However, that is not the case. Everyone stops using your app at some point. So you don't need to support users forever, you just need to support them for some finite amount of time. Some users might use your app for a few years, some use your app just for a few weeks. Some users will email you half a dozen times, but most will never email you. Your app price should be priced so you can afford to support the average user.
And another thing that people forget: When your user base is growing, the amount of word of mouth recommendation you get also grows, and you automatically start selling more licenses, so your revenue also grows.
Pay-once and subscription aren't really that different in practice. Pay-once even has an advantage: You get all the money up front. And that's awesome if you are planning to grow your company.
There's also a flaw in this logic: It assumes that all apps require some kind of server provided by the developer in order to run.
Once upon a time, standalone software was standalone and could run in perpetuity without requiring anything more of the original developer. It's still entirely possible to write software like this, there's just a trend away from it due to the prevalence of always-on internet connections and the ease of keeping some of your application server-side as a form of copy protection.
“Thanks for contacting us! Our standard license includes support for 12 months after purchase. I’ve attached an offer for our extended support contract. I’m looking forward to your response!”
The extent at which some users subsidize the app for others is just one of the decisions you need to make when deciding on a pricing structure, not a rebuttal.
This logic applies to literally any one-time purchase that includes a warranty, yet the consumer goods sector has managed it somehow. What's really happening is a deterioration of the idea of "owning[1]" software. I'm sure it's great for the publisher, but it's almost all downside for the user. I'm still using an email app that was acquired and shut down by Google in 2012 and it continues to work just fine. On PC I use WinRAR from 10 years ago with no issue. I can't imagine having to pay for all of these little apps on a subscription basis and then having to find alternatives when the creators get acquired/go bankrupt because the subscription is no longer supported.
Edit: To add to that, if the cost of the subscription is to provide me with superior support, will publishers selling me these subscriptions be removing the warranty disclaimer from their EULA? Probably not, right?
[1] Yes, you never "owned" it, but licensed a copy - but in practice it was similar to owning a physical good.
> But as far as most software pricing goes, if it's so bad, then people wouldn't pay.
And yet people keep paying ransomware for access to their important files.
Except bits don't rot?
I do feel that I get value for my money and with the yearly fee I get all the updates (which are important in the ever changing world of web development), but sometimes it still feels like protection racket.
This is actually my favourite licensing technique I have come across for software.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
If they started charging just for use they wouldn't need neither an excuse nor a justification.
I really don't see your point.
If you could explain further why you think sublime would need an excuse for charging a monthly fee I would really appreciate.
Actually they'd need both.
And companies are not so dumb as not to understand this. Any company that started charging or went into a subscription model, offered both excuses and justifications for doing so.
You might be think "it's a free country, it's their product, and they can do anything with it".
Which is true in a trivial way (they're allowed by the law to do anything they like in that area), but it's also wrong.
Wrong in that in practice they're not really free: to survive they are bound to the market and their customers responses.
So they're free only as much as they're OK with pissing their user base and potentially losing sales (or have most of them go for some other product, and kill their own user base -- e.g. Quark xPress vs Adobe Indesign, and tons of other similar examples).
If the problem is access to files, then they could just have a free converter tool to some standard format.
The way things should work is like this: Subscription for when you want to use the software and open format data files that you're always easily able to export and download.
If a company goes out of business or does something stupid then another one will pop up to handle your needs. This aligns incentives correctly while still allows a healthy dose of competition.
The "middle ground" has been the most common model for desktop app pricing for decades. You buy version X of a product. When the next major version is released you pay an upgrade price.
In fact, the "middle ground" has been the norm for the majority of software apps over the history of desktop computing. It's the SaaS subscription model for cloud-hosted software that is the new deviation. But that cloud-based subscription model is now leaking into desktop apps (like the Adobe suite).
Also, Adobe's tools have always been among the most pirated software out there. People who needed to do occasional work wanted Photoshop but there was just no way they were going to drop $700 on it. Nowadays, Adobe just charges them an $11/mo fee. That makes it much easier and I know several instances where this newer model has resulted in real income for Adobe, from what would've otherwise been pirate installs.
People are much more willing to pay a small fee several times than a massive fee once. The subscription makes them feel like they have more control and they can cancel when they don't need the product anymore (not always true because some of Adobe's subscriptions have annual lock-ins). It reduces the friction from "figure out how to pay us more than your car payment" to "just send us the cost of a trip to Starbucks, it will only take a couple of minutes and you'll be merrily on your way".
