The fundamental problem is that in our fully networked era software cannot _not_ be maintained. Security issues are inevitable, cloud/sync/store systems require servers, upstream APIs, libraries & operating systems are constantly shifting and breaking things.
So OSS aside (which has its own complicated economics) someone needs an ongoing revenue stream for that work to happen. Whether it's through regular release of paid upgrades (and EOL of old ones) or a subscription model is these days less of a fundamental separation and more of a question of cadence.
Take a look at the much-vaunted Campfire from once.com - there's been zero new features since initial release and I'll bet the cost of a copy come Feb next year when it's a year old there'll be a 2.0 for another $300. How long after that will 1.0 be EOL'd? So are you really 'buying once' for $300 or paying $300 a year just with the auto-renew turned off?
Sure they can. If you pay 100-1200x more for your cloud services than you need, maybe not. And I guess that is a theme, if you have subscriptions you don't really need to care about expenses because you have a steady income. Absurd? Yes, but that is how our industry behaves. I'm appalled at what people are paying for the cloud that literally could be served from a raspberry pi. Yes, you need redundancy etc. and that takes time and thought. But have you ever factored in the time and expertise required to manage the cloud? It is incomprehensible.
So, how many subscriptions do you need to be able to maintain your software? Is 10 enough? No? Conclusion, subscriptions are not sustainable?
Similarly, how many purchases do you need to recoup the initial development? You will hardly break even after the first 10 sales. But once you do break even every single purchase goes 100% to maintenance and new features. That is a very good position to be in.
Of course it matters what kind of product you have and how big of an audience you can get. If it is very niche product and you only expect 100 sales then maybe a one off payment isn't particularly appealing. But then again, maybe the value lies in support instead. Or, of course, a subscription.
Paying for upgrades is also fine! But without shafting your current users. Compute is dirt cheap. If you sell someone a piece of software for $300 you can afford 20 cents per year for cloud costs to maintain your relationships.
Agree. However the core problem with most SAAS products is: the companies are beeing greedy and the products fail to deliver enough value or keeep missing a certain quality bar to make you happy.
You could easily fix that by a base price and a maintenence fee (per year, since first buy) which would make it easy to opt in/out of a subscription model. The fact that companies are beeing greedy and fail to deliver prevents this from happening.
Jetbrains is the perfect example of a subscription based platform that I will happily pay for without any bad feelings. I pay yearly, after a few years you do get a discount (so I am a happy camper). And if at any point I decide I don't want to pay it anymore, I keep access to the latest version of the software I paid for.
Yes, the multi-year discount and perpetual license are nice -- though the version is the one from the start of the year but that's certainly better than a lot of peers.
I was impressed that when Jetbrains raised prices, it seemed a reasonable amount, they gave a few months' notice, and allowed people to prepurchase three years in advance at the old rates.
I'm hoping IDEA and the all products pack continue to survive basically as-is. Jetbrains looks to have launched a couple overlapping enterprise SaaS products, the AI integration, and increasingly specialized individual IDEs.
Speaking as a SaaS company here: I get what you’re saying, but this isn’t really fair. We have ongoing development so sustain, financial planning to do, and investors down our necks. It’s hard to justify a business plan with lots of fluctuations and uncertainty, when we could also have a SaaS model instead.
I was referring to companies such as Adobe and Autodesk and i don't mind SAAS at all if the value is provided and a choise is offered. Guesss its hard balancing the investors vs the intereste of your clients.
> Guess it's hard balancing the investors vs the interests of your clients
I think we know how that ends.
"We need predictable income so you should buy a subscription to our product" seems to be the argument that businesses love.
One of the problems of no-one being liable for security, is that no-one has the incentive to thoroughly separate software you really need to trust, and that you care whether it's vulnerable to hacking, from that which you don't. "everything needs a revenue for security reasons" would make sense if companies were giving an effective security guarantee and investing in fulfilling it, which they aren't. If software liability existed, most providers would recuse themselves from the most security sensitive features and we'd have a few big providers doing stuff like syncing, handling long term data storage, sandboxing, etc. rather like now with credit card data. At which point a lot of software becomes unimportant to update.
Conversely, it isn’t my problem to make a business model work.
Personally, I’ve decide if I can’t buy something and just have it I will do without. So be it.
Same here, I have no interest in funding someone's dream. I prefer to support a mutually beneficial relationship with a developer.
