[bluGill]

Missing: what is the customer break even for unlimited.

If I buy a word processor for $.01/word, I can buy one for $100 - then I only need 10000 words to break even. You can play with different pricing schemes, but you need to ensure that enough people will find value in your scheme to pay you, because there is always the option of someone else's unlimited plan. Even if all your competitors are also on some sort of usage pricing, I can hire a bunch of developers to write me a custom an unlimited version, and maintain it - at some usage this is worth it.

Of course not everything is so easy. My company pays AWS because it is cheaper to do that than to buy and upgrade all the servers we need. Our usage has busy months where we use 10x as much as the slow months, if we had consistent usage it might be cheaper to have our own servers, but we don't pay AWS for the non-peak months even though they have the servers. (I don't know how AWS handles this, that is their problem not ours)

[ghaff]

That's the general issue with subscriptions too. I'm fine with paying Adobe a subscription for a program that I use on a regular basis. I'm not fine with paying Adobe a subscription for a program that I might pull out to do something with once or twice a year.

[thebean11]

Wouldn't that be an issue with a $500 photoshop license too? You'd only get to use it a handful of times before the software stops being compatible with your OS (probably).

Subscription seems better because you can just subscribe multiple times for shorter periods.

[ghaff]

Certainly. Although, in my experience, you can usually keep older software running for quite a while. Maybe you even use a VM.

[freeone3000]

The compatibility with my OS is my problem, not Adobe's. At a certain point I'll need to buy another copy, but Creative Suite 2 runs just fine on Windows 10 ("the last version of Windows"), so that date is likely far in the future.

[sudhirj]

Yeah, this doesn't take into account the fact that you can activate you subscription only on the months that you actually use it. This is super-easy on iOS, buy YMMV on other platforms and payment methods.

[foobiekr]

I don’t want the mental overhead of this. Not to mention the dark patterns for cancellation that are prominent outside the iOS subscription ecosystem.

[thebean11]

Yeah that's definitely an issue. I'm not sure how Adobe's subscription system works, I doubt it's too bad though.

[ghaff]

I got a trial subscription to Adobe Acrobat to do some PDF optimization I needed done. After I did the task just went to manage subscriptions and canceled it. Was very straightforward.