#oneaday Day 657: Pro Subscription

Well, last night I heard that one of the services I make quite heavy use of — IFTTT, or If This Then That — has decided to switch to a subscription model, and, worse, rather than simply making it so that the subscription offers additional benefits, they've rather cheekily decided to completely gimp their "free forever" basic account.

For the unfamiliar, IFTTT is a service that allows you to set up various conditional statements to automate things. You say "If this thing happens, then that thing should happen too". Examples that I use include "If it's 12:00pm, then post a tweet promoting my Patreon" and "If there's a new feed item from [website X], then post a link to that article to my Discord". It's really incredibly useful, particularly if you're doing anything where a social media presence would be helpful.

Well, at least it was incredibly useful. As of October 7, IFTTT's "free forever" account will limit you to creating three "applets". Three. That means three "if this then that" statements, and no more. If you have any more than that, the rest will be "archived" and unable to be used until you archive one of your three active ones to make space. To put this in context, at present I have 31 applets running — a bunch of timed ones throughout the day to auto-tweet promotional and introductory messages linking to MoeGamer and my YouTube channel, plus a few of the aforementioned ones that integrate with Discord.

If I don't pay up, I'll lose all but three of those. Now, granted, IFTTT has generously offered a "pay what you want" subscription until October 7, allowing you to fix your monthly price — so long as it's at least $1.99 — but it still feels a bit like being extorted here. I'll probably end up paying $1.99 just because those applets — and the ability to make more as required — are useful, but the situation leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

I understand why they're doing this, of course. IFTTT was one of those services where it seemed impossible to figure out how they were possibly making any money, since there didn't appear to be any ads on the site or any existing membership or donation options. And as the site has doubtless become more popular over the years, I imagine its overheads have gone up and up to deal with bandwidth requirements and suchlike. So I understand why they might want to ask some of their userbase to give something back.

And I'd be fine with it if they'd handled this differently. If they'd kept their "free forever" (their term, which is why I keep repeating it) account exactly as it was, then simply offered the new features for the Pro account — essentially a means of making applets much more complex and flexible, ideal for power users — then I would have been fine with it. Instead, they completely gimped the free account, making it next to worthless, then made the only option to "upgrade" provide a bunch of features that your average user probably won't need.

I've seen several services and pieces of software do this over the last few years. The PlayStation VR video player, Littlstar, started charging a subscription fee a while back, for example — and rather cheekily offered a limited-time one-off purchase option for an extortionate $40 as an alternative. The fact that this was coming was never made clear, and with the way console software updates work, there is no means of downgrading to a previous version. The video downloading software that I used to extract YouTube videos to include in the podcast quietly updated itself without telling me, so there is now a limit of 30 downloads per day without paying, too.

It's reasonable to ask people to pay for things, particularly things that have taken time and effort to create. But suddenly charging for something that used to be free, with little to no indication that such a requirement was coming, is pretty unreasonable. We're burdened with subscription after subscription these days, and it really makes me miss the days of buying a piece of software and just being able to get on with things!