[exodust]

You're implying "SaaS" means subscription only, and the opposite of SaaS is "pay once". But there's various pricing models available. Usage-based pricing for example. Feature-based, or a combo of different ways to structure the price. Maintenance plans is another way, where to get the latest version requires payment but otherwise it keeps working.

Pay once still works. You could have increased the price to $500 or something. It would then take 3+ years of subscription pricing to equal one pay-once amount. Many users would opt for subscription anyway in that case.

> noisy predictions from some of our customer base

When customers make noises about the pricing, you have the choice to stand your ground and fight the war on pricing. Or you could meet them half way. But you stuck to your guns, and so did I when I jumped ship back when the newly released Construct 3 was indeed Chrome only at the time. I never made noises on the forums about it because I was fairly new to Construct 2. I just left quietly.

[TomGullen]

Maintenance plans is something we considered, but though it wouldn't work well for us. This is because it's infinitely more difficult to maintain software when you have your customer base split into different versions, complete abandonment of lower version customers is a no go when bugs are discovered or a feature breaks due to technology change. This significantly impacts the complexity of our product deployment and maintenance. There's also other complexities around documentation, tutorials etc etc, the list goes on.

It could also reflect badly on us if customers on older versions are demoing the product to other potential users when they are many release cycles behind the latest version. There's a myriad of benefits of just having all customers on the same version. To go down the maintenance plan route for us would be a mistake.

Generally propositions from customers for different or more exotic pricing methods over what we've gone with tend to involve a lot more complexity to ultimately allow people to buy it for less. The model we've got is working well, and we don't see any advantage to changing it right now.

> I never made noises on the forums about it because I was fairly new to Construct 2. I just left quietly.

Which is fine, but we're a much more successful company than we ever were with Construct 2, largely because of the direction we went with pricing. We accept it's not for everyone. I think looking back over our history we've gone from Open Source to Pay Once to SaaS. When you go through these changes you're going to lose customers who were attracted to your original payment model, this is just a reality we have to accept.