[jwr]

> you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you

There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions. You can't go to a local bakery and pay $24 for life to get fresh rolls every day.

Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.

[jbstack]

> there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions

This is clearly incorrect given that there are plenty of software developers who offer lifetime purchases. In fact there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of.

On a lower level, all that matters is the numbers. If your average customer stays subscribed for 24 months, then charging a lifetime fee equal to 24 months is equivalent to a subscription model. At that point it's irrelevant what's "sustainable" since 24 months is the max you can expect to charge on average anyway.

[feoren]

> there are plenty of software developers who offer lifetime purchases. In fact there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of.

There's a big difference between software you buy, run on your computer, and don't expect to be constantly updated, vs. an online service that you expect to stay up and serve you new content forever. In the latter case, if a customer drops off after 24 months, that lowers your costs. You can't reasonably charge a user for the number of months they could potentially remain subscribed.

[bluGill]

Software was always a subscription you bought version two then version three... It wasn't obviously or explicitly a subscription but it still was one.

[jbstack]

That isn't the same thing at all.

If I buy version 2 then it's mine and I can continue to use it for as long as I want, if I'm happy with the feature set. I can ignore version 3 or choose to buy it. If I buy it then I now own two products instead of one. Sometimes the older version might even be better (e.g. features I like have been removed or made worse).

With a subscription model I'm forced to pay again and again even if I'm perfectly happy with version 2.

[bluGill]

In theory you are correct but realistically you will upgrade.

[GrinningFool]

The difference is without subscription, I can be pretty sure the next major version will benefit me.

With subscription,the only thing certain is that the seller wants to do as little as possible to keep taking my money. This tends to result on product updates that benefit them.

[stavros]

Not only that, they will actively make the product worse for you because someone will give them more money than you to do it.

[Analemma_]

This kind of shoddy, surface-level "incentives alignment" analysis can just as easily be used to prove the opposite: with the "pay once, then pay for upgrades" model, sellers are incentivized to never actually fix all the bugs so that you are always forced to buy the next version.

[bluGill]

Except in the case of a natural monopoly (which doesn't apply to software) you can always switch to something else. Which means the seller needs to remain better than the alternatives.

[abanana]

This is betraying a way of thinking that suggests what's normal now is the way it's always been.

Given "there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of", it's safe to assume we're talking about more than a couple of years ago. To talk as if most users always used to upgrade, suggests you might be young enough not to remember the software industry before a decade or two ago.

In general, users very much didn't upgrade. That's exactly why the industry forced subscriptions on us. They weren't getting income anymore, when the older version of their software did the job perfectly well.

[bluGill]

I'm old enough to remember that time. People did up grade. Some of them rushed out to buy the latest version when it was released. Some of them waited until they got a new computer. Many of them tried to not upgrade until someone using the new version sent them a file and then they couldn't open it thus forcing an upgrade. A few only upgraded every other version.

I wasn't an automatic everybody upgraded on day one like subscriptions are, but it amounted to similar: regular upgrades over time.

[stavros]

Nope, we used to just stay on the version we bought on plenty of software, because it worked fine for our needs.

[true_religion]

We like to think of physical products as one offs where what you buy tomorrow is the same as what you buy today.

But I have run a bakery for 5 years, and you get better day by day, you introduce new techniques, find different flours, optimize bake times for fluffiness, crispiness, and taste. The croissants we make today are much better than what we made during our first month.

We improved our product just like how software improves, but we did it without a croissant subscription, but by selling its own version as its own thing day by day.

What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited. In the physical world, we have wear and tear, or in the case of croissants, decomposition or consumption which limit customers from using the same product forever.

Can the same not be found for many software products?

To use iOS as an example, the OPs app Castro charges for night mode, but night mode via OS controls didn’t always exist in iOS so a theoretical Castro v1 could have been released without before it, and v2 would include that new feature. Or when inevitably, v1 no longer works on new iOS versions, people would have to upgrade.

[angiolillo]

> What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited... Can the same not be found for many software products?

