Also, I wonder whether this will lead to a slower development of the software. Before you’d have to create a leap forward to impress people to buy the new version, if the old version was still good enough.
Carrot Weather App is another good one. Pay $5 once to get a really polished weather app with some basic "cloud" functions thrown in, like notifications to a phone device, some fun "achievements," and a pretty good weather data feed. If you want the super-accurate feed or if you want more advanced notifications and mobile device access (e.g. repeatedly on your Apple Watch), pay up for the subscription because it costs the dev more. And, if you stop paying, that $5 you initially paid is still valuable because the underlying app still works.
Stop paying? When you aren't "current" you can either pay up... or downgrade to your perpetual version "owned".
$4 a year (or $10, if you don't dismiss the 'ultrapremium club' popup and buy that by mistake) plus the $5 one time is not remotely what I would consider worth paying for a weather app unless Carrot was out in the wild building weather stations.
You'll also note that Carrot's website nor App Store description even mention the existence of this buy-up (except on the support page - but why would I look at the support page for an app I was thinking about buying?) or the pricing. They also deceptively show a photo of the Apple Watch showing weather, which is technically correct (the best kind of correct) - but the Apple Watch doesn't update in the background (or give you weather notifications) unless you pay for a subscription. Because weather apps that don't update are really useful.
Also, it doesn't "cost the dev more" to send updates to a watch instead of the phone (they're going through the phone anyway,) so I don't buy your justification for paying more for it. It's just a way to market segment and try to scam more money from people who have already paid above market for a weather app. You get Weather Underground data with the 'cheap' sub... but only on the phone. If you want it on the watch, you have to get the expensive sub. This also makes no sense. There's no way in hell wxug is charging extra based on the target device.
Most subscription software is a terrible deal in comparison. I have tried to avoid subscription software as much as possible. But we have a family subscription for 1Password because $REASONS. We pay $60 per year for (in comparison to Office) a small software product, with small cloud storage, of which we only need a couple of megabytes for storing encrypted passwords.
Also, I wonder whether this will lead to a slower development of the software.
Most likely. Once you are locked into some proprietary data format, it is often more expensive to move to an alternative, and it is easier to subscribe. Once a substantial part of the user base has a subscription, there is no more need to entice users with a new version.
Subscription software does not benefit the user.
Depends on software, subscription and benefits...
I think Office and Jetbrains are softwares done "right". They continually release updates - quarterly?... continually add new features...
I think more companies get it "wrong" than get it "right"... but done right, the company has reasons to keep developing - no new stuff? no continued monies. no new monies.
Each market is different, but when I look at an area like Photoshop or Illustrator, the competition keeps getting better. In some areas they aren’t even competing.
The workflow of a game artist will have them going through a bunch of different products to get to an end result. A lot of those steps can have alternatives. If a vendor has some proprietary format that doesn’t work with anything else they never even get a user base.
If a subscription is funding continuous development, and th company is doing a good job, and I use the software daily it doesn’t bother me. If I use it twice a year, I’m going to be looking hard at alternatives.
Subscriptions from Adobe were meant to soften the initial sale, but Adobe's own rigidity with the subscription schemes on release shot them in the foot, as organizations had to wait a long time for a model to come out that met the needs of small/medium businesses who previously could have made due with a few perpetual licenses. The storage was pretty sad even at the time of the switch, so that wasn't a compelling sales point either.
I think Adobe just didn't pull the numbers they were expecting when they switched, and now they're stuck with this model and infrastructure they don't know what to do with.
>Creative revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2018 was $1.23 billion, up from $942.2 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2017 and representing 30% year-over-year growth.
So not only are they still selling, but subscriptions increased 30% over the past year. Clearly it's working for them so much that they're finding success doing the same thing for the document cloud:
>Document Cloud revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2018 was $231.0 million, up from $195.9 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2017 as we continue to transition Document Cloud to a subscription-based model.
This is actually my way of making decision to buy a subscription-based product. It must provide comparable service. Office 365 single user license costs around 70$/year. Now:
- Evernote is asking 60$/year. Seriously? One note is already offering same service with 1TB storage.
- Pocket is asking 45$/year. WTF? It is just a bookmarking service which is already offered by one note web clipper.
- Proton mail is asking 50$/year for 5GB mail box. Dude, Office 365 offers 50GB add-free mail box. However NSA is able to read your emails, which is not the problem here. At least MS is not selling my information to advertisers.
Other than streaming services, It is getting really difficult to find any subscription-based product that gets close to Office 365.
I am not sure if that would be bad, though. Often enough, I feel that software vendors either just change the UI so they can show non-technical people how "improved" their new version is (MS Office), or they introduce arbitrary incompatibilities, so you need the most recent version to edit files that have been created/modified with that new version (I'm looking at you, Autodesk!).
With a subscription model, at least these vendors could focus on changes that actually provide value to their customers rather than making arbitrary changes just to make people buy a new version they might not really need.