It's an economic model that is certainly not for everybody, nor for everything, but for dev tools that help me earn money, I can't see the problem.
And if I stop paying for it tomorrow, and don't have access to it anymore, you know what? My site will still be online.
> It's an economic model that is certainly not for everybody,
Not calling you out directly OP (in fact, I quite like your project), but the subscription model is pretty badly thought out most of the time IMO. Especially in a commercial setting. You really should not have to pay a company a monthly fee to operate cameras you bought, on your property. These trojan horse subscriptions are then normally paired with other anti-people abuses, e.g. not allowing the user to use basic functionalities without the subscription.
> My site will still be online.
Just curious: what would happen if your website went offline? If your application is phoning home to verify a license, and the website comes back with an unexpected / no response (maybe you let the hosting run out), would the software still be usable? I think there should be more provisions against this sort of thing in subscription-payed applications.
I'm not affiliated with the project; just discovered it by chance this morning and found it deserved to be better known.
So, when I said 'My site will still be online", I meant as a web developper using Polypane, when and if I decide to stop paying the subscription, this will have no impact on the web site I've developped with it.
Subscriptions might be a problem when you risk loosing access to your data (looking at you Adobe), but in this particular case I couldn't see the problem.
Most of them? If you stop paying for Creative Clouds, your Lightroom database is of no use anymore; you'll probably be able to open photoshop/illustrator files with other apps, but maybe not with all their subtleties.
On the other hand, non-subscription based software was only good as long as they were maintained for your current OS… So I don't care much if my software is subscription based or not, but I care a lot about them saving my data using open standards.
Maybe a weird but honest question: How is/was software even able to finance itself without subscriptions? People expect updates and support which are continuous expenses.
One alternative, I guess, are full-price major revisions at semi-regular intervals. But won't that result in many people never getting an upgrade because they feel it's not worth it?
As a whole, subscription-based models are pretty bad for society. Companies have figured out subscriptions are so much better because A) they're not paid all at once, making the device attractive, and B) you can constantly drip dry money out of the customer's bank account. It's a great business model for businesses, though.