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Comment by Xavdidtheshadow | Hacker News Reader

The tough thing is that most software products you use are actively maintained and updated. That costs them money each month, so they pass those costs to you.

It would be great if we could see more software sold as-is, without updates. But, especially in the world of online-capable tools (which not everything is, but most apps can access the internet), ongoing security maintenance is important. I'm not sure we can have it both ways.

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I haven't given it much thought, but I like Jetbrain's compromise[0]. You pay a subscription to get all the updates, but you get to keep a perpetual license to any specific version (major+minor, you still receive bugfixes) if it has been covered by your subscription for 12 months or more.

This way you can choose to receive updates indefinitely and support development with your subscription, or buy/stay with a version you are using if you do not need/want the newer ones. (Buying an annual subscription grants you the perpetual licence immediately apparently, I have no experience with this.)

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

Agreed! I think that's a great model. Panic did the same thing recently: https://nova.app/buy/

> The tough thing is that most software products you use are actively maintained and updated. That costs them money each month, so they pass those costs to you.

Adobe managed to stay in existence and be profitable for a few decades before switching to software rentals.

What changed in the creative space that caused 'traditional' software sales to no longer be able to pay the bills? And why doesn't that also apply to, say, Capture One?

> What changed

Businesses often prefer operational expenses over capital expenses. What changed is that your average business IT (bigcorp or mom's basement) now has reliable access to the internet, which means that an operational expense for software has just recently become possible at all.

And why did that preclude Adobe from also allowing actual purchases of their products instead of just the rental model?

Capture One has subscription and license:

* https://www.captureone.com/en/products-plans/single-user/cap...

If I had a need for, say, cloud/sync features I understand a monthly cost as servers and bandwidth costs money; totally on-board. But for people who do not need/want cloud-y stuff, what re-occurring cost is there?

I was happy to purchase YNAB4 for budgeting, and would have purchased YNAB5—but it's subscription and I have no need for the sync stuff that's part of the 'deal'.

It's a lot easier to develop a single software product continuously by tying continuous development to continuous revenue. It frees the business to devote its resources to development instead of product sales strategies and version differentiation which just distract it from focusing on its core product. This also enables their customers to do the same thing, tying continuous use of a service to continuous production of its own product or service. If a business can completely outsource the problem of providing good tools to their professional digital artists by paying Adobe $Xk/year, it might even be worth it to them financially just to save everyone the time of deciding whether to upgrade or not every other year. OS updated? New file format? Solved. New employee? Employee left? Solved.

This is like IT infrastructure moving to cloud: businesses decide that the problems of maintaining IT infrastructure 100% in house is not worth it when you can outsource a big chunk of the business problem for a known cost. In my opinion all of these are examples of the same trend that also includes the direction that k8s, serverless, even companies like uber, doordash, wework etc are moving towards: a global relaxation of artificially maintained buffers down to solving problems continuously, automatically, and on-demand. (Since it begs the question, my critique of uber, et al. is that they're trying to be too big for their problem.)

I think this is the general trend, but I don't know why. My guess is that it is vastly more efficient; not more efficient in cost, but more efficient in time.

Would it be too reductionist to say then that the main value of a subscription as opposed to just buying the major versions you want is that you don't have to pay the costs for a decision that isn't impactful? If not, could an org not otherwise reap those same benefits by just choosing to upgrade every major version, but then retain the flexibility to not shell out for a new version if a pandemic temporarily hurts finances or something?

I was never a paying user of Adobe products, but my understanding was that they'd release a new (yearly?) version as a paid upgrade. It would presumably have a killer feature that would encourage enough of the users to buy, which (hopefully) retroactively funds the cost of the new version's development.

From the perspective of their business, it's advantageous to have the consistency of $X / month forever instead of "hopefully a huge yearly sales month, followed by mostly nothing until next year". Businesses like predictable revenue.

> Businesses like predictable revenue.

Then make the subscription worth something over and above the software:

* https://www.captureone.com/en/products-plans/single-user/cap...

A lot of apps rarely still introduce compelling-enough new features to justify buying a newer version. We'd all mostly be fine today using CS5 and Office 2007.

Subscription models are about forcing upgrades in a world where users increasingly aren't actually benefitting from them.

Maybe they don't need to be though. One of my greatest regrets is that I couldn't afford to purchase Photoshop and Illustrator back when that was still an option. The Adobe CS6 suite is software that is "done" as far as I'm concerned. I would gladly pay $1000 each for CS6 Photoshop and Illustrator with absolutely no future updates if I could.

Too often, those updates break already working tools. I don't need my essential app insisting that I wait 10 minutes to upgrade when I'm 1 minute away from giving a presentation using it.

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