The reason subscriptions are not such a great idea

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 24, 2019 at 12:10 AM

Alex wrote:
>That’s why, after being burnt once, for the purpose of PIM I’m leaning
>towards off-line standalone applications. I want to have full control of
>my data. I don’t want deal with the problem a closing service (or
>dealing with new changes I don’t like), which means somehow exporting
>the data, finding another service, and importing the data there.

Bad stuff can happen to an off-line standalone application as well (data loss due to software or hardware failure or theft).

Ultimately it doesn’t matter if it’s online or offline, in both cases one needs to back it up somehow and have it in human-readable form.

This is what I like about the likes of WorkFlowy and Dynalist. You can have automatic daily backups and the export format is simple enough that your data can be easily re-imported or even edited manually, as it’s human-readable.

The Adobe story is still interesting though. If you have a design-related business and your business model was based on the Adobe Creative Cloud service, then it could be hugely damaging when it’s just turned off at the drop of the hat like that.