What app is so useless, you can't believe it costs money?

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.

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...
- 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.
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
I paid for the pro version of HiPER calc, well worth it as I use it daily.
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.
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.
Soulver is the best calculator on my Mac and has been for more than a decade now.
Calculator emulators are the way. Wabbit for ti-84 and similar, and hp prime (official) for a full CAS.
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.
Haseba Calc on iOS is amazing. Well worth it.

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.
- It's often per user, because the amount of support tickets usually scales with the amount of users.
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?
- 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!
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
You pay for the support.
- And the support sucks.
- You wouldn't need nearly as much support if they made a decent job in the first place.

it's not an entire app but, discord profile decorations.

The fact it costs money isn't surprising, but the amount of money charged is hilarious.

17$ for some graphics that some look like they took about 20 minutes to make. Just to make your profile look different than everyone elses. Then the "discount" given for having nitro for it is even more laughable.

Whats equally insane is that people fall for it. I know some people that have easily spent 60$ on profile decorations. Spending equal or greater than the cost of discord nitro is insane to me, even if the decoration doesn't expire.

The thing that I find insane is having to pay for Nitro to have an animated .gif as your profile pic.
...The animation is played client-side, so literally costs Discord nothing to do this, and as a matter of fact it's actually more effort for them to intentionally block animations from playing until you pony up than just letting the browser container the app runs in natively do its thing. Given that the Discord app itself is basically just a glorified webview container with some stuff bolted onto it.
- I don't want to sound like I'm on Discord's side (I dislike nitro too), but that's honestly just how a lot of paid add-on features on free apps work. They take away some functionality from the free one to incentivize people to pay.
what bothers me even more than the price is that they all suck, and none of them fit my aesthetic. I could make my own decorations, and I'm offended that discord won't let me.
On a similar note, skins and other cosmetics in video games that do nothing to help with camouflage—or worse—make you stand out more. Never understood why people waste money on that.
- Early days of of micro-transactions did help you blend in more, but I noticed they started diverging away, leaving the more natural camos to be unlocked by gameplay, and the obnoxious/distracting ones as a premium.
- Difference is that that shit sometimes looks cool as hell and you see your skin constantly while playing(at least if you play in third person). You won't stare at your profile picture for hours.
- I can see that for a free game that you enjoy a lot, and want to reward with some money. You can make a donation, or get a silly skin for the same money (and have it visible that you donated some).
Also how discord dœs stickers . Like custom emojes , they're tied to discord servers , unless you have nitro then you can use them everywhere . Such BS system , shoulda done them how LINE dœs them : you only need to buy the sticker pack once then you use them anywhere , no shitty subscription needed !
Holy fuck, as if I needed more reasons to hate Discord... back when I thought it was just a new iteration of xFire I still hated it but could at least see a purpose for it, but it doesn't even do all the shit xFire could
- Xfire was the shit. I'd have paid a couple bucks a month for it, instead of it just dying. It was so crazy ahead of its time. Text chat, voice, game detection and tracking, clans, server browsing, broadcasting, pic and video hosting...
And the animations on them are so obnoxious I actively add custom CSS to remove them.
Vencord FTW

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 then follows up that face plant by getting caught going 85 MPH in a school zone. MKHB is crashing out hard.
- 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.
watch face app, Facer I think is like this. and still bombards you with ads and banners.

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?
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.

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.
It is expensive, but its not surprising that it costs money

Teams

I was legit baffled by how such a shit peace of software could become so ubiquitous – until I got to know SAP and realized that Teams isn't even in the bottom half of enterprise software quality.
- I thought SAP was shit until I worked with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, an ERP from alternate 1990s hell dimension. It has a built-in IDE that uses its own language called C/AL (syntactically similar to Pascal). The only source control is developers' ability to lock files they are working on. And the code editor is worse than notepad. Seriously, it does not allow to select or paste multiple lines, and in general, acts as if each line is it's own textbox. Forget about syntax highlighting or anything else other than black text on white background.
  And, AFAIK, if your company needs to customize it, you are required to hire a "Microsoft-certified" NAV developer.
- Have you tried webex? It’s like teams but on dumb-‘roids, the notifications are shot, the messages always pull your taskbar up, calls always get routed to either the wrong input or output, calls drop half the time… and the list goes on and on…
- A someone who has used and supported teams, WebEx Skype and crazy shit I don't even remember anymore, Teams is downright reliable and user friendly.
Oh, you're going to update without notifying me and then not restart?
You truly are the paramount of usefulness, Teams.
- and then not restart?
  I had Teams restart, twice, during an incredibly important meeting with the government, because it updated itself without my consent.
The entirety of Office365 has become crap, especially the online version.
- The online version means I don’t ever have to boot into windows to use all the M365 stuff at work, so it gets a “thanks Microsoft!” from me.

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.