Some of the enterprise software I've worked on has an option that functions this way. You pay for a specific version which is supported for a few years. You can keep using it forever but if you want to keep getting security updates or live support then you'll have to buy a newer version that is still in its support window.

Having said that, it seems like most businesses seem to prefer subscriptions.

[dabluck]

We don't charge for night mode. I don't really think versioning would work very well for us, many have tried, but I do agree Apple should facilitate other business models like this in a better way.

[true_religion]

On https://castro.fm/

It says Castro plus has advanced features, side loading, night mode, icons and more.

If you don’t charge for it, then highlighting it as part of the Plus package is confusing.

[michaelt]

> There is no such price

If it’s sustainable at $1/month, and a customer is willing to prepay $1200 for a 100 year subscription, that sounds sustainable to me.

[Uvix]

It’s sustainable at $1/month at current costs, but those costs will go up over time. The subscription price could be raised accordingly but they can’t go back and ask for an inflation adjustment from people who bought it.

[Grombobulous]

Technically you could invest the money that hasn’t been used to cover the lifetime user’s costs.

Even leaving it in a the right checking account, it’ll earn interest.

[jwr]

But that's a gamble! That's exactly my point. Someone is betting on something. How long the customer will stay, how long the software will be maintained and available, etc.

[michaelt]

Everything in business is a gamble.

Maybe tomorrow my competitor will aggressively cut prices. Maybe the product line I've spent money developing won't sell well. Maybe that new machine I've invested in won't be as productive as the marketing materials promised. Maybe bad weather will mean my customers stay home instead of visiting my shop. Maybe a war on the other side of the planet will raise my material costs and empty my customers' wallets. Maybe the artist headlining my music festival won't be allowed to enter the country. Maybe 10 years into its 50 year life my nuclear power plant will be undercut by falling costs for solar. Maybe Google will make the thing my app does a native feature of their OS. Maybe we pushed the envelope too far or didn't test thoroughly enough and we'll be buried in warranty claims.

This risk is why investments in businesses pay more than treasury bonds.

If you aren't comfortable with that, entrepreneurship might not be right for you - nothing wrong with being an employee and getting the certainty of a monthly salary.

[mrguyorama]

When I go to a bakery and buy a roll of bread, some of the money I pay the bakery will be squirreled away for future purchases, improvements to the business, expansions, cover lean times, etc.

That margin is called profit and has been the standard way every single business ever has managed ongoing expenses outside of per-transaction costs forever.

Despite this "Gamble", businesses continue to function every day. Some fail, but that is a purposely designed part of the market. If you cannot forecast your costs and revenue, you are supposed to go out of business.

It's funny that only in the world of Tech, the supposedly magical world where you can do so much with so little and one individual can "Build" something used by millions, that suddenly customers have to bear the burden of the business's inability to forecast costs and profit.

What, do you also expect me to tip you when I download?

Keep in mind that the vast vast majority of software subscriptions do not let you continue using the product you have paid for when your subscription lapses, even when the product gets no more support!

[angiolillo]

> There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions

Such a price clearly exists -- in an extreme case you could charge 50x your annual subscription price and invest it with a 2% yield to get the equivalent of your subscription as interest. More realistically, if you are already considering taking on debt to grow your business it can make financial sense to offer lifetime licenses that are equivalent to several years' worth of subscription revenue to get an influx of up-front liquidity. Of course as your needs change so will your ratio of subscription-to-purchase price and this may result in a purchase price that is too high for your customers to consider, but the number always exists.

> Every one-time price is a gamble

True, but so are subscription prices! Either way, as the person who sets the prices, you are well-positioned to pick ones that are most likely to be successful.

[zmgsabst]

$1/day forever is around $9125 using the safe drawdown rate of 4% per year.

So if you’re a bakery and a customer offers $9000+ for a fresh roll every day forever, you should almost certainly take them up on that offer. A smart baker could probably get that number sub-$5000, but you’ll always come out okay around 25x the yearly cost (in this case, $365).

