[samatman]

I don't think this is true in the slightest.

I happily plunk down for a one-time purchase of software, because it's a simple question: is this worth $n bucks?

A lot of it just sits there for months on end, and then I have the task which I bought it for again, and I use it.

But a subscription? Now I have to ask if it's worth $n bucks a month on an ongoing basis. It's a whole different question, and I feel like if I'm not going to use it for a few months, I'm just bleeding money I'd rather keep in my wallet.

I'm especially wary of products which want $n a month to lock my creative output up in a proprietary format, such that I can only retain access to it if I keep shelling out. That... sucks, and it baffles me why it's so popular.

When I see a subscription I always ask: what's five years of this going to cost me? Why five? I dunno, that's just the multiple that makes sense to me.

Very few subscriptions on offer make sense on that basis. I'd have dropped Netflix a year or two ago, but my Mom likes it. I keep almost dropping Apple Arcade, a piddly five bucks a month, but there's this one game I want to finish and never get around to it... and there it is: a lot of subscriptions are sticky, in a bad way. As far as I know, there's no way for me to pay full price for that one game, and keep my save point, and ditch the rest of the subscription.

Now if I'm making money with it, that's a whole different ballgame. Sure, sign me up. But if I'm not? Likely as not, it's gonna be a pass.

[judge2020]

> and it baffles me why it's so popular.

The Adobe situation is simply because it's such a good product suite. You can transition away but the pain points of using other software can be high enough to warrant paying for the software[0]. As for why the majority of users and businesses still pay for creative cloud, it's probably because they do see the value of receiving updates and bugfixes effectively forever.

0: https://youtu.be/L9VysWRHPdI

[samatman]

Adobe wasn't what I had in mind.

That's a moneymaker, for one thing. For another, they're the industry standard, and yeah the formats are proprietary but if you take a couple years break and start paying again, your files are going to open.

I was thinking more of products like Roam Research. Not to pick on them in particular, I know a lot of people like it, but it's just a non-starter for me.

The Moleskin iPad app is the one I'd most like to use, if they came up with a different business plan for it.

[mantap]

One time fees make software development into something resembling a pyramid scheme. Software development costs are recurring, if you hire someone they get paid every month not just once. So the developers must continually find new customers in order to support the old ones. At the point when they can no longer do so, the scheme collapses and everybody loses out.

[samatman]

I understand that, but we had a solution to this which worked fine: upgrades.

A number of trends have made this unpopular, and yeah, Apple deserves a big chunk of the blame, but by no means all of it.

But this has been explored fairly well elsewhere, so I'll refrain except to say: I do hope the steps are taken to reverse this unfortunate trend, because shoehorning subscriptions in where it's a bad fit is no kind of solution.