It seems you're very focused on what people "oughta" pay for. But what matters is simply what people do pay for. You tell this story, but it seems very inconsistent with my experience or my understanding of pricing theory.
I don’t know who the “you” is referring to. All I said was that in my personal experience, there have been occasions (not frequent, but it has happened) where I’ll buy a perpetual license to something for a task I use a few times a year. Because the $20 or whatever the license cost was worth the time I saved. In most cases, what I said was that if I didn’t use a piece of software after the trial expired, that was a good forcing function to figure out if it was something I find value in or not. And in most cases, the answer is going to be “I don’t need to buy this.”
I’m not at all focused on what people oughta pay for so I don’t know where you are misreading this.
I also said that for business and SaaS options like the OP article is about, things are completely different (your Copilot example). The comment I replied to was about consumer software trials and how they don’t think time limits make sense. I happen to disagree.
You can die from exposure.
Let's say, you sell your software as a single-version perpetual license. You sell it for 150$. A typical user uses it 8 hours a month. After a year, that's 96 hours. So they spend less than 2$ per hour (I'm rounding in the seller's favor.) So using it for 5 minutes, 1/12h, is less than 25 cents. (Again rounding up in the seller's favor.)
Is this about not giving away 25 cents?
This is where SaaS wins over, but even there, the overhead, both for sellers and users, of managing payment for people who want to do one-shot work is never going to be worth it.
Why? They couldn’t market the obfuscator, so they were winding it down. People didn’t want a license for something they used for ten minutes four times a year.
(We did later hire an intern to fix bugs in the obfuscator. The app was constrained to a specific JAR size, and those gave us enough headroom for about another dozen features. And I made a change late in the project that got me space for two more, via suffix sorting the constant pool instead of prefix sorting it).
I wouldn't be quick to judge either way.
That is very strange.
> https://tailscale.com/pricing
I have genuinely deployed tailscale in paying locations on basis of my really positive experience on the "Personal" plan, which is effectively almost the whole product for up to three users/100 devices, for free.
I don't think there is a universally right answer for all products/services on this question though.
That's why they want that model. Complaints like the GP's are just a thin veil over being too cheap to pay for the software they use. You can see it in the other responses to your comment.
Flip that. I find most people do the second thing first. If what I'm doing in the software takes 5 minutes, chances are I can find something else out there that will do the same thing for free as well. Sometimes the same software lets you trial it again because it's been so long. And so all the additional features you'd review them for amount to nothing when I'm just using them to remove the background in my picture.
But here is the bigger issue.
> it’s a good way for me to evaluate if it makes sense for me to buy a license or not
It's a horrible way for me to evaluate licensing. Why? Because, I probably want to get on with whatever task should only take 5 minutes and do something else. I don't want to spend time evaluating licensing and determine the cost benefits analysis of this software purchase (which more and more tends toward a monthly/yearly fee).
I want to do the 5 minute thing and move on, and I will spend more time searching for another free solution than pay.
You want to get me to pay you? Make that 5 minutes showcase the things I did't know I needed.
And yes, if you have the only thing that can do the thing I'm looking to do, sure. But, a monopoly isn't exactly what we are talking about here.
> The idea that, as a consumer, I'm going to sit down and fully evaluate a piece of software over the course of 7/14/30 consecutive days to then make a purchasing decision is bizarre.
Maybe it’s my past life as a software reviewer (and current life as someone frequently asked about my assessment/opinion on apps), but for consumer software (SaaS, especially for business like what OP article is about, I think is different), I really don’t think this is that bizarre.
To me, a trial is really instructive because if I’m finding myself opening or using an app frequently during the trial, that’s a good indicator I’ll get value out of the application. Similarly, if I did a trial in January for one task, then came back to do that same task again in May and the trial is expired, it’s a good way for me to evaluate if it makes sense for me to buy a license or not. There are some programs I use two or three times a year that I purchase because it is useful enough for that one task, but there are others that I use infrequently enough to try to seek out other options. A time-based trial, for me, is a good forcing function to determine if I’m actually going to use the program.