We’re giving the developer money for a bucket of features. It should be okay if a new feature comes along that I have to pay for it (upgrade cost). By paying when I did I was signaling that the old features were worth the price, expecting it to be free forever and include new features after that seems a bit unreasonable.
However, I get quite upset when I don’t have the option any longer to stay with my old bucket of features because they want to put me on the monthly fee treadmill.
IntelliJ gets this better than most. You have to pay every year, the year you stop paying is the year you’re frozen at. Fallback perpetual licensing I think is the term they used.
I love Tower for Mac, I’m happy with my current bucket of features and don’t wish to hop in the recurring revenue treadmill. I’ll be quite disappointed if they make it hard for me to stay on my current version.