Jetbrains’ perpetual licenses are similar to this. https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

20x? No. But I paid way more than the annual subscription cost ($40/yr) for a perpetual license of plex pass ($120 for life), so in general, yes.

This was also the case for everybody who had bought a perpetual license for Adobe products and then did not subscribe to them when they switched to a subscription model.

I think a more reasonable multiple would be 5x. The problem you'll run into is that people who complain want the cheap subscription price and perpetual access.

I'm not sure that twenty times the yearly price would look like a reasonable price, but if it's software I actually want, I might agree. I would weigh that price against the functionality of the software, ignoring whether there is a subscription model. As I said, I'm not beyond paying a three-digit sum for software I like (and Mathematica is the first example that came to mind, but not the only one).

Only the provider of that service can provide that, and not even completely.

Third parties promising it would still be at the whim of the original provider. If they shut down the service, what would that third party do to fulfill their promise to you?

What we need is open, documented protocols for internet-connected hardware and escrow for pure internet services, with a guarantee to open source if the original provider shuts down their servers.

The latter will be difficult to enforce. The service provider could, instead of shutting down the service, just raise prices to something above absurd, and then shut down once all customers are gone.

There’s a reason they stopped selling Photoshop in non-subscription when the pricing difference was something like this.

$699 vs $49/mo. Now maybe $20/mo since they no longer force bundling and have lower cost feature restricted versions.

The math was easy at the time because you’d break even in 2 years with the old price. Now it’d be like 4 but plenty of users were on CS2 for 6 or so.

Since 12x is your 1 year break even rate it’s not too unreasonable. Especially if you’re not upgrading it ever year.

Is this a thing you’ve seen? Really cool idea!

I doubt many would actually use it because complainers on HN aren’t average users, and the number of months you’d have to prepay would likely be quite high to actually make it make sense for the businesses involved.

But still, if you could make a business reselling monthly subs as 1-off purchases, it would be pretty dang cool!