Hacker News Reader

Subscription based licensing can be really useful for getting legitimate users who can't fork over a thousand dollars at once. IMO Adobe creative cloud is a great example of this working out well.

View on HN

It's really not, Creative Cloud is the most pirated software suite in the world, and the company that makes it is almost universally hated by its customers.

Agreed, the software I am most likely to buy (and least likely to try to use without buying) is one with a lifetime license and offline activation for unlimited machines, even if it's just for one version. That's very valuable to me; as long as I can access the key and installer, I know I will always be able to run it.

Subscriptions are a negative value, it's something that'll bleed me dry as long as I have it.

How does that work?

Unfortunately it also generates negative press on social media from frustrated users, and people who avoid subscriptions will avoid the product. But if you're an already established market leader that doesn't care, then subscriptions are fine.

I'm not a fan of subscription services but there are decent compromises to be had, e.g. Jetbrains model where you receive a perpetual fallback version after a year.

I agree that there are decent subscription models. Adobe, however, isn't one of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com