The campfire model specifically is even worse; it becomes a liability to maintain that I can’t request of the vendor, but have to take care of myself. The burden of actively looking for vulnerabilities, and fixing them, is on me.
The idea may be venerable, but I don’t quite understand who would think you could consider a networked online chat server as finished…
> who would think you could consider a networked online chat server as finished…
What about a phone service? What about cable? WAN? Recent "smart" insanity notwithstanding, those things are not updated on end-user side; every now and then, some hardware or wiring might get replaced, but the infrastructure part on the customer side is generally one-and-done, and customers pay only for the actual telecommunication service.
Now that's just moving the goalposts. Comparing a chat server application with copper wiring isn't just Apples to Oranges, it's Apples to a Torx Screwdriver.
The chat server requires constant network communications with various devices that change over time, suffers from possible supply chain vulnerabilities it needs to defend against, talks to databases, mobile apps—suffice to say, there's a million interactions that may be failing in the future due to unforeseen changes in the outside world.
A phone line introduces but a fraction of the complexity on-site, and thus doesn't need as much caretaking. I mean, ...duh?
And even if you want to pull through with this analogy; phone service customers still have an ongoing subscription to cover for the eventual repairs and wiring replacement. Just think of the transition to fibre in recent years. You pay for the service on the phone line and the maintenance of your infrastructure. It's a bundle.
This is why I sell my products with a one-time payment (lifetime access/usage), but with an optional support/updates payments.
It seems to work quite well for both my customers and my products.
Can you elaborate a little? Do you mean the one-time payment is for that major version of the software, and new features require payments?
Yes, when you purchase, you get that version + free updates and support for a year.
After the first year, you can still use the software, but if you want support or to get the newest features and update to the latest versions, you can pay to renew your support period.
For the pricing, usually a renewal for an extra year is about 10-30% of the original license price.
Yes. That is why I want a Hardware Product with Software Model like iPhone. I want my NAS / HomeServer with all the OS and Software included. With Security update for at least 8 years. ( Synology is the closest thing we have got )
Apple could have done this, but they were so focused on their Services Revenue they want everyone to subscribe to their iCloud. They could have allow the NAS / HomeServer to backup to their cloud.
Actually, they do allow this. I store my photos and iPhone backup on synology NAS. You just have to devote some time to set it up yourself.
I think the subscription model needs to be refined.
500$/year (invented amount) for a Photoshop subscription that I’ll use 3 times in a year? But when I want it, I need photoshop, not $SOMETHINGELSE. Sell me a $5/day license and I’ll be happy to pay every time.
Subscription model is ok for heavily used software, but doesn’t properly address whatever I use every now and then.
There are also SaaS products with usage based pricing. It depends on what SaaS or software or product it is. Different pricing model works for different things.
but sometimes the product I need doesn't offert the right subscription for me.
For 3 times a year, it must be free because I can read 3 articles a month on HBR and Forbes for free.
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 play a game of pretending. The person buying pretends that it's a one-time purchase. The person selling pretends that it's a one-time payment. But then it turns out that a new version comes out every two years or so and you need to upgrade, so you end up paying. It's a subscription, but everybody pretends it isn't.
For the software I use and rely on, I would much rather see a subscription model, which is sustainable.
It is not a subscription though. You are not hostage. You don't have to upgrade. You can keep using the old version if it serves your needs.
Imagine your stance as a customer instead. Imagine being hostage to every single piece of software, completely at the whim of another business that can increase the prices and/or pivot away from your needs. You have to keep paying regardless of whether you want or need any of the features being introduced. Does it make business sense to allow for that risk?
Both models work and it is getting tiresome to pretend that anything but a subscription model isn't sustainable. Yes, everyone gets the appeal of subscriptions from the perspective of selling software. But it is pretty disingenuous to not acknowledge the other side or pretend that the other doesn't work. You can't be that lazy with anything in life.
> have to keep paying regardless of whether you want or need any of the features being introduced
This here is the misunderstanding. A better way to phrase it is that you have to keep paying if you'd like the software to work.
On most platforms just keeping up with the OS and library changes requires plenty of work and it is unreasonable to expect someone to do this without constant income.
Now, when I'm a customer, I see things differently: if I use the software and I intend to rely on it, I want the developer to survive, so that they can maintain and develop the software in the long term. Paying a one-time fee will not result in a sustainable business, so the software will eventually die, disappear, or get acquired, none of which is good for me.