Similarly, if the amortized yearly cost of a customer is $12 (ie, $1 per month), then a $300 forever price is financially indistinguishable from a permanent subscription. (Actually, better: time value of money, they can’t cancel the annuity you buy, etc.)

So there always is a price where that is financially viable.

[drdec]

> the safe drawdown rate of 4% per year

IIRC this rate is based on some standard retirement length (like 30 years), not forever.

[swiftcoder]

> Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.

The gambling goes both ways. Your $1 subscription price is betting that you can convince each user to keep on paying that subscription forever, their $24 lifetime price is betting that customers are going to churn after a year on average.

Your gamble is perhaps slightly safer, in the sense that if subscriptions fall so too do the ongoing costs. But there is a floor to costs (i.e. you need to keep paying your team), so both approaches are pretty dependent on the sales funnel bringing in new subscribers

[PaulHoule]

I remember an article in Byte magazine circa 1982 or so which talked about how the software business sucks because it goes like

(1) Raise capital and spend a year developing a product

(2) Release the product, make a certain amount of money, then revenue dries up

(3) Pay yourself a bit and feed the rest of the money into develop version 2.0

(4) A year later it is struggle to sell version 2.0 because you're not just competing with applications from other people you are competing with your old 1.0, your most satisfied customers might be the least likely to upgrade

And that assumes development for 2.0 goes according to plan! As a software developer who gets a paycheck my life is easier working on a subscription based project my life is easier because management is not facing a financial crisis because a project is running a few months late.

As a customer though I often like paying ahead and I've been through a few cycles like this with Plex. Like I see the lifetime offering from Plex and I have the money now and it looks like a good deal... Then two years later they come up with something that really alienates me (that FAST service) and I hate being pushed into something I want nothing to deal with. So I go to Jellyfin and it is a godawful mess that I never get working quite right, just watching a movie with family and friends becomes an exercise in humiliation.

And I'm thinking... I don't have the option of exit [1] because I can't cancel my Plex pass! If on the other hand I was paying for a monthly subscription they are motivated to care what I think [2]

Now funny I had this summer when I was trying to gentle a stray cat [3] in a room in the other house and wound up watching a lot of Tubi, came to the conclusion FAST wasn't so bad, switched back to Plex, got a monthly subscription, and I am highly satisfied.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model

[2] I hate to be this way but when I have trouble w/ amazon I write to [e-mail] and point out that it makes no sense to screw me for $20 because I have a say in at least $2M NPV of AWS cloud spending, when you consider a Prime subscription and how much an ordinary person could buy from AMZN in a lifetime, AMZN has a tremendous amount to lose from "exit"

[3] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/bobb

[vladms]

Depends though what you pay for the one-time price. You can pay an offline version of the application (no extra costs afterwards), or a limited period of SaaS application updates (let's say 3 years).

I agree that paying a one time price and expecting continuos updates and new features is not reasonable.

[jbstack]

For the majority of software I use, I don't really care about continuous upgrades and new features, as long as it works with the feature set I signed up for.

A great example for me is the Xodo app on Android. It's by far the best PDF editor that I've found on Android, particularly for annotating with a digital pen. Some features are locked. If I want to unlock them, it's $5 a month. I get nothing out of that which isn't already in the app. I'm happy to pay a one-off fee for the work the developers have done up to that point. I'm definitely not happy to add another $5 a month to my pile of subscriptions.

For me the boundary is this: (1) If I get something of value every month (e.g. use of a cloud server, or something which obviously needs regular updating like Netflix) -> subscription justified; (2) If I just want to use what I can already see in the app -> very unlikely I'll ever subscribe unless the product is absolutely essential to me and there are no competitors.

A good example of the latter is Skritter. I don't care about new functionality, but there literally isn't another app which can do what it does, so I pay the subscription.

[Grombobulous]

As you have demonstrated with this comment, customers don’t really understand that there’s no such thing as “the product is done and costs are no longer incurred” even if the product is 100% done, and this is especially true on commercial app stores.

