Are we renting software?

The topic of rent vs buy came up at a table near me the other day. I happened to be thinking about the seemingly endless pool of new subscriptions possible, and their passionate debate got me thinking.

Most AI and consumer software today feels like renting.

You get access to use the thing, not ownership, and you play by their rules. Obviously their rules are there to protect them.

Convenience, magic, functionality, this is what we pay for, or to get rid of ads. But it is still their house. If they change the price, the features, or the terms, you absorb the shock because moving is hard and it’s home.

When you sign a lease, you accept terms, agree to a price and conditions in exchange for use. Not much different than our fiscal relationship with our digital toolkit.

Pay for the year and save 20% really does have a nice ring to it. So does first month free. Usually this meant rent was 5-10% higher than the neighborhood average.

When we leave an apartment we take all of our things with us, pack it in the van or the truck and off we go.

When’s the last time you tried to move off your email provider or tried a Spotify alternative?

Our data it seems is the security deposit we never get back. Best we can do is ask for our data to be deleted or sent to us in a giant compressed file we wouldn’t know what to do with if we could.

This is a larger conversation, one I was introduced to in Shoshana Zuboff’s[1] 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. There she talks about the systems that have taken hold within a new age of Capitalism we’re living in. Whereby organizations, and there are many, that go down this path have turned our data (behavioral, personal,etc) into their lifeline. Intrinsically tied to their growth. There’s an imbalance in the economic relationship we find ourselves in but this is for another post.

Back to our choices in rent vs. own. Owning: it’s work, yes it is.

If renting software is living by someone else’s rules, owning is taking the keys.

In practice, that means self‑hosting and looking for open source alternatives to your paid applications: you stand up your own stack and build the walls and wiring. There is help and no shortage of YouTube tutorials to figure it out but there isn’t an easy way to get this done for the average jane.

So right now our choices are either continue paying to play on someone elses servers, or go through the, at times excurtiating process of standing up the services and maintaining them and to have some sense of ownership.

I suppose our social media profiles have become our “owned space” on the internet. These are still fairly closed systems, compared to where we started with Xanga, friendster, and especially for me myspace, it feels like in exchange for convenience and simplicity we’ve accepted a smaller box to play in.

We’ve shown that regardless of the box we can find ways to showcase our creative uniquness, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t find ways of making the box bigger. Vibe-coding feels like an avenue towards this, but these tools are still pay to play. We’re still renting. I’m a little afraid to ask the question: do we care?

My belief is that we do, we’ve just reached, or are about to, a state of complacency. Are we going to ask more from the teams building these tools? Are we going to find ways to own what we use? I’d like to.