Downvote me all you want (HN can be really narrow-minded at times), but when I look at new software that I intend to rely on, one of the main things I consider is whether the developer has a sustainable business model. If they don't, I don't want to invest my time into learning, migrating to, or integrating their software.
Incidentally, I've been running a solo SaaS business for a number of years now. It's B2B only. Seeing the knee-jerk downvoting reaction here only convinces me that not providing any B2C plans was the right choice. I just give my service away for free to hobbyists.
Yes, and often when the OS has had a major revision a new version comes out as a paid upgrade (or more often lately, a purchase includes upgrades and maintenance for a certain time).
Though it is work the developer has to do regardless, if they want any new sales. And maintaining the software is orders of magnitudes cheaper than develop it from scratch so it is kind of weird to latch on to the maintenance aspect. If your sales paid for all the initial development then it will pay for maintenance. A bigger worry than the maintenance aspect is, will I recoup my initial investment?
The cost will always be arbitrary, software costs nothing to "manufacture" so any one-off payments or subscriptions will only match the costs associated costs for a certain scale.
I agree with what you say, sustainability is crucial. Doesn't follow that subscriptions are the only solution. Subscriptions-is-the-only-sustainable-model is the narrow-minded view I mostly see on HN. Undoubtedly because the audience are developers.
> So OSS aside (which has its own complicated economics)
Assuming you're actually referring to free software and not open source software, it really doesn't, though. It's straight up better in every way than service-oriented software and commercial software in every way... except actually compensating developers. I'd work for a pittance writing free software if there were any institutional support for it. But who wants to kill the golden goose, even if it means our lives would all be greatly improved?
That's not "complicated", this is the opportunity to make a shit ton of money by charging people for software despite insignificant marginal costs. Even if it means humanity writes the same goddamn software over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, mostly shittier than the last iteration.
Many SaaS disappoint after a while. They suggest you are paying monthly and benefit from ongoing development in return. Instead prices get increased, and essential new features are locked behind additional pricing tiers. Premium, professional, enterprise, what’s next? The user interface becomes an advertising app for the upsell. It’s an abuse of trust. So the problem is not so much subscriptions and SaaS themselves, but the business practices they enable.
You're buying once for $300.
I already made one-time payments (aka "lifetime") for two softwares/services. Was great until the providers went out of business. Before that they treated me not so well in support. But, what should I do, end the contract? Now I have the strict rule for myself not to use any kind of one-time payment options in this area (software/software based services) anymore. I'm just putting this down here to shed light on the possible downsides.
Edit: now I realize this is not written clear enough. This rule applies to software/software based services I intend to use regularly to solve a specific problem, like office, storage, etc.
It's not a "lifetime" payment unless you can run it off-line. If the software needs to talk to vendor licensing/authentication services, then any "lifetime" license is a lie for the reasons you mention.
No doubt about that what you have just said.
Lifetime payment literally means the specific software is yours and runs even after the business selling it goes out of business one day or is acquired by another business.
We need to consider these issues before selecting pay once option.
Ok, but think what would happen if you made a subscription and the provider went bankruptcy. Or was acquired by someone who shuts down the service? You would have payed for something that all of a sudden disappears and you have nothing, not even an old unsupported version fir the time you need to find alternatives.
Opened a website. Already got `Welcome to our website!` modal that block the content. Through the modal's overlay can see the banner `Your product could be here`.
Well, that is annoying. Thank you so much, I would rather use anything that is less intrusive.
I find my tolerance for subscription software is proportional to how often I use it. A tool I use daily as my core work, no problem - I want to support them to ensure they stick around. But occasional tools I’d prefer to buy upgrades only if there are new feature I care about.
I’m not a creative, so I’m not paying Adobe subscription (they’re icky in so many ways). But if I were I’d have no issue.
But there is a 3rd category - something like an editor I couldn’t bear if it was tied to a company to ensure it’s survival so that’s got to be open source - even though ironically I’m willing to pay more in that scenario.
I'd say there is a fourth category too - things that would be perfectly fine as a simple, local program purchased once that grow over-complicated cloud features to justify a subscription model.
Examples of this would be Lens, Postman and now Insomnia. This sort of behaviour is why I use k9s and Bruno instead.
100% agree with this. And I’d put most of the software into this category.
Also, let me offer you a different view on the software you use a lot and therefore want to support. The more a software/service is important to you, the more you should worry about having that as subscription, because it can go away in a matters of hours without you being able to do anything about that.
Think if slack went bankruptcy. Or if it was acquired by someone that shut it down. What would all those people that heavy relies on slack for their workflows? Or what about GitHub?
