
Over 9000!!! 😱🤯
utter classic
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.
Its really slow without it. And its like a vpn but lighter, so you don’t get caught torrenting by an isp.
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
Near all paid apps on iPhone.
Full price EA games with F2P-style microtransactions and ads
And this isn’t useless, but I can’t believe that to rent Photoshop for $20/mo, your creative projects are not your IP…
to rent Photoshop for $20/mo, your creative projects are not your IP
How is that even legal?
I don’t think that’s true.
They changed their TOS to give them a right to everything you make. https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/06/change-to-adobe-terms-amp-conditions/
Sorry but the same article links to an update that backtracks.
There’s just no way this would ever pass without them losing all their business customers, any legality of such disclaimer aside.I stand corrected. Still though, it shows that they at least wanted to have this happen, which breaks my trust in them.
They probably wanted to sell it as AI training data.
Yes, that’s kind of the point. They wanted to steal every artist that uses their software’s work, and then use it (or sell it) to train AI to put those artists out of work.
It feels like the epitome of “short term profits at the cost of long term gain”. No one’s going to be using your software if you put them out of work. But I guess when you’re a monopoly the only direction to go is down.
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.
