[throwpoaster]

There is a cost-revenue pairing issue with traditional software business models: if someone pays upfront, how do you pay to deliver bug fixes? In games that offer any kind of multi it's worse because you have continued server costs as well.

One could say, for example, "ship bug free" or perhaps more reasonably, "include the net present value of future costs". Both of those are essentially infeasible.

Subscription model software one-shots the cost-revenue pairing issue.

[badgersnake]

Support contract if you want updates, or limited free support for critical bugs. If you want the next major with more feature you pay again.

[dceddia]

Sketch, CleanShot, and Jetbrains come to mind as software that uses this model. It seems the most fair to me: pay once, get forever usage of the software, and one year of free updates. After that, additional years of updates are often a discounted rate.

An issue I ran into when I tried this with my software is that it’s not a very common model so people didn’t really get it. They’d call it a subscription, or they’d call it lifetime, and some got very angry when I mentioned anything about renewing for updates.

It’s a hard thing to describe succinctly, and it’s even harder to ensure that description survives the game of telephone as they tell their friends/followers.

[Nevermark]

> An issue I ran into when I tried this with my software is that it’s not a very common model so people didn’t really get it.

Instead of a years updates, which is a bit amorphous in terms of actual value delivered over the time frame, an alternate is you buy a major version, get all updates to that for free, for as long as it is updated in any way, including bug fixes.

Then pay for the next major version, only if you want to (with a discount for owners of the previous one).

And put the major version number into the name of the software, i.e. "Digibrain 1", "Digibrain 2", ...

Then continue to sell version X-1 at a discount, after X is released, to get more sales from the lower end of the market. And so owners of X-1 can still feel the love and less "out of date". Or even all previous versions at log drops in price. And bug fix old versions indefinitely, which is very purchaser friendly.

Another choice would be selling new updates for a noticeably higher price initially, signaling it as "premium", not "we want more of your money", then bringing the price down before the next update.

Might not connect with everyone, but it makes the value and optionality of purchasing an update more apparent.

Obviously, updates better be worth it.

[immibis]

This provides an incentive to make every version major.

[em-bee]

if you want to sell it, it should be. if it isn't worth a major version increment then it is probably also not worth charging for it as an upgrade.

[immibis]

You want to sell every upgrade, even the minor upgrades. Therefore the minor upgrades are actually major upgrades.

Never trust any contract of the form "X is free unless we say it's not"

[john01dav]

An easy way to solve this, at least long term and collectively, is to have a new term that refers to this model. I'd call it "the JetBrains model".

[dceddia]

In my case there's not really one product I can expect everyone to know about, but I think this works well when there's an existing big product in the category to point to as an example.

[Perepiska]

Actually I pay for JetBrains product and report bugs to support. When subscription ends I have right to use version with bugs. It looks unfair to me.

[imoverclocked]

Welcome back to the 90s; I miss that model of software, as do a lot of people. When you buy something, you still have that something. It may become obsolete in time but as long as you have the hardware/OS that can run it, you still have access to it.

I worked in a daycare center when I was in my teens. I saw a kid (doing a kid thing) with a bag of skittles. He was giving it out to his friends but licking each skittle as he handed them out. I did put a stop to it but I had to stop chuckling to myself at the faces everyone made when getting a pre-licked skittle first. Fast forward a few decades and software subscriptions remind me of that moment, every single time.