Can I propose a compromise? How about a yearly subscription with opt-in renewal. If you stop paying, you don’t get updates (or locked out in case it’s a service - not standalone software).
We all hate subscriptions but at the same time lifetime ownership puts you in a shitty place from a business development perspective. If the product has room to improve within its scope, I want the updates, the maintenance, select new features. If you one-time price that, the business incentives call for acquiring more users, not to make their existing ones happy.
Jetbrains does this well. Pay for a year and then you fallback to that license/version forever
The Jetbrain licensing model caused a lot or confusion when it was introduced (as can be seen in posts on their forum and reddit), and when I check now it still seems to be the same.
> as soon as you pay for 12 consecutive months, you will receive this perpetual fallback license providing you with access to the exact product version for when your 12 consecutive months subscription started.
So if you do not renew then in practice you might need to _downgrade_ to an earlier version when your subscription expires. But some of their software doesn't even support downgrade, so you need to uninstall/reinstall it and hope you have some old backup of your settings.
Is this what you are referring to?
Yow, I hadn't realised that twist. Having just read the JetBrains documentation around it, I don't like that.
Looking at a lot of this stuff, "lifetime" is a bit misleading. It's for the life of the version. Buy v1.x and you can use v1.x forever, but if you want v2.x, pay again.
Of course, "forever" is only until everything around it leaves to the software not working, such as not supporting a new version of the OS it runs on.
> Buy v1.x and you can use v1.x forever, but if you want v2.x, pay again.
Yeah, but that has a few logistical and incentive challenges. Someone buying right before an update etc. And you may not want to create conflicts between semantic versioning and business decisions.
Another approach could be to have features labeled with date, and gated behind flags. Then deliver updates to everyone but features are enabled based on your purchase date, eg within a year.
I saw this adopted by Beekeeper DB manager - https://www.beekeeperstudio.io/pricing/
>Pay for a year and get a lifetime usage license.
Hey! I run Beekeeper Studio.
Here's why I price like I do:
I can't keep the lights on with one time payments, period. I just don't make enough money.
However as a consumer I prefer them.
My compromise is a subscription that provides a permanent benefit after 1 year. Access to any version of the app released in your subscription period. Forever.
I think it's really fair, and when I made the change I saw an immediate uptick in sales.
Renewal is still opt out though. Defaults matter.
That’s the model of Nova from Panic. Stop paying, and you stop getting updates after the moment your subscription lapses. That’s it. There’s no other complex system. It works great!
Oh nice, I also started a similar project about nine months ago - https://payonceapps.com/ It came from my personal experience, where I sold my app for a fair one-time price and decided to give similar-minded people some spotlight.
In case the author sees this: The email popup needs to go. I'd love to see your conversion on just that popup, its most likely zero.
Sorry, this distribution model worked in the 80s, 90s where it also originated from. Software was once installed on your desktop computer. No updates, no client/server model, just a black box without internet dependencies. I get the complaints that people wish back to a time where they purchased once the software but it doesn't work for SaaS, mobile phone apps or where i need to run a web server for the service. People easily forget about the hidden costs and why the software distribution model from ancient times doesn't cover the costs nowadays anymore.
There is no need for a client/server model for most pieces of software, integration to existing cloud storage is far more useful than your server. Updates have existed for many years although less common as software was often more fully featured to begin with. There is still plenty of non subscription software that is out there, fully functioning, and of a high standard. Affinity is a key example.
> People easily forget about the hidden costs and why the software distribution model from ancient times doesn't cover the costs nowadays anymore.
If this was true then there would be zero solvent software businesses that don't rely on subscription revenue, which is clearly not the case.
Not all software has to be SaaS.
Self-hosting is easier than ever nowadays, devices a lot more capable.
Soon, smartphones will be able to run powerful LLMs locally, so no need to use a paid GPT app subscription.
Take Photoshop for example, it's a product that runs locally on your computer. Why would you pay a yearly subscrption for it instead of a pay-once, use forever? I understand (optionally) paying for updates, but not just to keep using a product that is already on your computer
At least in a B2B context a yearly maintenance fee was covering the costs, without cloud subscriptions. I think the move to SAAS in many areas is just to establish a stronger lock-in.
There's still plenty of software where using a very old version is perfectly fine. Matlab, Solidworks, Photoshop, etc. If you bought a 10 year old version it will still work fine and you probably aren't even missing much.
