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Comment by xavdid | Hacker News Reader

I really like their pricing structure here. If you want updates forever, it's functionally a subscription (which makes sense - constant updates require constant dev work). The key difference is that if you stop paying, you keep everything you've paid for previously (the app and all past updates).

That's a _great_ way to do a subscription.

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intellij is functionally the same.

Buying a subscription gets you one year updates, and then whatever that last version is remains functional forever.

There was some confusion, and I'm not sure if they changed policy, but IntelliJ gave you a perpetual license for the version on the day you purchased it, not the last version at the end of the support contract

Why is this being downvoted? He’s right.

> When purchasing an annual subscription, you will immediately get a perpetual fallback license for the exact version available at the time.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

Though it is made slightly (?) better for the fact that if you for 12 month consecutively, then your fallback license is upgraded to the version 12 months ahead.

(That is, the next sentence in the bit you quoted is:)

> You will receive perpetual fallback licenses for every version you’ve paid 12 consecutive months for.

I never bothered to understand what "perpetual fallback" actually meant until you explained it here. It seems like a fair arrangement except that some releases of IntelliJ have a notable quality dip while new features stabilize - it's a bummer if the 12 month period you pay into happens to be in one of those dips.

As I understand it, the IntelliJ version you can keep using forever is the one from the beginning of the subscription.

So while the subscription was valid, you got upgrades, and then if you don't renew, you have to downgrade. It's their way of nudging customers to keep paying. It's working for me.

Every 12 months you pay it bumps forward by 12 months. This is true whether you pay monthly or annually or every 3 years.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

Slightly different, you get a fallback license for every version you've paid 12 months for [0]

[0] https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

This is a bit misleading; you only get a perpetual license for the version you had at the beginning of the 12 months, as you can see with the second graphic[0] on that page.

[0]: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/article_attachments/203511589...

The version is refreshed on an annual basis of payments. So your fallback version will always lag, but it won't be significantly out of date if you have a 4 year old account, for instance.

It's not that simple or as simple as the other replies.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

Sketch too. I recently re-downloaded it and they said "You can download anything up to version [x]"

Sketch has been like that for a while.

The app now has a special licensing setup that restricts your installs to two machines.

Sketch made a thing about leaving the App Store.

But the App Store licensing and update process was way better than what it has evolved to.

> The app now has a special licensing setup that restricts your installs to two machines.

That's the one thing that pushed me to Figma.

It was bad enough that it's MacOS only. Now I can only have it on 2 machines?

Sketch customer service recently described it to me:

"Your [sketch] license can accommodate up to 2 devices — one for each seat you've purchased, plus an extra one we offer as a special perk."

I had to reply specifically calling out that this was not a special perk. I've paid the full license price at least three times. It should be available to install on as many machines as I want if I'm the only one using it.

It is Sketch's job to catch when someone is abusing this and create tech to handle that.

I think that this is actually not about preventing privacy, it is to try and get people to move to their cloud product.

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about what I'd want for a subscription service. I've paid for subscriptions that allow you to continue to use the old version indefinitely, as well as subscriptions that completely turning off access to software at the end of the subscription.

I think the "use the old version indefinitely" is actually irresponsible as soon as the application opens a network port: it's critical for users to apply security updates as frequently as possible. I don't want any of my users finding the need to run older software: it puts them at risk, and makes customer support more difficult.

So, if users can always run the latest-and-greatest regardless of their subscription status, (it seems that) the only way to reward people for having subscriptions is for some subset of functionality to only be available to subscribers.

For PhotoStructure's case, I'm not willing to hold their libraries "hostage" in exchange for an active subscription, so even when people allow their subscription to lapse, they still can open and browse and interact with their libraries using the latest-and-greatest version.

Paid features are (like auto-updating "smart" folders, auto-organization, geo lookups, and face detection) are applied if a subscription is active.

I'm hoping this will be a reasonably fair approach, but I know that it's always a challenge to get people to pay for anything.

At that point, you're basically selling a freemium subscription, which is very hard to pull off properly for desktop software, and requires walking a very fine line: if too much of your functionality is paywalled, then the "free" version is useless and the whole exercise is pointless; but if too little of the functionality is paywalled, nobody will pay for your software. IDEs are a great example, because there is little functionality that is important enough to make users want to purchase a subscription, yet doesn't render the software redundant when a user stops paying and it's disabled. But I'd imagine there are also plenty of niches (like yours) for which this type of business model works incredibly well.

I hope it works out for you!

I'm doing the same, with https://httptoolkit.tech/: the core features are free, but there's advanced extras that require an active subscription.

I'm this exact case you cover: it's a powerful developer tool that's very connected to the network & captures the traffic of many of your other apps & devices. It _must_ stay up to date, or users could be at serious risk. Holding back updates from users would be irresponsible. I've noted this in the past, but never really spelled this out fully, and it's important context, thanks!

For cases like ours, the upside of freemium over simple paid software though is that the end of the subscription doesn't completely shut down a user's life (unlike totally losing access to your IDE, or your cloud data), and you do need to ensure that. Instead the free user limits are put back into place, but those should generally make workflows inconvenient or less effective, and not catastrophically blocked.

In my case, for example, free users lose the ability to import/export collected traffic, but the exported HTTP traffic is in a standardized format anyway (HAR: http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/har-12-spec/). Some automated built-in tools go away too, but manual workarounds exist for free, for immediate & short use cases. Those fallbacks & that portability ensure nobody is ever totally locked up by the end of a subscription.

