[rognjen]

While admirable, a one time payment for a service you host is fair neither to you (what if I use it for 10 years) nor me (what if you shutdown tomorrow).

On the other hand, a one time fee for analytics I could deploy on my server a) makes financial sense for you and b) is an intriguing value proposition for me.

Have a look at https://once.com/

[weird-eye-issue]

The irony of ONCE is that the company behind it makes 8 figures annually on recurring revenue. They can afford to launch products with unsustainable business models just to get some PR

[paxys]

They didn't launch anything, just repackaged a couple of legacy products that nobody was paying for with a flashy marketing campaign.

[kristiandupont]

I don't think ONCE is a loss leading marketing device for them. That would also seem like a pretty poor strategy, as those users are pretty unlikely to convert.

[XCSme]

I am trying this with https://uxwizz.com but it's not easy.

I do like this model, but there are some challenges:

* With one-time the initial payment is higher ($299 one-time vs $29/mo), many people don't think too much before paying $29, but think a lot more before paying $299.

* Only paying once still doesn't cover the support expenses or future development. In my case, I went with pay-once use forever, but with paid updates after the first year. Also, the way I do the updates payment is different (you can pay any time to get 3, 12 or 24 more months of support/updates). With this model, the customer only pays what they want, and me as a developer, I'm incentivized to keep releasing updates.

* Self-hosting is also more niche than a service, especially if your product is not aimed directly at technical people. With my product, a lot of marketers could use it, but many of them don't even know what self-hosting is. That being said, for a small business, the available market of people who know how to self-host is large enough.

I do hope more companies/products switch to this self-hosted model, it's better for privacy, ownership, avoiding data centralization, etc.

[udev4096]

Nothing more than a marketing tactic. Why not offer their main products for "once"?

[Avfrosta]

That's a beautiful site and a nice way to put it. But yes, you're right. While my server costs are low anough that just one user could cover months, it's still not sustainable. My plans is to move onto a "pay for what you use system" in the future.

But I have thought about making it self-hosted too. But there already is so many great products for that out there.

I wish there was a perfect way to do this. I despise subscriptions, I dislike pay as you go becasue it's too complicated, and finally, a one-time fee dosent really work when sold as a service as you said. But I guess these are the options for people not willing to self-host.

If you got any interesting reads on this topic please send em my way.

[tugu77]

Have you considered open sourcing?

[solardev]

> Have a look at https://once.com/

...from the company behind Basecamp and Hey.com, both subscriptions.

[phartenfeller]

...and campfire, a one time fee slack alternative. Are people allowed to change their views?

[solardev]

It just doesn't have much weight when the overwhelming bulk of their revenue comes from subscription services. It's cool that they're experimenting with this, I guess, but it doesn't exactly instill faith that the pricing model is sustainable. It's like how Google can afford to offer a bunch of free services because of the bazillions of ad dollars subsidizing everything.

[weird-eye-issue]

Does anybody use it? There was a lot of hype on Twitter when it first came out and I haven't heard a single thing since then. Who wants to install that on a VPS and be responsible when it goes down when they could just use a Discord server or Slack?

[phartenfeller]

This definitely depends on the use-case. But not having to rely on a foreign service and owning your data is huge for many people. Additionally slack is super expensive for a paid tenant that does not delete your chat history. And some day in the future Discord will surely enshittify their free options too.