Software Subscription Debate

It sounds like you feel like you underpaid. Then the solution is for them to charge more or charge for more of their products, not a subscription. A subscription basically forces you into paying for upgrades.The only thing a subscription model is good for is it wrestes power from the consumer.With the traditional model if they decide to stop updating the app, you wouldn’t buy the next version, and that would be your leverage. With a subscription model, they can decide to stop deivering upd

First off, I'd really appreciate if you could reduce the angry, accusatory tone, I don't think it's productive. I have zero apps including subscription apps. I work for a B2B company for a paycheck. I am on the consumer side of the transactions at issue here. I don't know what you do for a living, because from your positions, it appears you might have no idea how the software business actually works in 2023.Nobody's forcing you to pay for software subscriptions. If yo

Fully agree. I am a software developer myself. I can't imagine making a living by charging my customers just once, ever. It just doesn't make any business sense.Software needs to be maintained and developed, and just following the evolving technology (operating systems, libraries, environments) is a lot of work. On top of that, you need to fix bugs, provide support, and yes, develop new features. This is not feasible with a one-time purchase.For some reason many people like to pl

More and more I see new apps being released and having a subscription model. Pay X for the tool plus Y every year to get updates. Paying 99$ and then 49$ each year is (at least for me) too much money and a no go. If after a year bugs are discovered on the purchase that I initially made, why shouldn't I receive that for free? Subscriptions are ok for services and I don't really care, but products shouldn't be on a subscription model. Just my opinion.

I don't mind subscriptions, I actually prefer them for many things.Especially for software I rely on I want the developers to consistently earn money so they keep motivated to work on it, do maintenance and fix bugs. I don't pay for software, I pay for the thing it allows me to do. Me paying a subscription fee creates an incentive and responsibility to keep things working.If there is a backend component to its even more important as they will have continuous cost.Also the &quo

I prefer the subscription model, as long as the total expected cost is not too far out of line for the service. $5/mo for every tiny utility is too much.However, before the rise of subscriptions developers still needed income. What often happened were releases with big changes (sometimes completely changing the ui) for the sake of justifying an upgrade cost. Even worse, incompatibility between versions to force an upgrade.Perpetual license of an older version included with the subs

Why don’t you like subscriptions?Previously, you’d buy a software licence for $X00 or $X,000 and after a year or two you’d either stop receiving security/feature updates or you’d have to spend another $X00 or $X,000 all over again. You’d also only be able to use the software on one machine - period.The move to subscriptions means that cost is spread further over time.Subscriptions aren’t necessarily bad - if your software provides a monthly service, like cloud storage or access acr

I'm deeply disturbed of this normalization of software as a subscription service. I want the return of good old days when people could pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.

Subscriptions for purely software updates seem like a steep price hike over buy once and get updates for a long time. I really don’t like how devs are under the guise of we need to make a living and start charging subscription for such. I won’t buy that unless is totally indispensable

I've actually moved to preferring subscription software for things like 1Password (which moved from purchase to subscription).Software is a moving target where everything else is changing around it - OS, hardware, web infrastructure, etc. and having devs continuing development on a tool I'm using is useful. The subscription model in this case accurately reflects the reality and is better than randomly having to pay $45 on occasion to upgrade to a version that still works.I'