[netsharc]

Grandfather talks about classical Windows software. On the Play Store this app says "Contains ads - In-app purchases".

Ah, as a cheap bastard, I hate how software was pay once back then, and for this one I'm just going to ask you what's the monthly subscription price?

[mpascale00]

This comes up in so many threads here... How can we change the culture of subscriptions back to pay once???

[sgarland]

Given how profitable it is, I doubt it’ll be changed.

That said, I very much like Codeweavers’ approach [0], which IMO is the modern equivalent to purchasing software on a physical medium: you buy it, you can re-download it as many times as you’d like, install it on as many machines as you’d like (single-user usage only), and you get 1 year of updates and support. After that, you can still keep using it indefinitely, but you don’t get updates or paid support. You get a discount if you renew before expiry. They also have a lifetime option which, so far, they’ve not indicated they’re going to change.

I have no affiliation with them, I just think it’s a good product, and a good licensing / sales model.

[0]: https://www.codeweavers.com/store

[mpascale00]

Profitable for sure, but I'm often half surprised by the lack of competition against subscription-based everything these days.

[necovek]

It's not really about the culture anymore. Software that requires maintenance — and most does — has a continuous development cost. As such, subscription is the most natural way to cover it.

On the other hand, we have software which has low maintenance cost, but sold for peanuts ($0-$10) in small quantities, so authors try to introduce alternative revenue streams.

As in, it's fair to pay continuously (subscription) for continuous work (maintenance), so I don't expect that to go away. Ads, though, yuck...

[sneak]

Software sold today does not require maintenance. Software to work in the future requires maintenance. I am not buying future software. I am buying today software.

Increasingly I am not buying software at all.

[perching_aix]

This is a good argument in favor of subscriptions not being mandatory, but not in favor of the abolishment of subscriptions overall, which is what they were talking about.

[3036e4]

That is the old way. You bought some application and it came with upgrades until next major version release or similar. Then when that release came out you could decide to pay again or just keep using the old (now unsupported) version you already paid for.

That solved all the issues with paying for maintenance, but sadly someone must have figured out a mandatory subscription was a better way to make more money.

[johannes1234321]

It's not only a way to make more money, but it also matches better to modern development approaches.

Major versions come from a time where one had to produce physical media. Thus one could do a major release only every few years. Back then features had to be grouped together in a big bang release.

Nowadays one can ship features as they are being developed, with many small features changes all the time.

[sgarland]

On the contrary, software today is so absurdly buggy that it often does require maintenance to work.

[charcircuit]

Even ignoring security, bug fixes, new features, etc it is also not fair that you can get value from the app every month, but the developer doesn't get to capture a reward for any of this value. Having people pay monthly for value they get monthly seems reasonable.

[BenjiWiebe]

Does that mean you'd be in favor of subscriptions for owning a vehicle, rather than paying outright? Or a house?

The manufacturer/builder gets paid once, and you get value monthly.

[charcircuit]

Leasing cars and renting houses is already a common practice. So yes I believe these make sense to exist.

The existence of purchasing cars and houses with no ongoing cost to the builder is due to competition.

[mpascale00]

I disagree. You can read a book or listen to a record, watch a dvd, unlimited times, having fairly paid upfront a price for the item. A computer is general purpose and lets you check your email every day, hell even lets you create new value in the form of new software, without the manufacturer receiving a royalty.

The idea of capturing reward post-receipt is feudalistic.

[charcircuit]

The existence of products in competitive markets is not a counter example to what my point was. I recommend looking at the terms bottom up pricing and top down pricing. The former is about creating a price based off of how much it costs to do business and then adding a profit margin. The latter is creating price in line with how much value it offers customers. The existence of products using bottom up pricing doesn't mean top down pricing does not exist.

[necovek]

That's not how markets work (and I disagree that it would be reasonable).

Price is usually established based on how much something cost to make (materials, effort, profit), combined with market conditions (abundance/shortage of products, surplus cash/tough economy...).

If you want to continuously extract profit from consistent use of a hammer or vacuum cleaner, somebody else will trivially make a competing product at a lower price with no subscription.

[charcircuit]

>somebody else will trivially make a competing product at a lower price with no subscription.

And software like photoshop is not trivial to copy so it can survive being priced based off of value provided. There exists competitors that don't have a subscription, but they are not good enough to kill it.

[GuB-42]

I don't know about this app but many of the "Contains ads - In-app purchases" apps offer to remove the ads for a one-time payment.

[nsksl]

Find a pirate version if possible…