Ask HN: What tools do you pay for today that feel overpriced or frustrating?

Hello everyone,

I’d love to hear about:

1. Tools you pay for that feel overpriced or frustrating (especially if you’d replace them immediately if something better existed), and

2. Anything that routinely costs you time, money, or attention (and how much money and time it costs you).

I’m most interested in problems that are painful enough that you’d gladly pay to fix them.

If you’re open to sharing, it'd be nice to know:

1. the exact problem 2. how you solve it now 3. the approximate budget or cost

Thank you. The more concrete and specific, the better.

Answers (0)

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Discussion (2 comments)

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al_borland

2h ago

Every single app for streaming TV or movies. The price keeps going up, fragmentation makes it all a frustrating mess, and I think everyone is waiting for the market to collapse on itself a so we can get one-stop-shops like we have for music.

This isn’t really a problem a developer can fix, if you’re fishing for ideas. The problem exists with the content owners and competition based on exclusive content.

fuzzy_lumpkins

2h ago

Everything Adobe. Customer support is just a forum where 98% of the offered "fixes" for bugs in their software is "revert to previous version" or "reset your preferences". I swear everyone at that company doesn't even use their own products because for every one thing they fix, two new things break. Functionality of some things don't make sense. There is zero reason to have Media Encoder be its own separate program when it can be integrated into Premiere and AE on its own, which can repeatedly cause connection/bug issues if they're not able to sync properly (also not being up to date on newer file container types which it should offer). Which also leads into the problem of separating everything into more and more different programs to milk every cent. On top of the massive cancellation fees they try to stick to people and KEEP trying to force cloud saving onto everyone so you become reliant on keeping your sub to keep access to files. It's unfortunately become industry standard and while there are other/free options they're not as up to par on capabilities just yet for top tier level for an entire creative suite of work. Currently it's around $700/yr per user.

Shutterstock is $1500/yr per seat for level I use, with frustrating UX in search function and now you have to pay for a subscription, and then pay even MORE if you want to use anything they deem to be "highly desirable" like Amazon. Oh you have a subscription? Well to get access to what you see here you have to subscribe even more. They added AI content which is chock full of AI slop and copyright issues which clearly isn't being moderated. They also have a ton of vector files which werent checked at all because they're just JPGs saved in vector containers, making them pretty much unusable. Also suffer frequent outrages/download issues that take hours to resolve which clearly is an issue when people have deadlines.