[antaviana]

IMHO, if you are looking for long-term business, you need to go the subscription-only route. Probably $19/year.

Don't offer permanent licenses, it will add complexity to purchase and support. You do not want a users with a product of yours with a vulnerability they are not entitled to update.

A subscription-only model will allow you to focus on only the last build which everyone will be entitled to download, greatly simplifying your support.

You will be able to add features at your pace and will avoid the bloating that results when you compete with yourself as is the case with a permanent license model and (increasingly stupid) upgrades.

You will focus on quality not on corner case features to justify upgrades or interface revamps for the sake of it, confusing your existing user base. If you keep your quality high and the product is stable and reliable, your users will stick.

We have been selling our desktop product (in our case B2B) as subscription-only for 8 years and we couldn't be happier about the decision.

[bdcravens]

I agree with the idea of a subscription model, but $19/year is way too low.

[njhaveri]

Thanks for the feedback here, I really appreciate it! You make many solid points here, and some are totally new points I had not considered before.

[filoleg]

I think they can do a pricing model similar to what Sketch uses, but given it is an email client, I am not entirely sure of that myself (though still worth exploring).

For those unfamiliar, with Sketch, you basically have a yearly subscription and you continue receiving regular updates while you are subbed. Once your subscription expires, you get to keep the version you paid for at the beginning of your subscription period, but you stop receiving future updates (aside from security ones and such, ofc).

With Sketch it makes sense, because each year they add a cumulative of lots of new features and such, so people are motivated to renew the sub every year to get those features. With an email client, however, there isn't much in terms of "new features coming every year with updates" that people would be excited to pay the sub for on regular.

However, I still think it is worth exploring and considering as a viable possible option. With that model of "yearly sub, but you get to keep the old version once the sub expires", you allow people (who don't wanna deal with subs and just wanna use the barebones product to pay for once and forget) to experience your product and give you money. And powerusers and those who just want to support the project would be happy to pay the annual sub on regular and receive new features as they come. With that in mind, I would think a yearly $50-60 sub is pretty reasonable, but I am not an expert on pricing things like that, so take it with a grain of salt.

[dfinninger]

This is very similar to Intellij's perpetual fallback license. When you unsub, you are frozen on that point release.

I spent a while with a professional version until the community edition had some features that convinced me to move over.