111–120 of 123 posts
In addition, as the article points out, your price point has to compete with the 10ish dollars I give Spotify every month and for which I get hours of use every day. Can you compete with that?
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You seem to imply that "the ever-growing total cost of ownership" of subscriptions is not ever-growing for the single-purchase model. Over the years I've noticed that many a software I once 1-off purchased is not supported anymore on my latest (security patched) OS. While technically possible, it's not practical to run that old software on the old OS (corporate security foo, old OS only running on unavailable hardwar…
It's problematic - the ideal business model that best matches the costs would probably be a combination (upfront payment, + ongoing subscription for maintenance patches), but I doubt anyone wants that (looks like the worst of all worlds to a user).
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> It doesn't make sense whatsoever to receive one time payment and provide updates forever. Duh? This is written in English but I genuinely have trouble making sense of your words. We had this for decades without subscriptions, they're called UPGRADES! You buy 1.x, or 2.x or whatever, and then when 3.x comes out new customers pay full price but existing ones get it at a much reduced price. But they can do so on their…
> UPGRADES! You buy 1.x, or 2.x or whatever, and then when 3.x comes out new customers pay full price Upgrades like that kind of suck for everyone though. The users, the developers, the businesses. Users expect software to get bug and security fixes. By having 1.x, 2.x and 3.x versions, developers have to maintain 3 different versions. It also forces developers to add new features even if no one wants them. Plenty of…
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There has to be a lot of value in it for me to pay that kind of money for temporary usage of software. The closest thing right now is Jetbrains all products pack. I consider every November when the renewal comes up if I am going to continue. Adobe Photographers subscription is a great deal because the total cost for a year is way less than the price it used to cost to buy Photoshop flat out.
Adobe Photographers is actually a pretty reasonable subscription for me. I don't use Photoshop a lot . But I do use it and Lightroom I would do pretty much every upgrade anyway. If I just did the occasional Photoshop thing, I'd probably buy Photoshop Elements (Or use GIMP).
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I actually look at this from the other direction: the need to somehow justify a monthly subscription fee has encouraged developers to add further user hostile features, including a move toward owning customers data and forcing customers to share data (often with egregious privacy invasive policies) and makes it harder for customers to interoperable with other software.
my favorite negative example for this move: YNAB (You need a budget) - https://www.youneedabudget.com/pricing/ they had a perfectly fine working offline app that i gladly upgraded for the full price every time it was available. now it's subcription/online only and i haven't left a dime there since. bye ynab i'm gonna miss you!
This article misses the elephant in the room: Apple. For years after the App Store launched, developers asked for an integrated way to provide upgrade pricing to help support major upgrades. Instead, they usually had to resort to creating an entirely new entry in the App Store. How many customers were lost because they didn't know they had to go back to the Store to download a separate app named Thing 2? And how many…
It's not just Apple - Microsoft may have led the way with the switch from 'purchase' of Microsoft Office Suite to 'leasing' where you had to pay for a yearly fee to maintain access. That's when I decided to learn Linux and installed LibreOffice. In the older model, you could purchase hardware and associated software and even if the company stopped supporting either, you still had a basic working system that might las…
This never happened, you can buy office as a one time purchase now and get the version you paid for and nothing else, just like you could with office 1997, here:
Home version: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
Business version: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/p/office-profe...
- “One-time purchase for 1 PC or Mac”
- “Classic 2021 versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint”
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Software was incredibly expensive before the subscription era.
True in the sense that I stopped paying for any software that went subscription. Saved me hundreds of dollars a year that would otherwise have gone to the developers.
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This article misses the elephant in the room: Apple. For years after the App Store launched, developers asked for an integrated way to provide upgrade pricing to help support major upgrades. Instead, they usually had to resort to creating an entirely new entry in the App Store. How many customers were lost because they didn't know they had to go back to the Store to download a separate app named Thing 2? And how many…
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> Unlike paid upgrades, a subscription guarantees recurring revenue not only for the developer, but for Apple themselves. Actually, Apple would get more revenue the other way. They only take 15% on subscription revenue after the first year.
What Apple earns from fees from $x per month per user in recurring revenue is greater than the fees for $y per user per upgrade for certain values of x and y depending on the number of users in each category. How do you know what you is true?
1. Monthly subscriptions earn more revenue for developers compared to pricing sporadic upgrades/updates.
2. The converse of 1.
If 1 is true, then we’d likely end up with subscriptions regardless or apples incentives here. If 2 is true, then Apple is clearly leaving money on the table, because they take a percentage of revenues, and as parent comment states, they take a higher percentage of that revenue in the alternative scenario.
So it doesn’t really matter if they know which drives more revenue. All that matters is that the incentives dictate that Apple benefits the most when developers make more revenues.