If you are using Mac OS, you can find the highest quality programs in any category for sale for between $30 and $100. The old model still works great. I have purchased some fantastic software and these prices are cheaper compared to the 80s and 90s.
Feature request: show platform (Windows, Mac, Android, etc).
Especially since products can be one time payment on some platforms and subscription based on others (e.g. final cut pro is listed as one time payment but the ipad version is subscription based).
For UXWizz (also mentioned on this site), it makes a lot of sense to have a one-time payment, because it's self-hosted.
For many products and services that require active services/cost from the developer to run, it's harder to be sustainable with one-time payments, but for a self-hosted product it makes a lot of sense. Think of how software licenses used to work, or how games still work and do very well.
Post-purchase subscriptions aren't necessarily bad, but the real death-knell is when they're combined with the profit motive. It hurts to realise that, no, your post-purchase subscription isn't paying for ongoing security updates; that it is the business model. It's why the subscription is $9.99 instead of $0.60, or whatever. The purchase price is just them double-dipping.
This. A subscription can work if a service is actually provided, as in regular updates, however I would say that's rarely the case and it's simply to make cash. Goodnotes, Pro Create, Affinity, all show you can make a fantastic product without a subscription and still bring regular updates.
Idea: treat a subscription as a perpetuity (forever) or annuity (set time), and offer customers the choice of paying a regular cashflow or the present value of the perpetuity or annuity. You as developer need to smartly invest those larger payments to ensure you stay paid.
I'd add: Upnote (getupnote.com). It's a notes app with just enough features to be powerful (markdown level formatting, tags, spaces) but not too much. And a very quick/responsive app with background sync. It's comfortably replaced google docs for anything that doesn't need much styling, and works well offline.
(Not affiliated, just a happy user)
I'm not even a graphic designer and Pixelmator Pro has paid for itself many times over. I can't believe Mac users (outside professional graphic-design) would willingly pay Adobe.
I love sites like this. I'm always looking for more apps that let me keep using them even if I stop paying for updates. Adding a $10 monthly subscription will stop me from using most products but I'll gladly pay $100+ for some quality software that I can keep
You know, in the before times, they actually had a single word for "pay once, use forever". They called it "ownership".
And according to libertarian thought, ownership is the basis of ethics. I'm a bit surprised there isn't more of a libertarian backlash against the "you will own nothing and be happy" trend in our culture.
I don't have this idea fully fleshed out yet, but I feel that the ownership vs. rent preference is like the difference between resource model in StarCraft vs. Total Annihilation (and their respective descendants).
In StarCraft, the focus is on your absolute account balance; you think in terms of having N units of minerals/gas, and spending them on things that cost particular amount of resources to make. In Total Annihilation, the focus is on resource flow - you try to balance how much metal/electricity per second your mines/generators supply, vs. how much metal/electricity per seconds your factories and defenses consume.
In my experience, the two approaches are ultimately the same - you could compute the resource flow for a StarCraft game, and you could pay attention to absolute amounts in Total Annihilation - but they yield entirely different game dynamics, and different player mindsets. Personally, my mind thinks more in StarCraft terms, but I imagine finance people think more in Total Annihilation terms, and in those, subscriptions are the natural mode of spending.
An analogy: /pol/ used to be a libertarian board, but once it watched Ron Paul receive two screwjobs and saw that the anti-libertarians are actually militant (even if only covertly), /pol/ realized a militant ideology is the only solution as a bunch of ragtag armed individualists are no match against an organized instrument.
Libertarianism will make its greatest advancements in creating software and systems which render groups redundant and/or impotent vs individuals. A homomorphically encrypting, opaque, Monero-like Etherium would threaten the neccessity of certain governmental functions and lock the government out from observing (like Bitcoin) and manipulating (with force) participants.
Uncensorable prediction markets, DAOs, the possibilities...
I would love for every tech to be this way but sometimes, there are recurring costs (for good reasons) for whoever provides the product. In those cases, I think subscription makes sense
For every software that is not abandonware, there is always a recurring cost (besides cloud, there is support, security updates, aligning with OS updates, etc.).
There is something to be said for both sides. The counterpart to your argument is that, especially in niches or other markets where there is a dominant player, there isn't much incentive anymore to improve software when all your users are subscribers. The money comes in anyway. Besides that, you often see regular price increases in such markets because the user lost all power. If you end your subscription, there is no good alternative. In the pas you could just not update if the new pricing wasn't worth it.
