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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Agree. Pay once and make well defined versions. Versions can definitely be done as in app purchases. Knowing I’m creating content I could lose access to if i cancel the subscription is a great reason to not purchase in the first place.

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Disagree. This puts pressure on the app developer to release versions with new features whether it makes sense for the app or not.

I balk at yearly subscriptions to software too for the exact reason you state. But, I also realize that one time purchases don't keep the doors open indefinitely. I wish I had a magic solution for this conundrum, but I don't.

The subscribe-for-continous-updates, and stuck at last-paid update (as long as you pay, you update; if you stop paying, you keep the app, with no further updates) seems like a pretty good model, as far as incentives go

I hadn't thought of that one. I rather like it. Does anybody other than Jetbrains use this model?

I know I've seen it a couple times, but can't find the search terms to find them now; jetbrains model is a bit wonkier though (key term: perpetual fallback license) -- you subscribe annually, and if you stop the subscription, you roll back to the version available at the time you last paid. So you're basically buying the software as it is today, and then getting a 12-month trial of the updates happening from there.

This doesn't seem to be any better incentive-wise than the model I described (stopping payment stop further updates, so you keep whatever you have today), but comes with the user-backlash of losing what they thought they had (no one feels good about rolling back)

There's an app called Agenda that has a similar model to the one described. I think there was an HN discussion on it, but I can't seem to find it.

Ah, thank you! It looks like Agenda[0] does use that model. Here's a blog post with details[1] in which they mention that Sketch[2] also uses the same business model (with some minor variations).

tl;dr: you buy the app and 1 year of updates. You keep what you pay for.

I wonder if it would be viable for an app like photoshop to have a feature marketplace. You start with a very basic version of the app and you buy the features you want piecemeal. You then have a separate service contract for ongoing support (ie: bug fixes).

[0]: https://agenda.com/ [1]: https://medium.com/@drewmccormack/a-cash-cow-is-on-the-agend... [2]: https://www.sketch.com/

Oracle is famous for this, and it basically amounts to anything you want to do leads you to another sales rep with an upsell -- everything useful becomes feature-gated.

It might work better with consumers, where such a strategy isn't cost-effective, but I also imagine its a difficult system to tech support -- you get a combinatorial explosion of possible "features" that may be in play. Anyways, it incentivizes bad behavior even consumer side, encouraging results like 200 $1 features and communities/tutorials/discussion becomes strangled

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