[mft_]

Not sure to what extent this applies to you?

To my mind, paying for an ongoing service (e.g. translation, or video streaming, or Strava, or whatever) is a reasonable use case for a subscription – if that’s something that suits your end user. (it could also be paid for by individual small payments – or tokens – as suggested elsewhere.)

I think the frustration is predominately in companies shifting payment for a piece of software from a single payment to a subscription, which over the previous typical lifespan of a single software purchase then costs significantly more. Sure, they bolt on superfluous ‘cloud solutions’, but fundamentally it just feels like an MBA somewhere figured out that they can make more money with a repeating subscription than a single one-off payment – and now they’ve all jumped into it.

Of course, it also has the benefit of protecting better against piracy – though I suspect this isn’t the primary driver for the change.

[TrueGeek]

Many end users do not understand the difference between "standalone piece of software" and something that has an ongoing cost for the developer.