[zombiephysicist]

I have no problem paying for software. The problem is most software is total crap these days. And I refuse to pay subscriptions. There are great examples of stuff I'm HAPPY to pay for. iStat menus, KeyboardMaestro (and I used to love 1password before they went subscription).

[ZephyrBlu]

Don't understand the hate for subscriptions. Some companies moved to subscriptions purely for a money grab, but for a lot of companies a subscription model makes more sense and a lot of them are really good value.

1password for example is only $3 USD a month. I don't understand why you would stop loving 1password because of a $3 subscription.

[jobigoud]

You want to build a stable system. Set it up so that the lower level pieces work and will continue working if untouched so you don't have to think about them and instead focus on the higher level stuff.

A software that is subscription based means your computer system seen as a whole will stop working at some point in the future if you don't remember to take a specific action (like updating the payment method or some such). It means uncertainty, it basically means you can only guarantee your system will work as-is for the next month. The more software of this kind you have, the more complex your system becomes to maintain in a given state and it burdens your mind.

I think it's fine for software you only intend to use for a few weeks/months at a time, or for software where you always want to be on the bleeding edge of tech, but for things as low level as a password manager? You want something really stable. It should also not update itself. So if we are not interested in updates what's the point of paying monthly?

[cassianoleal]

My main gripe with 1Password is that it used to be a great product. It worked well, was relatively fast and stayed out of the way.

All those things have gone in later versions though.

Now it's very laggy and keeps getting in the way of my browsing, and I have lost passwords for new websites just because the modal to create the entry would "freeze" although not completely - I could still press the cancel button which would then ... cancel the creation, but also delete the temporary password item.

This modal stops you from using anything else on the browser as well, so there's no way out of it.

[brutusborn]

Why do you refuse subscriptions? I always thought they made more sense, especially for software that needs a lot of maintenance.

[rollcat]

It should be up to the company/developer to choose their business model, and it should be up to the market to accept or reject it.

Subscriptions do have some advantages for the customer: they often come with a free trial, and if you later on decide that they're not worth the value, you can (hopefully, easily) cancel; whereas getting a refund for a one-off big purchase might be more tricky, or even impossible; your resale ability might also be limited. The subscription model also helps align incentives: the developer must continue providing good value, or risk losing subscribers.

But on the other hand: people want to own things they pay for.

[Gordonjcp]

Counterpoint - DaVinci Resolve is a professional high-end video editing, compositing, and colour grading package. The free-as-in-beer version omits some specialised tools (like 3D camera tracking and support for timelines larger than 4k resolution), which are present in the full-fat paid-for Studio version.

It costs about 200 quid, or you get a licence for it free with basically any of their cameras or edit controllers.

Once you've paid for it, you own that copy, and so far in any of their releases your key will work with all the updates. Version 18 is about to drop, and still even a key for 14 or 15 will work just fine.

I get that they make their money from selling hardware and Adobe don't, but less than a year of licence fees for Premiere would pay for a copy of Resolve. If you waited 18 months you'd be able to afford the Speed Editor package and then you'd get a cute wee edit controller with a proper jog/shuttle wheel and proper clicky buttons with your licence.

The 27 quid a month for a Premiere licence would be one of my larger monthly outgoings.

[blinzy]

If that company, the one that develops DaVinci Resolve, only produced software, would that model of £200 fixed one-time payment be sufficient to be financially viable?

Let's say the company's headcount to develop/maintain such software, plus a bunch of other required roles such as marketing, sales, hr, etc., is around 25 people averaging £80,000/year each (not that far off considering employees cost more than just their salary) to make it an even £2 million/year.

That means in order to not go bankrupt, i.e. break even, they need to sell 10,000 copies to new buyers every single year. Is that realistic? I don't think so, a company that tries that model will soon go in the red because we aren't even considering other costs that a company has, which aren't negligible. Even if you cut the estimate above in half, e.g., let's say they cost £40,000 each instead, that's still 5,000 new buyers of the software each year.

In contrast, a subscription model of £100/year requires them to have 20,000 ongoing subscriptions, which is substantially easier to achieve. I believe there's a reason that a lot of companies have shifted/are shifting to a subscription model, an alternative being monetisation models such as advertisement-supported programs.

[yakubin]

Other companies which sell (only) software based on one-time payment model:

- ACD Systems (ACDSee)

- Serif (Affinity)

- Freron Software (MailMate)

- Sublime HQ (Sublime Text)

I use them all. Wouldn't pay for a subscription. I don't want a service. I want a product.

I also pay for services, but for other purposes: mail (Fastmail), online bookmarking (Pinboard), music streaming (Spotify, mostly for discovery; after I discover something I like, I usually go and buy it to have it myself), VPN, VPS. If there existed a decent video streaming service, I'd probably pay for that as well, but there isn't any.

[blinzy]

I'm not saying it's impossible to sell software with one-time payment model, I'm saying it's noticeably harder. There's always going to be companies that make do with such business models, but what's the ratio of successful companies with one-time payment out of all companies that have tried that? How does that compare with companies that go for subscription model (or ad-supported model)?

And are there any behemoths (i.e., hugely profitable companies) that do one-time payment software? Because as far as I know Microsoft would have been one of the few or only such cases (and obviously it only applies to a subset of their products, many others are using other business models) and they are also moving towards a subscription model, e.g., for Office, which considering they probably have a legion of financial analysts, accountants, etc. I assume they have done their due diligence to figure out it's worth it.

[yakubin]

Adobe used to be such a behemoth. They didn't switch to subscriptions due to unprofitability. They just wanted more and more. Same with Microsoft. They're a behemoth switching to subscriptions now. But that's not because they're running low on money. And most games are still one-time payment today. So you can count Ubisoft, EA etc. Of course there are other sources of payment for them than just the nominal price of the game, but most gamers only pay for the game and ignore everything else.

Besides, I don't think I want a market dominated by behemoths. If popularity of one-time payment model would lead to a market dominated by <25 person companies with an odd behemoth here and there, then I'm in.

Also, most software companies today are startups which exist only thanks to investor money. It's hard to say what a customer-driven market would look like. Although maybe recession is going to clear this up.

[Gordonjcp]

As I said most of their money comes from cameras. £2M per year would be a couple of thousand cameras, which feels like a fairly easy number to hit.

[blinzy]

Yes, I know you said they do sell hardware and that's probably how they survive.

If you look at my comment I said "if they only produced software", because I wanted to use it as an example (just from your £200 figure) with back of the envelope estimates to show why many companies move to subscriptions, because if you have a niche product, having new customers in the thousands or tens of thousands every year is incredibly difficult compared to having a reliable set of recurring customers with subscriptions.