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.
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.
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.
I think we know how that ends.
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.
Personally, I’ve decide if I can’t buy something and just have it I will do without. So be it.
The idea may be venerable, but I don’t quite understand 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
:-)
I am a developer, but more importantly I run my own business. I honestly have no idea how I could run a sustainable business on one-time purchases :-)
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.
It seems to work quite well for both my customers and my products.
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.
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?