This dramatically changes the incentives re: piracy. Instead of spending hours trying to find a cracked build from a site that won't pwn your PC so that you can save hundreds of dollars, you just pay a few bucks and speed through with a known-good version (plus a clean conscience).
It's almost a side benefit that subscriptions frequently represent additional lifetime value v. a "pay once" model.
Mobile app stores killed that model, when they made continuous, perpetual updates the norm. At the time, everybody was too busy pointing out the implications of going from 50$ to 50ct when the even bigger change was a farewell to major version upgrade sales.
But there, after a few cycles of companies ruining themselves by hiring in the short-lived money surge of growing an app to saturation, parts of the industry seem to have found their way to quite reasonably priced subscriptions.
Continuous, perpetual updates are definitely NOT the norm in mobile apps.
Some get some bug-fixes and the occasional new feature, but any major update lands a version 2.0.
Far more (the "long tail") are just abandoned (like all those thousands of 32-bit apps being deprecated in the iOS store).
2015 - you sold v1 for $5.00
2017 - you start selling v2.
You sell v1 for $5.00 but in the description tell everyone not to buy it.
You sell v2 for $5.00 but direct people who have already bought v1 to buy the bundle of v1 and v2 that you price at $8. Anyone who has already bought v1 can buy the bundle for $3.
N * (N + 1) / 2
Not very satisfactory, but very prevalent.
And, I'd say, given the low price of apps, it might be just right to not offer any special discount for an upgrade. You could always reward older users some other way.
A user can buy the base version, then a few months later when you create a release that allows processing widgets through the program twice as fast, they can update for a small fee. This would force the developer to create updates that would be easy to communicate the benefits of to the consumer.
It'd be a bit more difficult to figure out pricing for new users over time and which version they receive, but it would allow they old pricing model without forgoing the benefits of incremental development over time.
That could quickly devolve into supporting a large number of distinct versions of the software, which would be difficult and costly. Nobody wants to do that.
Not to mention that, if this versioned software is a platform (for example, WinXP and its service packs you mention), downstream vendors would also need to QA and support their software on all actively supported versions of said platform.
I use various bits of successful software like Transmit and Alfred that let you update until the next major version in which you must pay again.
The reality is that having everyone on the same version drastically simplifies not just security, but also interoperability. It isn't 1998 anymore. The default is internet connectivity and we should stop pretending our apps are secure when they are not.
Now you do you, and I'll use Goldwave v4.0 for basic audio edits - exactly the same tool I used in 2000, one that works well and I never had to re-learn.
I despise tools that capriciously change in my hands. Extra "security" is not worth the productivity hit.
Again, Internet connectivity isn't my default. Dropbox can handle that, and that software gets all the updates. The tools I use to make stuff I put in Dropbox better all be offline and never changing unless I say so.
That applies to the office suite, DAW, graphics editor, etc. I haven't seen anything their online features could give except a cloud lock-in.
You may value extra security, often necessitated by the very virtue of the software being online. And I value the ability to use without having to think about whether the signal is strong and my card payments went through.
The reality is that the interests of the users are often not aligned with the interests of software vendors.
That being said I do think truly securing an application requires first having a secure platform. Otherwise users could indefinitely demand mitigations at the application layer until it contains most of its own OS.
A good example is the Adobe Creative Suite 6 Master Collection which was so expensive to buy in Australia that it was cheaper to fly to the US, buy a copy and fly back. Now, you can get a years subscription to Creative Cloud for 'All Apps' for about 1/5th of the price of what CS6 MC was in Australia. It is still expensive, and after 4 or 5 years you will have spent more but thats significantly longer than Office 365 which costs about 2/3rd the price per year of a copy of Office 2016 outright.
In the US, companies have product liability to correct defects for the lifetime of the product, subject to routine limitations. [1]
So companies create business models to compensate for this limitation.
Companies figured this out with software decades ago, so it’s certainly possible (eg, Microsoft).
[1] https://injury.findlaw.com/product-liability/what-is-product...
I explained why I find the description fitting. You could at least entertain us with why "future users pay for your upgrades" does not fit in the context of one-time-paid "perpetual license" software beyond disagreeing with the phrase I chose to name the predicament.
Many many companies still allow this, but I think if you want support you should be paying a support fee (e.g. monthly subscription).
There's obviously a middle ground, like being able to at least use the version you paid for indefinitely but having to pay a smaller price to upgrade. But which direction a pricing structure goes also depends a lot on the niche and type of software.
Citing the worst examples of "subscription abuse" isn't really an argument either. Of course you can find examples on each end of a spectrum. But as far as most software pricing goes, if it's so bad, then people wouldn't pay.