The best balance may be in the JetBrains-like model, where you pay a yearly amount, but you keep access to historical versions when you decide to cancel. In this way money flows in for updating and improving the software. But if you fail to provide value, users can always cancel their 'subscription' and continue using the last version.
Thing is, I don’t believe in owning software forever anymore. Things loose their value too quickly: what would an Office suite from 2005 yield me now, other than the need to run an ancient VM to produce files nobody else could work with? Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002? No. It looks unbearable today.
So using forever is off the table; which brings me back to regularly purchasing the new version. And if I agree to do that, I begrudgingly agree to the premise that I’d rather always have the current version than having to research whether the new creative suite actually contains Photoshop features I need.
> what would an Office suite from 2005 yield me now
An office suite.
I occasionally write documents in Office 97. Yes, in emulation. And despite the emulation, it loads quicker and has no lag.
Some software does "rot" in time. But a lot doesn't. And we shouldn't be afraid of keeping things running.
What a strange way to frame the issue. I am not afraid of keeping things running. Most of the time, it's simply not possible, specially when working with other systems and people, without ever increasing pain.
The world is progressing and software will be obsoleted. Yes, not all of it and not at the same speed (MS obviously being top of the line when it comes to compatibility and being able support it), but inevitably so.
It's not a strange take. It's recognizing that software goes to shit faster than it gains new features.
Continuing the Word example, enterprise users may indeed be better off with the most recent versions of MS Office suite, because of SharePoint and all other integrations in use. For a regular user, the best Word version to use is 20 years old.
FWIW, my wife stuck with ~15 year old Office version on her own computers, in spite - or rather, because - of having used more recent ones at work; it was only until this year that she was begrudgingly forced to update, as Windows 7 got EOL-ed and it was just simpler to download the current one than to dig out old disk images.
Enshittification is real. And so is the larger zeitgeist in software development and design, of declaring the users are idiots to justify disempowering them (whether through laziness or malice).
About the only new useful feature in the past decade, that became almost universal and that justifies subscriptions somewhat, is the "collaborative" aspect of syncing between devices. But note that the primary use of that is to be able to edit your work on multiple devices, which is effectively a per-application workaround over OS vendors being greedy and unable to get their collective shit together.
Some of the handy Excel functions (like XLOOKUP, LET, LAMBDA) are only available in the newer versions. Sure, they aren't universally used because of the inertia, but in my opinion useful enough to justify the upgrade.
You're right wrt. those new Excel functions, but I consider this to be an unusual exception - these all happened recently, so even if you want to upgrade for them now, you'd still be fine not upgrading for over a decade before :).
Office 97 works on Win11. No emulation needed.
>Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002? No. It looks unbearable today.
Haven't played Dungeon siege specifically, but there's plenty of games from that era that still hold up, some even graphically. Be careful, or you're going invoke the wrath of the site's retro gaming community :)
Many, many people still enjoy Red Alert 2, which was released during the same time frame. The competitive scene is still active as well.
You know what is my favourite software license model? The one Bitwig uses:
I pay once and get $years of updates and the last version I am stuck with I can use as long as it runs on my system.
Updates then prolong/refresh the update period for another $years and cost something like a quarter to a third of the full price.
This way the manufacturer has incentives to deliver new things and I pay them when my live circumstances allow it without them locking in the work I made using their software.
Perpetual license. It is by far the best model imo. Allows the user control over the renewal cycle which is how it should be for apps that don’t need constant updates.
I bought 14 games last year from the early 2000's, racing simulator games. They absolutely suck compared to today's racing simulators, except that they don't because they did stuff differently that they don't do today and I miss some of those features and games for what they were.
I also routinely run tons of software that I paid once for, it works for me, and I never have need to upgrade. It rarely stops working with a new OS version, as far as Windows and Linux goes at least. Office 2005 will still export all types of formats, or I could print to a PDF, or I could even just send out an old school .doc file and most people can still open it in whatever program they use today, even if it isn't optimal.
Additionally, even if something only works for a limited time, I still got my use and money's worth out of most of that software. I don't expect physical things to last forever, so I also don't expect software to last forever. I'd rather pay once, twice, or more for "pay once" software that I use over 20 years than pay every single month, probably adding up to a lot more than the several copies of different programs over the years would.
> Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002? No. It looks unbearable today.
On the other hand, I fairly regularly fire up an emulator to play Space Invaders or Galaga. And there's no end of projects porting Doom to pretty much anything with a display and a microcontroller in it.
