[grincho]

In software, at least, I've argued that subscription pricing is innately deceptive and, long term, deleterious to the quality of the product. It's a market distortion born of the App Store model, where it's difficult to charge for updates. And that, in turn, is an artificial constraint imposed by OS vendors who have an incentive to keep people on the latest OS (without breaking their apps). There's a full-length rant at https://www.grinchcentral.com/an-open-letter-to-subscription....

[burlesona]

I respectfully disagree, at least that you can't generalize this to all software. For many products, incentives are better aligned for both the customer and the business if usage is based on an ongoing subscription. There are plenty of people who have spelled this out, but the recent switch of Ulysses (word processor) to subscription was one of the nicest explanations I've seen [1]. Sketch App also explained this when they made the switch, though perhaps not as eloquently [2].

[1]: https://medium.com/building-ulysses/why-were-switching-ulyss...

[2]: https://blog.sketchapp.com/versioning-licensing-and-sketch-4...