It costs $99/year to keep your app on the Apple App Store. Stop paying and all apps are delisted.

It costs $5/month to maintain a business phone line (Apple needs a phone number)

It costs $10/month for a mail forwarding service (or else Apple will publish your home address)

It costs ~$100/year to maintain an LLC.

A developer must buy a new Mac every 10-12 years or so just to maintain basic OS support (we can call that ~$50 a year for a MacBook Neo, but if you want your code compile to not be painful you’ll probably grab a MacBook Pro).

Domain name? $15/year. Business email, $10/year.

[dghlsakjg]

Yep. Businesses have overhead.

There are plenty of businesses that have all that overhead and still sell things instead of subscriptions.

Flip this argument around: you go buy a rake at the hardware store. They tell you they need to charge $5 a month for as long as you want to use it since they have to pay for a phone and website, no apple fee, but their city business license is more than that, etc.

Precisely no one will take that deal. If the store wants to stay in business they must continue to sell more products. It’s not my responsibility to keep paying them for a product so they can have a phone line.

If you are selling an app that has a service backing it or are providing support and updates, fine. Try to sell it as a subscription. If you are selling an app that runs entirely on my device? Version it. If you want me to pay for your overhead of continued development, create a new version that has something I would want to pay for.

[vladms]

I think that for the physical store example the overhead is already included in the object price, and probably a significant part of it.

> If you want me to pay for your overhead of continued development

My recollection with the status of 20-30 years ago is that people would sell you buggy applications for huge amounts of money and then you would be on your own. Doing good applications, without bugs, supported on multiple platforms and multiple use-cases is very expensive and takes time. Not sure what was your experience with pay once and just use the app, maybe it was better...

The benefit of subscriptions is that everybody has more flexibility. The developers can work continuously on the application. The customers can already use it for less than a one time (very large price) and see if it fits their needs and can change their mind if things don't go in the right direction.

[Grombobulous]

The problem is that you’re not really making the right analogy. For one thing, the hardware store isn’t staying in business because you bought a rake once that you’ll never buy again. They’re making money on the contractors coming in and repeatedly buying things like paint and drywall. They’re making money on you buying light bulbs, dish soap, and mulch every year for the rest of your life.

When you really think about all the things a hardware store sells, not a lot of it lasts forever.

As a customer I’m totally all for buy-once and FOSS software. But I recognize that it’s not always the economic reality.

There’s plenty of buy-once iOS software out there. I’m definitely not saying that developers can’t do it, merely that I don’t blame the ones who go subscription-based, and that a lot of customers don’t realize the ongoing costs associated with publishing an iOS app.

[dghlsakjg]

The hardware store isn’t a perfect analogy, but my grandpas hammer has yet to reach EOL. Hardware stores are FULL of profitable items that you only buy once, or are you replacing your toilets on a monthly basis? Pick a different store if it bothers you that the hardware store also sells consumables. Hell, pick a hardware vertical like tools or plumbing fixtures that only sell once. Specialty hardware stores exist for those things, and their business does not rely on consumables. Plenty of businesses that exist to sell you a product or service once and count on no repeat business. The jeweler I bought my wife’s engagement ring from is not expecting me to buy another. He’s quite successful still despite having to cover the overhead of running a workshop and storefront.

I’m not blaming the ones who go subscription based. I endorsed it as a model when it makes sense (when you are providing an ongoing connected service inherent to the product, eg.). Developing the next version of your software doesn’t qualify as a service in my mind.

I’m complaining about software that goes subscription based completely unnecessarily. Adobe is the perfect example. There is no reason I shouldn’t be able to just buy photoshop. That worked fine for decades. I don’t need a subscription to MS Word, either. What new development has happened in text editing since autosave was added a few decades ago?

I can still play my original copy of Half Life, and valve is doing fantastic selling software instead of subscriptions. Arguably they are one of the biggest and most loved by consumers for that.

