Ask HN: Do you miss one time payment software licenses? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you miss one time payment software licenses?

39 pointsdevrob25 comments

Very much so. I am perfectly willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a perpetual license. I run many machines and can refer back to a project years later. Not so with a subscription, generally.

I do like the new model where you pay for a perpetual license and have the option to subscribe to annual updates. That's a win-win. I do want developers to make a good living. I also want to be able to access my files from 1997 if I choose.

> I do like the new model

I'm only aware of JetBrains doing this. Are you aware of other examples?

Sketch does this, I believe

Sketch no longer offers a perpetual license. They have moved to a subscription model.

Here are some other desktop apps where the software does not expire. (Updates or upgrades can be paid for new features).

- Affinity apps: Designer, Photo, Publisher

- Sublime text

- Fontlab (Lifetime license, type design app)

- Glyphs (Mac-only, type design app)

WordPress plugins.

In the Mac universe, there are several:

  - Eastgate's Tinderbox
  - Zengobi's Curio
  - Momenta's Agenda
  - I think Bear app does this too.

In the case of Eastgate, a subscription is about $90/year, and well worth supporting a great tool and cool developer.

As I've said, I'll happily spend money for good tools, but I want to use said tools if my subscription expires.

Yes. I have had one time payment software licenses before with hundreds of apps.

Instead, most of them have replaced that with a subscription rent-seeking grift by overcharging each month and just offering the basics of functionality and unnecessarily creating an account for that purpose.

Want to cancel? You lose access to the software you once 'paid for'. A certain entity once said and still foresights a dystopian future:

It's 2030, you own nothing, there is no privacy, can't use the digital software / game(s) offline, always connected online for license checks 24/7 if you paid for it and life has never been better!

I prefer the subscription model, as long as the total expected cost is not too far out of line for the service. $5/mo for every tiny utility is too much.

However, before the rise of subscriptions developers still needed income. What often happened were releases with big changes (sometimes completely changing the ui) for the sake of justifying an upgrade cost. Even worse, incompatibility between versions to force an upgrade.

Perpetual license of an older version included with the subscription does seem like a good middle ground here.

Very much this, on the end you have an office 365 subscription which has incredible value for money. On the other end are subscriptions like Omnifocus or Noteplan, the price point is too high for the added value (at least for me).

Nope. I stopped buying software when this started. I find an open source or free alternative now. Partly because having a bill for software that I may or may not use every month is unnecessary but I'm hearing now that you have to threaten to sue to get Adobe to cancel a subscription.

My solution for this is to use something like a Wise debit card and just keep a zero balance on it at all times, except when you actually want to renew a bill. I love to see these companies whose services I only use every 3 months, cry for me to update my payment method. Best part of my day.

Yeah. Used to be, you could just wait until you could actually afford to upgrade. If times were rough you just wait a bit longer before getting the latest version. Same problem with the cloud. It's good when times are good but if you can't afford to pay the bill, your fleet evaporates and you're SOL.

I miss it because I recently used an add-on mod for a pc game (that’s very good) that also has a subscription model. I rack up huge bills just subscribing left and right to every little thing.

I certainly would miss them, if I were stuck dealing with the endlessly irritating nickel-and-diming subscription model, but I have almost entirely migrated onto open-source software instead.

I know lots of people hate on them, but honestly I usually don't mind too much. It does change the mental model for pricing: instead of being based on dev costs, it's based on value. If I use the software for a long time, then it's presumably more valuable, and therefore it makes sense for it to cost more overall (if you assume a value-based pricing model).

> instead of being based on dev costs, it's based on value

Was it ever based on dev costs? What does that mean exactly?

I price my software to try to maximize revenue, i.e, the cost per unit times number of units. The trick is finding that sweet spot.

It probably wasn't, but it felt like it was. And what I mean by it is: "people worked on the software, that took time, we should pay them for that time."

My sense is that a big part of why people don't like subscription models is that they figure, "I have to pay every month/year, but the developers don't actually have to write new features in that time." I think that mindset implicitly prices the software based on the cost to the company of developing it. I'm suggesting that another mindset is, "if I use this for 10 months instead of 1 month, then it's worth ~10x as much to me (relative to if I'd only used it 1 month), so it makes sense I'd pay ~10x more for it."

I was looking at it less from the business's perspective, and more from the emotional perspective of the buyer.

I agree with "people worked on the software, we should pay them for that". :-) But I don't think "time" is the best way to think about it. It's still a question of how much you value the product. If you buy a music album, it's irrelevant how long the recording of the album actually took. What matters is if the songs are good.

IMO the problem with "subscriptions" is obvious: in most cases, the term is merely a euphemism for "rental". There are some developers who allow you to buy a perpetual license with a certain time limit on software updates, but that seems to be a minority of the subscription model. Whereas the majority of subscription software simply stops working as soon as you stop paying. That's rental.

Rental is almost always a bad deal for consumers, except in the short term. If you go on a 2 week vacation, you obviously want to rent a car in the new city, not buy a new car and try to sell it 2 weeks later. But leasing a car indefinitely is typically a worse deal financially than buying a car.

Consumers want to own the products they buy, but increasingly, software developers want to prevent consumers from owning any software, forcing them to rent indefinitely. That's why consumers are upset, with good reason. It's a loss of control.

A big part of this is the App Store, which caused a race to the bottom and is hostile to upfront paid software in a number of ways.

I like monthly pay for something I would only use for a single project.

For something I use frequently, pay for updates for 1 year and keep if I cancel. This way encourages the software to be worked on, and demotivates features being artificially held back until the next major version (to encourage upgrades).

The way the monthly payments work, they usually charge you what a permanent license would have cost within 6 months anyway.

Absolutely yes.

I suspect a poll would be overwhelming.

Yes, and I always choose products that still offer them if possible. If there's a lifetime license available, that's always the one I'll get.

The majority of video games are still using this

Yes, specially when apps like Todoist use dark patterns to auto renew. Fuck Todoist.

Yes.

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