It's a very delicate balance (they need to be limited a bit, or nobody buys anything!) but it's been working well for me so far, and as a bootstrapped dev a free basic option is _incredibly_ useful as free marketing. Good luck with PhotoStructure - feel free to get in touch if you want to chat about any of this.

Sketch has the same subscription model.

Main issue is that ongoing changes in the environment will eventually render whichever Sketch version you are using possibly unusable. I am on a version (that isn't too far out I think) that now can't save anymore on Mac (I suspect the file system/access changes they introduced). So where I previously had a version of Sketch I was totally happy with feature-wise, I now have one that I can't really use anymore. Would've been nice if there was a separation of "free fundamental" updates and paid-for feature updates.

That’s Apple’s fault. You could, say, dedicate an old Mac to Sketch and keep it on an old OS, and the setup would work basically forever.

I do think Apple could do much better with backwards-compatibility. They don’t need to go Microsoft’s extreme. I thought they’d found a good compromise for years on the Mac, but it’s tipped much too far towards just breaking everything lately.

Sketch has a 'soft' way into making you constantly buy subscription. Plugins usually target only the latest released version of Sketch, so if you are dependent on plugins (and you ARE dependent on plugins if you use Sketch), then you either upgrade or eventually lose extended functionality. Because plugin manager will update plugins regardless of their compatibility with your current version.

if you need to hold back on an old version (whether because your license lapsed or whatever else), you should stop updating your plugins as well. They don't force auto updates or anything.

A lot of plugins require some external APIs. They get obsoleted way faster than you can imagine. And it doesn't end at plugins. If you use any design resources, they are more almost always using the most recent version, so you are doomed to load them with issues.

I use Sketch rather rarely once in maybe few weeks, but i've found out that it quickly becomes uncomfortable to use if you don't renew the license.

I agree with most of your comment but as a constant Sketch user I'm NOT using any plugins, so that plugin dependency is a bit off IMO.

But sadly Sketch is garbage now. I've gone from paying for v.x.0 - x.09 and its solid and stable. Now I pay $XX a year and it bricks with every update. It was a great program for awhile there. Its making me look at XD at this point... SMH

It’s honestly been made irrelevant overnight by Figma.

Once even one person on your team moves to Figma it becomes absurd to use something where you have to share fixed files around and are stuck with only using Macs for your design work.

I still use Sketch for things that only I work on outside of work because I’ve already paid for it but having living documents and being able to share with the rest of the company without them installing software is essential now. Not to mention being able to use my powerful PC workstation not just my Mac laptop is great too.

I feel a lot of software is like this before all the SaaS crap.

Sort of; before the SaaS was that big a thing (which coincides with general availability of the internets) we got annual versions, every year they tried to cram in features (and backwards incompatibility) to warrant upgrading to a newer version.

But in the past decade or so we've seen companies move away from that; leaders (I would say) are companies like Google whose Chrome browser was "evergreen" and released / updated constantly with no extra cost, and Apple who made iOS free and changed MacOS / OSX to the same system (although they still do only big bang annual updates, probably for marketing reasons), as well as pretty much all software on iOS - although with that platform, microtransactions also became a thing.

I have a similar, but slightly different pricing structure for my self-hosted analytics app[0]:

- Users can pay a monthly subscription, and while they are subscribed they receive updates and have access to support

- Users can also purchase a lifetime license (cost is about 12-14 months of the monthly subscription) which includes lifetime updates

Initially I only had the lifetime pricing but I recently added the subscription, my reasoning was that by having the subscription:

- It assures potential buyers that product will still be maintained

- They can try the product for a fraction of the normal cost (eg. pay only $7.99 instead of $99, so the risk is a lot lower)

- They can have the option to support me and the development as long as they're using the product

After I added the monthly option (I actually show it as the default one), the sales are about 50%-50% for each option (monthly vs lifetime).

There are also buyers who "hack" the scheme by getting a subscription and cancelling within a month, so they get the product but won't get any updates or support. I did expect this to happen, but I think it is actually a good thing, as most people who do this wouldn't have purchased the lifetime version anyway.

I personally don't like the SaaS pricing in general, especially because it is so over-priced. As a solo developer I am having a hard time finding affordable services to use. For example I use GitBook to publish my docs, their pricing is reasonable at $8/user/month, only that it starts at 5 users and forces you to pay $40/month. I would have gladly paid the $8/month for my usage, but $40/month for hosting a single docs website is absurd. The biggest problem is the so-called subscription fatigue, when you reach one point where paying for all the subscrptions you need adds up to a huge monthly amount. Not only that, but you also get all those monthly invoices that you have to take care of and pay taxes on. Buying a product is so much easier, you pay once, one invoice, you can use it as much as you want without worying about data caps.

[0]: https://www.usertrack.net/

Lots of audio software has a similar model, Bitwig and Reaper come to mind.

Acorn's (an image editor) model is also good: They release major versions as separate apps on the App Store; Acorn 4, Acorn 5, Acorn 6. They're permanent purchases, and only the latest version is visible but if you had purchased previous versions you can redownload them from the App Store.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/acorn-6-image-editor/id1233861...

I wonder if this subscription model can be sustainable for web applications that have recurring expenses like server and storage costs. Does anyone know any successful examples?

Isn't that what update pricing used to be?

Yes, but this way, you don’t end up punishing people who got in at the end of a release cycle!

Agenda do this, feels like a nice middle ground.

Tableplus has a similar model

Agreed!

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