[4ad]

I will never use a subscription app if the computation happens in the client. E.g. Photoshop, Mathematica, games, etc. Not even if the price is low. Note that I will happily pay thousands of dollars in this programs as long as they are not subscription based.

I might use a subscription based app if it's just a frontend for something that happens server side, but even with that the bar is very high. It needs to fundamentally require server side computation that can't be done on the client for whatever reason. For example, the cloud Mathematica thing does not pass the bar.

So far no application has passed the bar.

Unrelated, but another turnoff are apps that require .pkg installers. Drag and drop should be enough for anything except perhaps kernel drivers, and I don't want to install 3rd party kernel drivers anyway. E.g. VMware should use the hypervisor framework rathet than its own kernel drivers.

[paultopia]

This. I will pay a subscription for the actual ongoing use of someone else's resources, i.e., their computing capacity, their storage space. I'm not about to pay a subscription for code sitting on my machine. And I'm especially not about to pay a subscription for something I already paid for when it was a one-time payment.

[presspot]

So, if you absolutely need the functionality in a subscription app with local processing, what do you do?

And, if you're willing to pay ' thousands of dollars' for the right to use a local app, why would you not 'rent' the license for tens of dollars?

[4ad]

> So, if you absolutely need the functionality in a subscription app with local processing, what do you do?

I don't use it. I don't absolutely need any particular software.