This. The software would get abandoned once they've cashed in on the bulk of people buying it. They can trickle in more sales over time, but that's not going to amount to nearly as much as the initial payload, and therefore the motivation to continue developing dwindles.
You can release new versions though. This is what a large chunk of the software industry has done up until recently. Photoshop has gone through a lot of version numbers through the years.
Although it does sort of put pressure on the developers to actually refine their product and continue to deliver tangible improvements. Nobody is going to pay for a UI that's been re-arranged a bit.
Except a "new version" is arbitrary, and the decision to do so was made for financial reasons and not technical. Every new version of Photoshop had some percentage of people complaining "why can't this update just be a patch?".
Yeah sure, although upgrading was optional. My point is the incentive is on the developer to make it worth while to pay for an upgrade, they can't just phone it in.
There's even more pressure on a subscription service to deliver value, since you can cancel and the business makes less than selling MSRP (and this usually means losing money on the customer after customer acquisition costs).
I can't think of a single subscription service I use that doesn't continue to deliver new updates and value on a regular basis, and other than Adobe's bullshit "annual masquerading as monthly" drama I haven't come across something I wished was still packaged.
Nope. The one-off ceiling is basically non-existent for practical purposes. Do I pay you a theoretical infinite amount of money to use your product for a small percentage of my income, or do I pay you a small part of my wealth for your product?
With a subscription model, there’s a point where the consumer has paid you “too much” and they will either cancel or find another solution. This is also known as churn. If your avg customer pays you for 8 months, this is a pretty good indicator of how much customers are willing to pay, but you can likely charge more for a one-off cost, sometimes 2-5x more.
Since you are likely combatting churn by finding new customers, switching to a one-off model means you can just find new customers and not worry about churn since it doesn’t exist.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes subscription models make a lot of sense. Most of the time they don’t unless you’re selling something that has an infinite cost anyway (like immediate access to “all” movies ever made like Netflix) and would be an infinite cost for the consumer to do it in some other way. But if I can pay a contractor to build your app for less than infinite money, then it shouldn’t cost an infinite amount to use your product.
It's actually a fair question. The online service still has hosting and bandwidth to pay for at a minimum. Paying them once does not mean that they will be able to pay for hosting and bandwidth for the next twenty years that I expect to use the product.
For scale, I've been using VIM for almost thirty years. Twenty years is not an exaggerated number.
One $10 - $50 sale per month won't pay for hosting and bandwidth. Not to mention developers' salaries, rent, insurance, electricity, equipment, and a few pence into my childrens' funds.
Surprisingly, people figured this out a long time ago. When you create something substantially different from what the customer originally paid for, you sell it as something different.
Softwares can't sell like hardwares. When you buy a toaster for example, after the warranty expires you pay for every time you take it out for repairing. With softwares customers expect a life time of warranty, bug fixes and improvements.
The customer pays when a feature they actually care about breaks, and they upgrade.
Sell it as is, or with a very short one year support window. Exactly like all sorts of companies used to profitably do until they realized they could extract more value for the same work with a subscription.
Not sure why you're downvoted, but this is exactly what we saw early on with the app store. People paid 99c for an app, and then expected it to work with every new version of the OS and incorporate new OS features forevermore.
The stores also lack (and still do) an easy way to sell new versions, so here we are. Subscriptions.
I will gladly pay for the new version, when they amount to something I care about. Most of them isn't worth it - I would rather accept some minor bugs.
Jetbrains has very good model in that regard. Hope they will not ruin it (new pricing for self hosted Spaces is bit concerning).
The problem with software is that even though the program itself doesn't change, the OS and hardware that it runs on often changes and customers expect to be able to use the same app on new hardware too. This requires a continuous maintenance work from the developer side. So, it's often not only "minor bugs" but major bugs introduced by hardware or API changes.
I am aware and I have zero issues with that. Honestly until app is connected to some evolving API, probably it will work for many years before OS upgrade makes it non-functional. Lots of software I used 20 years ago still runs ok.
It would be nice, Intellij does something similar where you pay for one year of updates. If you stop paying it still works.
But in general if it's an evolving product, I don't think you can avoid a rolling payment.
Usually, no. If the updates are worth it, I'd purchase the next version. I used Adobe Photoshop 5 for _years_. I wouldn't have paid for the CS version.
/s