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>It doesn't make sense whatsoever to receive one time payment and provide updates forever.

Duh? This is written in English but I genuinely have trouble making sense of your words. We had this for decades without subscriptions, they're called UPGRADES! You buy 1.x, or 2.x or whatever, and then when 3.x comes out new customers pay full price but existing ones get it at a much reduced price. But they can do so on their schedule, or if they don't then they don't lose anything they already have, they merely don't gain the new features. Which in turn is one of the few truly hard direct bits of incentivizing feedback, developers don't get money "by default", but must earn it each time.

I struggle to understand how suddenly it's like the entire idea of upgrades seems to have vanished. Why would a one time payment mean updates forever for free? But why would it mean subscriptions either?

Edit: Maybe if there is anyone truly to blame as the root of this evil it's Apple for being massively hostile to updates in the App Store for reasons that I will never understand either. That really sucks and probably forced subscriptions on the general population more than any other single actor. For that reason alone I really hope to see alternative stores forced on them by law.

It's not my English or that I haven't heard of upgrades, App Stores don't offer a mechanism to sell upgrades. That's why Im proposing it as a solution.

Yes, and that’s because developers won’t be able to support multiple versions, and they don’t want people stuck on old versions that don’t support new phones and library security updates.

In “solving” the subscription problem, upgrades create more cost, bugs, and exposure for everyone.

It's actually more than that. Many apps have a server component and this requires ongoing revenue and support for multiple versions of the app even if the new OS of the device doesn't break that app.

With phone upgrades, for example, and an iOS app.

The cost of maintaining different versions of apps for different tiers of payees seems prohibitive. Especially when libraries change constantly.

Maybe I’m wrong and your system would work fine. It doesn’t seem right to me though.

Personally, I think subscriptions are the way forward, just lower cost subscriptions. Why is 15 a month such a standard? Most of the 15/month apps I shell out for feel more like 3/month or 4/month apps.

> The cost of maintaining different versions of apps for different tiers of payees seems prohibitive. Especially when libraries change constantly.

Perhaps, developers should look for libraries that don't change constantly. That way the could reduce their workload independent from the pricing model.

Updates have disappeared because most software today is no longer full offline (as was the case of those CD-ROMs you’d use to install softwares back in the days), but a hybrid of offline and online, with a local client making calls to an API. A software company can’t ship a hybrid product and stop running the API, the API has to be kept up, which is often no small feat, and costs money. On top of that, if they had to deploy different endpoints for different versions of the client, the backend management would become absolutely chaotic and cost the company even more.

Tldr: online softwares cost money to run, even after they’re sold. They’re not standalone softwares.

I actually look at this from the other direction: the need to somehow justify a monthly subscription fee has encouraged developers to add further user hostile features, including a move toward owning customers data and forcing customers to share data (often with egregious privacy invasive policies) and makes it harder for customers to interoperable with other software.

my favorite negative example for this move:

YNAB (You need a budget) - https://www.youneedabudget.com/pricing/

they had a perfectly fine working offline app that i gladly upgraded for the full price every time it was available. now it's subcription/online only and i haven't left a dime there since. bye ynab i'm gonna miss you!

Which is ironic since the whole point of the app is to teach users to plan cash flows and find areas of excessive spending they didn’t recognize before when it came in periodically. I stopped using it once they pivoted but really, once you learn the basics, a spreadsheet or any other tracking method works just as well.

We had this for decades without subscriptions, they're called UPGRADES!

Exactly. I bought Panic's Nova for $99. Love it. It came with one year of updates. My year is over. But I don't need any of the new features with the new versions.

When some features are added that I need or want, I'll pay for the new version. No big deal. It may be a year from now, it may be two years from now. It works for my wallet, and it incentivizes the developers to add solid new features.

The whole idea of being drip-fed features by software developers is crazy. I'm not a junkie on the corner holding out a shaky $5 bill to my software dealer to get this month's "fix."

> UPGRADES! You buy 1.x, or 2.x or whatever, and then when 3.x comes out new customers pay full price

Upgrades like that kind of suck for everyone though. The users, the developers, the businesses.

Users expect software to get bug and security fixes. By having 1.x, 2.x and 3.x versions, developers have to maintain 3 different versions.

It also forces developers to add new features even if no one wants them. Plenty of good apps are essentially feature complete, but in an upgrade centric world there has to be constant new features. This often makes apps worse.