Windows

And that despite charging for it, they fill many versions of it with adverts, install without asking bloatware and crap paid for by other companies to shove down your throat, and also sells your personal information to (checks) at least 801 third parties.
- Hey! Those 801 third parties are trusted third parties. All of them were properly vetted when they said they wouldn’t misuse our personal data.

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.

Workout timer that wants a subscription

The “pro” versions of common social media apps that remove ads or give you a useless check mark.

I have been creating ad removal patches for 2 apps this week. Revanced is truly amazing
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.

The German Dreckstool website (meaning shit tool) hosts a hitlist of shitty tools/software. I don't think it's that popular, but the top/high-scored of the list may be indicative of some of the worst.

I googled nr. 1 and watched their promotional video.
Sooooo many buzzwords. From their marketing material, I have literally no idea what the software even does, but I can already tell it's utter shit.
- Oh, Siemens.
  Yeah.
- I love marketing that tells me nothing about the product or service. 🤢
Outlook should be way higher. I cannot believe how in tarnation I cannot view the reply they gave me if I'm standing in my sent folder. I have to copy past the subject and searchthe mail again on my inbox. And the ficking alerts that don't trigger at friggin all WTF?
- I hate the sent folder in the first place.
  Old outlook had a setting to place sent emails next to the replied to email. That worked for all folders, except the inbox.
  In Thunderbird I let it place sent emails always next to the context.
  In the new Outlook, after every send, I have to go into sent and move it to the correct folder. (I have many folders for structure of various concerns.)

Crab Rangoon's. I just don't like them. I mean it's just fried cream cheese.

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 board~~ I won't ask any more questions...
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.

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.

Microsoft Sharepoint has a Wiki. The Wiki can not generate a table of content.

Near all paid apps on iPhone.

Our shit setup at work, where I am now using two browsers and two email programs because our Jira and Confluence can't be arsed to decently support web standards/Firefox and because Outlook is shit but Exchange has stuff I need Outlook for.

Today was the first time, after yet again something not working - issues on confluence and Jira ticket can't be closed, endless load on Firefox - where I genuinely felt relieved that a very different website for file transfer simply worked. I could open it, click download, and download the file.

It's absurd that I feel this way.

Atlassian is shit for forcing us into the expensive cloud for a shit product. Our Jira and Confluence have plugins, and we pay admin company to integrate more customizations, and it just makes everything worse. The "changes only happen at night" I read from Atlassian is pointless because without notice or announcement stuff breaks anyway, and I have no idea who makes changes and when and what, because nothing is being communicated. Today was the third time we weren't able to add work time to tickets. Let's see when the next time will be.

It's a constant annoyance and stumbling over shit tools.

I have various CSS hacks in place to make Jira and Confluence more usable, but it's still shit. And man their HTML DOM is absolutely horrendous with only generated classes. Most of my CSS hacks use test ID attributes.

Shit Atlassian, shit Jira and Confluence, shit customizations. Annoying Outlook and Exchange.

Man this became a long text and rant lol

Unfortunately, they're not useless but apparently necessary. I don't see us ever moving away from them.

Atlassian is shit for forcing us into the expensive cloud for a shit product.
I feel your pain. Or rather, I felt it once and am now freed!
We were big into Atalassian when they announced they were going cloud only. We had on-prem versions of Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket
We pretty quickly said "Fuck that", mostly because we have an on-prem policy for IP protection.
I was pretty happy to spend some time searching for replacements, mostly because it was my job to apply upgrades to these steaming, tottering piles of badly written java horseshit. They looked pretty, but the upgrade process was convoluted and quite often failed terminally. I still think that the difficulty of upgrading the hosted versions was a driver towards cloud only, mostly because it exposed how shite the things were and how many complaints they must have got for offering an on-prem product that was so hard to maintain, despite looking pretty.
I take some pleasure that the Atlassian share price is now half what it was before they did this.
(If anyone was interested; Confluence and Jira were replaced by Youtrack. Bitbucket by Teamcity. Both by Jetbrains, both much easier to upgrade (Teamcity is web-based one-click), and our licencing costs are about half what we paid to Atlassian)
- Our biggest dependency is on the jira extension for adding work time and doing monthly and yearly worker Abrechnung.
  I believe the hope was to be a reasonable migration to cloud, but if course man's issues and a lot of effort. Now we're in the cloud with that.
  We wouldn't only need a ticketing replacement. But time, invoice, and lawful worker pay docs.

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.

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
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.

Boost / Sync for Lemmy

huh? i use boost (and used to use it for reddit before the whole API thing) and haven't ever seen it ask for money or anything
- Same, it shows ads, but they're pretty easy to block. I paid for it just to help support the dev, he seems pretty cool.
I read your comment, I thought a sec, and I just paid to remove the ads for boost.
Love boost.
What's wrong with Sync, lol

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

Sims freeplay. Haven’t used it for a long time but it sure asks for a LOT of money for a free game 😂