I've been thinking about this a lot about Adobe lately, specifically. I've been getting into video editing as a hobby, and the fact that I could use Premier for $20/month rather than the single time purchase of $800 or whatever it used to be is the difference between me being able to use it or not. And yeah, maybe in 40 months I would be spending more money, but there's no guarantee I wouldn't be spending money to upgrade at that point... and then once I started wanting to add in After Effects, Audition and Photoshop, $60/month for literally every Adobe product compared to what, like, $2400 for those four? And if I use any more things from the suite, it's still the same price. I was talking about this with someone the other day, and was like "Imagine telling 12 year old me that I would own a legal license of Photoshop because of how inexpensive it is."

(I am also a happily paying customer of 1password; I strongly prefer the cloud offering...)

And that's beyond the fact that, in some sense, this aligns the business needs closer to mine. It is easier and in some sense, more fair, for me to pay for the software while I use it, and not when I don't. On the business side, it's nicer too. It pretty much feels like a win-win all around, except for certain circumstances. But in the happy path, it's basically almost entirely strictly better.

I feel weird being on this side of this argument these days, but it is what it is.