[mrguyorama]

You think that's bad? You should see what the hole in the wall food place pays for rent every single month. They still don't require a subscription for their service.

None of that applies to Android, and it only applies to Apple because we have such abysmal regulation in the modern era, where you apparently aren't allowed to regulate business that happens with a computer for some reason.

[Grombobulous]

The hole in the wall food place can sell me the exact same food every single day. My stomach is definitely on a subscription plan.

As far as “none of this applies to Android,” you’re right, but the App Store is where 70% of mobile revenue is spent, even though Apple has less than 20% global marketshare. [1]

[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/

[simiones]

The biggest tension between software and one-off purchases is related to bugfixing, and especially security. It makes sense that you don't expect new features for a product that you paid for once. But, what is the case with bugs? If the product mostly does what it promised to do, but sometimes crashes, do you expect those crashes to be fixed for your version, or not? What it you're using a 10-year old version and a new critical (say, unauthenticated remote execution) vulnerability is found in it? Do you expect to get it resolved as part of the price you originally paid, or would you be ok with being told you have to buy a new version if you want this ?

[jbstack]

There's some merit to your arguments, but not enough to justify a subscription:

- Subscriptions are marketed as being a lot more than just bugfixes - new features being the big one. But there's usually no cheaper "bugfix-only" subscription, which means that someone who doesn't care about new features has to pay for them anyway.

- To be honest - yes, I do expect bugfixes for free if I've paid to buy the product. After all, a bug is a defect, and products are usually sold with the expectation that they will be fit for purpose. That's the principle which applies to physical consumer products, so why should it be any different for software? If I bought software that calculates my taxes for me, and it turns out a bug means that it applies the wrong tax rules, then I haven't got what I paid for. Why am I expected to pay every month just to make my software do what it was supposed to do in the first place?

- The developer is still incentivised to fix bugs in order to attract new purchasers.

- Subscriptions aren't a magic solution financially anyway, because there's an average limit to how long a customer stays subscribed for.

[Telaneo]

Heck, I'd pay to explicitly not get the new features and only get the security and bug fixes in several cases. The "new" features is in some cases just a reshuffling of the UI and removal of features I actually do use.

[skinfaxi]

How do manufacturers of physical products handle defects? Aren't they obligated to correct defects through recalls and similar mechanisms? I don't see why software wouldn't work similarly.

[simiones]

Not always, it depends on the defect. There are many, many design defects that do not significantly impact the working of the device that will not get repaired, but would usually be patched in regular software (especially for visual design or bad UX like a literal rough edge on a physical product). Recalls in particular are very rare - they generally only happen for very serious faults, usually those that affect the safety of the device.

Also note that expectations can vary quite a bit between physical and software products. For an example, my vacuum cleaner fairly often shuts down if I stop and re-start it too soon. If this happened with an app, I would certainly consider it a pretty ugly bug, and might ask when they plan to fix it. But I would never consider sending the vacuum cleaner to a service station to try and get rid of it - and I think there is little chance they could fix it even if I did.

[swiftcoder]

A good chunk of the software on my device doesn't need to access the internet, another big chunk does so using standard mechanisms (i.e. libcurl) that could be security patched out of band by the OS.

The only reason I routinely need to update most software, is that Apple/Google keep changing device screen resolutions/cutouts and they keep killing off old APIs

[egorfine]

> as long as it works with the feature set I signed up for.

Yes. On the exact major OS version you signed up on.

[jbstack]

That's fine. It's my choice whether to upgrade my OS or not. If I do so, and my app no longer works on the new OS, then I can purchase a new version. Why should I pay a monthly fee just in case I might upgrade my OS and just in case the app doesn't work there?

Also, it's far less likely than you're suggesting that I would need the exact major OS version I started with. The majority of apps survive an OS upgrade just fine. In my case, I use NixOS, so that isn't even an issue at all since every package can have all of its dependencies frozen for as long as you like, even with a new major OS version.

[Grombobulous]

It’s worse than that, stop paying Apple $99/year and all your apps get pulled.