The first question is, do I have to? If not, then I will have to deal with all kinds of intermediate cases, say an industrial designer or film music composers. But ad hoc I tend towards making a difference and accepting that there will be a whole lot of cases that are not obvious how to deal with them. Sports professionals would be another tricky category.

I would say it lies in the nature of being an artist that the products are unique and unpredictable. Competition applies to a much smaller extent. You write one great novel at age 20, should you be able to live on the royalties for the rest of your life? In the end the consumer decides anyway, if they buy enough books at a high enough price, then you can.

As I wrote in another comment, there is also a moral aspect to this. If people willingly pay your subscription fee, then this is what it is. But do you find it good to sell your software at an inflated price in order to make yourself a nice life? How would you feel if everyone else did the same, if the supermarket staff would all only work half a day, make $45k a month and put the bill for that onto your grocery prices? I bet you would hope that competition solves the issue, otherwise your subscription income will no longer afford you a nice life.

> In the end the consumer decides anyway, if they buy enough books at a high enough price, then you can.

Why is this different from software?

The software priced here is very cheap. DevUtils costs lifetime less than what an hourly wage of SWE intern costs.

I don’t even know what logic is implied in here regarding the supermarket staff.

If you make $40k profits per month, the price is not as cheap as it could be, that is probably around the median yearly income in the USA. My point is just that this is not a sustainable thing, not everyone can take $40k home each month and only work 4 hours per day. Here it is just a single guy and the result of that is not noticeable, a few thousand people pay a handful bugs more each month than they could. But just imagine what would happen if we would cut the total working hours of the entire economy in half and gave everyone half a million dollars per year.