The graphics aren't always the point, sometimes it's the gameplay, or the nostalgia.
I guess you don't like the proverb "Old is gold".
I still play Virtua Cop 2, and many companies/individuals aren't tech savvy but still use windows XP/7 with Office 2007.
My point is that if we can't distinguish which things are our assets, liabilities, precious, interests and hobbies then we won't understand where we pay once or in subscriptions.
I'll choose to pay once and own software forever if those software are too good for the next 3 to 5 years (like how we buy a smartphone or other things in life) or are being updated regularly.
> Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002?
On that note, the makers of the Eufloria series from back-in-the-day have started working on a sequel. :)
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/221180/Eufloria_HD/
They have a Discord channel too which people are welcome to join:
You would be surprised. When I still used Linux on the desktop, I stuck with Office 97 (IIRC) for a long time, because it was the only version that worked well with CrossOver Office (Wine-based). It worked well for a long time, opening other people's files etc., even as new versions of Office came out.
> Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002? No. It looks unbearable today.
Funny, considering many games I play to this day are older than that.
In many ways, I think they look great still. Pixel art for example ages very gracefully.
Why would software lose value? It's not a mechanical item that physically wears and rusts. What you're talking about is planned obsolescence. Those companies benefit from the software seemingly becoming less valuable. TeX is no less valuable today than it was decades ago. Why would it be?
Open Source software that enjoys continued development by the broader community obviously works differently; this is about proprietary software that will not be ported to new platforms, receives no security fixes over time, and will just stop evolving at a given point in the past.
TeX would not be as useful if the only version you had available would be one Knuth compiled himself in 1990, without the original source code; and the fact that TeX solves a contained problem, he intended it to be a „finished“ project, and was an exceptional developer makes this a good example to prove your point, but a bad one to counter mine: most software is just not like that.
To the contrary; a lot of software is highly contemporary, depends on other, external things, and requires a constant stream of security updates to cope with the rest of the world. This causes software to loose value rather quickly.
> this is about proprietary software that will not be ported to new platforms
Software being proprietary is entirely a choice of the vendor. There's nothing inherent in MS software that means it has to be proprietary. It's a pretty essential part of planned obsolescence.
As for new platforms, what new platforms? I can still buy a complete system that can execute x86 code that was written decades ago. And, in any case, we've been able to write platform agnostic code since before many programmers were born.
Not all software needs to care about the "rest of the world". There is a ton of software that doesn't need any kind of network support at all to deliver value. The only real reason for software to become less valuable is if the problem it solves goes away. This can happen, of course, but I don't think it happens as much as MS and other want us to believe.
Software that is designed well is able to be adapted and re-used for new purposes. TeX didn't have good support for separating style from content. But we didn't say "TeX isn't valuable any more", people simply built further tools on top of it like LaTeX and ConTeX etc. This is also why Unix remains just as valuable as it always has been. Unix surely delivers more value to more people today than it ever has done. It turns out the world really doesn't change as much as we sometimes think it does.
Even the best software has the world move on around it.
Has anyone documented the process of getting the original TeX82 source release to compile on a modern system? I imagine it would be an ordeal, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
Because „value“ is defined relative to the competition. If someone manages to sustainably build and sell a car for $100, a used beater suddenly isn’t worth $1000 anymore. The value decreases because I can get a better thing cheaper now. A Mainframe that was worth a million in 1980 would be worth about 10k as a museum piece now, because nobody would use it seriously anymore (even if it works exactly the same as in 1980).
Some software had a high value at some point but is pretty worthless now because there is cheaper or even open source competition now.
It's a mistake to conflate value with "market price" or liquidity. I have plenty of assets like books, kitchen equipment, and even electronics that would fetch a mighty sum of approximately zero on the market yet still provide me with enormous value (as much value as they did the day I acquired them).
If cars were like software then they wouldn't wear or rust, the only reason they'd "lose value" is if the roads or fuels changed. But the roads haven't changed fundamentally since the invention of the car and newer fuels can usually be used with minor tweaks rather than starting from scratch. It's completely irrelevant if I could buy a "better" car. I wouldn't be on the market for one because my current car continues to deliver value.
The "roads changing" can happen to software too, it's true. If the x86 platform became obsolete then clearly a bunch of software that is too intrinsically tried to that platform would be less valuable (because you can't run it). But that hasn't happened. In fact, we can't even seem to change the "roads" when we want to (see IPv4). Much of the change in software is artificial and created by those profit from it.
