[chunkyguy]

And who pays for the maintenance and bug fixes?

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.

[horsawlarway]

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.

Rent-seeking in the most literal form...

[matwood]

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.

[dzikimarian]

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).

[XCSme]

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.

[dzikimarian]

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.