Having to eat food is a lifetime subscription. I guess the point is you would pay for the app once, but visit the restaurant multiple times. I think something like a small initial fee plus donations to keep it running would be good for such an app as this.

Bad analogy. You keep paying the restaurant for every meal, whereas you would pay only once for the app.

The argument I was responding to was “The developer has ongoing costs therefore the user can’t expect not to have ongoing costs.”

I might eat at a restaurant only once.

You'd rather pay every time you use it?

If the price was reasonable (less than ten cents in this case), absolutely.

I don't think you can charge so little. You'd probably have to buy some amount of runs in bulk.

Another alternative would be you buy access for a block of time, but not an auto renewing subscription. Mullvad VPN works like this, I have to go into the app and re-up if I want to keep using it every month.

However I think this type of app should be a one time purchase anyway. Looks to me like it could work without any server / hosted infrastructure.

This is actually a great idea. Lots of subscriptions just pay for a thing to be available. Netflix will tell you "sleeping giants" who never watch are ok, because the content was made available, but I think that's BS. I'd love to see a system where you're only billed on the months that you use it. Or even just charge me a dollar per use with a monthly cap of ten after which the rest of the month is free.

A better analogy is the usual "car" analogy: I bought my car in cash as a one time purchase. Even though Toyota needs to maintain their network of dealerships and service centers, finance their factories' operations, and pay their employees, I still don't have to pay a monthly subscription for the car (yet). If I drive it, I pay to put gasoline in it and maintain it every so often, and that's it. If I don't drive it, it sits in my garage and I don't have to pay monthly for it.

This idea that customers should need to pay for all of a business's business costs and overhead as the overhead happens is a new one, and an annoying one.

But you maintain your car don't you ? If you need to fix the car, you're generally on the hook for that (besides manufacturing defects etc). Then there are normal maintenance costs you're always on the hook for.

Generally anything physical you own, you're on the hook for maintaining. But software is different isn't it ? If you pay a lifetime fee for an app, are you expected to maintain it ?

I bet that if manufacturers were also on the hook for maintaining cars they'd sold indefinitely, we'd be on subscription fees there too.

Obviously, some apps have negligible maintenance so i'm not saying a subscription model is the best model for all cases, just that i don't think the analogy with cars fits exactly.