How about good old "pay for it once, then own it"?
/s
Although it does sort of put pressure on the developers to actually refine their product and continue to deliver tangible improvements. Nobody is going to pay for a UI that's been re-arranged a bit.
I can't think of a single subscription service I use that doesn't continue to deliver new updates and value on a regular basis, and other than Adobe's bullshit "annual masquerading as monthly" drama I haven't come across something I wished was still packaged.
How about for maximum flexability we do a per user rolling monthly license.
For scale, I've been using VIM for almost thirty years. Twenty years is not an exaggerated number.
It might make the software prohibitively expensive though.
With a subscription model, there’s a point where the consumer has paid you “too much” and they will either cancel or find another solution. This is also known as churn. If your avg customer pays you for 8 months, this is a pretty good indicator of how much customers are willing to pay, but you can likely charge more for a one-off cost, sometimes 2-5x more.
Since you are likely combatting churn by finding new customers, switching to a one-off model means you can just find new customers and not worry about churn since it doesn’t exist.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes subscription models make a lot of sense. Most of the time they don’t unless you’re selling something that has an infinite cost anyway (like immediate access to “all” movies ever made like Netflix) and would be an infinite cost for the consumer to do it in some other way. But if I can pay a contractor to build your app for less than infinite money, then it shouldn’t cost an infinite amount to use your product.
Softwares can't sell like hardwares. When you buy a toaster for example, after the warranty expires you pay for every time you take it out for repairing. With softwares customers expect a life time of warranty, bug fixes and improvements.
Jetbrains has very good model in that regard. Hope they will not ruin it (new pricing for self hosted Spaces is bit concerning).
Sell it as is, or with a very short one year support window. Exactly like all sorts of companies used to profitably do until they realized they could extract more value for the same work with a subscription.
Rent-seeking in the most literal form...
The stores also lack (and still do) an easy way to sell new versions, so here we are. Subscriptions.
The problem is that a lot of things that aren't a service are being rebranded "as a service" just to extract free revenue.