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I am sick and fucking tired of signing up for accounts to do certain things, and those website are anywhere from 50 percent to 75 percent BROKEN. Take your fucking upgrades and features and shove them up your tail end without lube. I’m tired of it. It ends up wasting a whole lot of my time that I can’t bill for. That’s right. You wasted my time, and YOU want ME to PAY you for it. I don’t think so. If anything, I should be sending you a bill.

Mail Chimp

This was bought by a financial institution at some point, and you can tell. It’s more broken than ever. A couple years ago, 98 percent of what you saw in your account worked. There were a couple hiccups that were annoying, but not overly so. Mostly, there were just templates you couldn’t use, and you were limited to X number of subscribers. That’s perfectly reasonable. Today, 75 percent of that website is broken.

 

Today, I went to create a custom email for Friday. I’ve decided that I don’t like the automated emails because you can only put one feed into it, and I don’t always have a new article for that specific feed. I’d like to be able to put about four feeds into it so that it’s parsing everything that could be relevant.

Enter – The New Calendar Feature. Ooohhhh Ahhhhhhh

On the surface, this looks great. You can create custom emails that are relevant to what your doing or what you want to accomplish and set them up to send on X day. EXCELLENT. I was going to do the whole month of July today. That’s four emails. Max. So, I spent the majority of the morning creating my first custom email to go out to my email list. This takes a couple hours. I get ready to schedule the email, and everything goes blank. Uh oh….. What happened here? It’s definitely not working, and I see the dreaded UPGRADE buttom. Oh, nonono nonononononono. NO! Absolutely fucking not. I just spent two hours creating this email, and you want ME to PAY YOU to get it sent!? Are you kidding me? At this point, buddy, you owe me $100 for wasting two hours of my time TODAY. Nevermind the fact that I have to log back in and actually send it on Friday. Add in another $25. So, Mailchimp now owes me $125. I don’t owe them a dime, but they sure do owe me for wasting my time.

The thing is that that’s not the only thing that doesn’t work. Most of the data in their explore these analytics is fake. They do tell you that it’s fake, but it doesn’t need to be there at all. If it doesn’t work for the level of account that the user has, it needs to be removed. I’ve wasted a lot of time seeing if these “features” might do me some good, but I can’t see anything, and I can’t use them. Therefore, I am NOT interested in them, and it doesn’t motivate me to buy anything. If anything, it motivates me to find another provider that has a website that does work.

Animation Software

This is another area of software that’s an exercise in anger management. It is really incredibly difficult to find good animation software that’s affordable. Read = FREE or a one-time buy. I’m really not a fan of paypaypaypay models to infinity. I hate rent also and Internet and electricity and gas and everything that is paypaypaypay to infinity. I hate it all. It’s not just these guys, but they rank up high because this stuff used to be pay once and use forever, and it’s not critical. You don’t need it to live or to even live comfortably, but it is nice to have to add a little animation into your videos and social media and whatnot.

Adobe

Really cool. I did a few videos using this software. It was clean. It was easy to use, and one day it just stopped working. I have no idea why it stopped working, but on that particular day, I had spent about five hours on a video. It was an article overview/tutorial. There was nothing particularly advanced in it. I’m always very careful not to click on any “paid” non-features, so there was none of that in there, but they snuck on in there somewhere and wouldn’t tell me where it was. Oppse. Five hours just down the drain. I cannot get that time back, and it doesn’t motivate me to purchase anything. You just wasted my time, you owe me $250 for five hours of wasted time.

Canva

Same deal as Adobe. You’ll sign up. Create a few videos. It’ll go sorta smoothly. They really really love to sneak in paid content that you didn’t click on, and for the first few videos, you’ll be able to find it and delete it. Until that one time when you can’t find it, and you can’t delete it. More wasted time. This one really made me mad. It wasn’t two or five hours. It was an entire day. Like 10 to 12 hours, and BAM . . they snuck some paid content in that I couldn’t find. I had to totally abandon the project. It’s probably still saved there, but I can’t use it. I actually had someone recommend Canva to me this week. I said – I hate Canva with a passion. They snuck some paid content in there that I couldn’t remove and wasted a whole lot of my time. $600 of my time to be exact. The individual countered with – Well, I only pay $12.99 a month. Obviously, this person has $156 a year that they don’t care about. That’s fine. Good for them. They have an extra $156 a year that they can spend on this. I don’t, and if I paid for everything that everyone wanted me to pay for, I’d be living under a bridge.

For animation software, I finally settled on Synfig Studio, which is its own nightmare. It’s so hard to learn that you’ll wish you had the CD so you could throw it out the window and run over it a few times. The good news is that it’s free and open source, so if you spend the time to learn it, it’s your software.

To these companies and the others that think it’s motivational to include “features” that don’t work, STOP IT. No one is motivated, and you’ve just pissed off someone who might have purchased it if the features they could see worked. Instead, you’re creating delays, demanding money and holding work hostage. I believe they call that extortion. Keep in mind that if someone is using your software, they are spending their time to create whatever it is, and that time has value. Be respectful, and do not waste their time with shit that doesn’t work. Peop[le are more likely to buy or donate to companies and individuals that provide them a great user experience.