> If cars were like software then they wouldn't wear or rust, the only reason they'd "lose value" is if the roads or fuels changed.
No, and that’s exactly my point. A car with technical specs from 1970 wouldn’t be worth as much today as in 1970 because the standards are higher today. I wouldn’t want a perfectly restored house from 1600, just because it was the greatest way to live in 1600. Because I am used to stuff from now.
That sounds like the hedonic treadmill to me. The existence of something "better" does not reduce the value of what you already have. I have a 1080p projector. I enjoy it just as much as I always have done. You might have a 4K projector but that doesn't affect me at all.
This is not to say a newer model can't deliver more value than my current one. But that's not the same as saying my current model suddenly delivers less.
Well it is the hedonic treadmill, but that doesn’t make it wrong. It’s a real thing. Maybe you’re more modest than me but the standard of the time absolutely changes my value of things. Ten years ago the iPhone 5 was the greatest thing ever, today I wouldn’t want one for $100.
But nobody is asking you to pay anything. You already have the old one because you paid for it ten years ago.
Wasn’t the original comment about comparing „buying for a fixed price“ vs „subscription model“? Depending on the expected competition in the future, the subscription can be better because you expect to get a free alternative in a few years. So buying a software for a high price doesn’t make sense even if you get to own it forever, because you aren’t going to use it forever anyways.
That's not the kind of value that matters to the user. Software is not supposed to have value, it's supposed to deliver value. And that is not subject to rot through competition. If some program from 2000 delivered me $100 of value yearly then, the existence of an enshittified competitor from 2020 that produces $100 of annual value for me today doesn't make the 24-year-old program suddenly deliver less value.
In the point of the original comment, it absolutely is. They said:
> Thing is, I don’t believe in owning software forever anymore. Things loose their value too quickly: what would an Office suite from 2005 yield me now, other than the need to run an ancient VM to produce files nobody else could work with? Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002? No. It looks unbearable today.
The point as I understood it was: why would I pay a high fixed fee to own a software “forever” if I am not really going to use it forever? At some point, a subscription will be cheaper overall. Because people buying an office suite in 2005 for a fixed fee aren’t using it anymore, they can also use LibreOffice now. So if they had a choice between “one time $500” or “$5 per month”, the monthly option would have been better. Software not degrading because it’s digital doesn’t change that.
It can also become a liability and introduce cost, though: For example, if your old program requires emulation to run on a modern OS, or some file conversion process, or network isolation. All these things fall under maintenance costs that you probably don't factor into your calculation. Your "enshittified" competitor won't have these, and may very well deliver a higher net value, all considered.
Final Cut Pro > this should not be on the list. Versions require paying to upgrade and if you update macOS you end up having to pay for FCP.
It does make sense, though? If the developer has to work to change the product to work for new MacOS versions, because of API that Apple changed, the developer should be reimbursed for the development time, right?
So you’re saying it’s better to stick to Windows or Linux where you don’t need to pay for an update when you wanted to stay on a specific version, just because your OS updated.
I am not sure how MacOS development works, and if apps are automatically compatible to new versions or not.
I was not saying anything OS specific, just that if the developer has to actively work to implement changes, those development time should be paid for.
I’ve been burned twice with FCP. Happy on version X, updated macOS, run FCP and it fails with that it doesn’t work on this version, contact FCP and get told I have to pay for the latest version to work on that version of macOS. It seems like it’s just a version check.
If it was a major version upgrade I would happily pay it. But even premiere pro never broke between OS version updates on macOS or windows. So it seems like a FCP thing.
The Mac version of Final Cut Pro hasn’t had a paid upgrade since FCP X was released in 2011.
That’s around when I stopped using it. (2010) but I moved to premiere pro. Haven’t been back to FCP since. But if they stopped screwing users that’s great!
If you can't decide which model to choose, go for open-source and contribute whatever you want.
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Yeah until the company decides to adopt a subscription model
the only thing you can rely on in terms of ownership is FOSS.
In what sense?
Because most issues arrise in this thread are about future updates, not the ownership of the current product.
With FOSS you get no guarantee for future updates.Many products that started FOSS, did it just to use it as a lead magnet, and once they had enough leads, they switched to SaaS as their main model, stopping support and updates for the FOSS version.
> they switched to SaaS as their main model, stopping support and updates for the FOSS version.
and then someone usually picks up the Last open source available and forks it. thats ownership. happened so often already it's a pattern.