Subscriptions are a good way to balance the needs of users, developers and businesses.

> Plenty of good apps are essentially feature complete, but in an upgrade centric world there has to be constant new features.

No, there don't have to be, this "upgrade centric world" is a poor straw man.

Upgrades can be fun for end-users, like anticipating a new music album. And after feature complete there are features that can be added without muddying a product, e.g., adding plugin support, skins, additional language support, new platforms, performance improvements. And at a certain point in time it's reasonable to no longer make bug fixes in legacy versions.

Why not EoL 1.x once 2.2 has been released and likewise EoL 2.x with the release of 3.2.2?

It's interesting that in your thoughtful survey of alternatives, you don't consider simply challenging the assumption "and provide updates forever".

Subscriptions do indeed fund perpetual development in a way that one time purchases don't, but the implication that comes along with that is that features are to be added along the way. If you only released maintenance patches, you subscriber satisfaction would dry up really darn fast.

So now we have this model where publishers charge subscriptions so that they can keep their business stable or growing, and subscribers are demanding features be added so that they're getting value for the ever-growing total cost of ownership. And what do you get from that? Feature Bloat.

The subscription model insists that successful products need to continually grow their code base, complexity, and feature set. The idea of stable streamlined applications that do a few jobs really well and otherwise stay out of the way is very hard to sustain in a world of subscriptions.

The alternative -- which was common in the past and remains common among many (not all) game publishers now -- is to temporarily expand your team payroll with talent that produces the product, and then scale it back to warranty the product with necessary maintenance patches while your emphasis turns to growing the market through sales instead of growing the product through features. Later, perhaps, you create another related product or a successor product.

It can and does still work, and it can make for very high quality products that don't become bloated monstrosities. If subscription fatigue is making the news, I'm sure will see a resurgence of this model soon enough.

I actually considered that, just didn't call its name explicitly.

> Maybe the AppStores can implement something like version limiting and you can ask for a payment for upgrading to the new version.

I'm also not sure how I feel about it. Having people using multiple versions of the app in the wild seems wrong. Also, many apps have a server component which has ongoing costs and as a result user who choose not to pay for an upgrade will still cost you money and maintenance of the server for old versions OR they will lose functionality. I guess it can work for offline apps.

> Also, many apps have a server component which has ongoing costs

Many apps have a server component to justify charging for a subscription. Sure you might need a server if you're doing something novel, but apps that operate on documents should just use iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

That makes a lot of sense for something like a lot of games. Develop it, provide maintenance/patches for a while, and when it pretty much breaks on an OS upgrade after a few years? <shrug> Most people who cared got their enjoyment out of it. No reason to support ad infinitum.

What's funny is that the people who really care will continue patching your game for free to keep it running on newer operating systems.

You seem to imply that "the ever-growing total cost of ownership" of subscriptions is not ever-growing for the single-purchase model.

Over the years I've noticed that many a software I once 1-off purchased is not supported anymore on my latest (security patched) OS. While technically possible, it's not practical to run that old software on the old OS (corporate security foo, old OS only running on unavailable hardware, etc). So I end up purchasing the next major version regardless of new features.

If we compare the two models in regards to "price for having access to the software for a long timeframe", you pay for compatibility/security updates either way, just in the purchase model the cost curve is a lot bumpier than in the subscription model.

As someone earning a big part of my income from self-developed SaaS subscriptions, I can tell you it's a life changer for my attitude. In the old model there was always this nagging voice in my head. "This customer support ticket is from a customer who last paid me 2 years ago and they don't have a support contract and who knows if they will ever buy the new version."

So while my general ethics are in favor of providing good customer support, the monetary incentives are really stacked against it on the purchase model.

In my experience customers don't want to hear about all the issues we deal with (lib updates, security patches, UI fixes, you people know the drill), they just want to know what the software can do for them and how much it will cost them to have access to it working for a certain amount of time.

Interested to see what others think!

It's problematic - the ideal business model that best matches the costs would probably be a combination (upfront payment, + ongoing subscription for maintenance patches), but I doubt anyone wants that (looks like the worst of all worlds to a user).

> upfront payment, + ongoing subscription for maintenance patches),

That's how B2B software was priced for decades. It's also how things like PlayStation+online work.

Isn't that basically the DLC model of many games?

It‘s fascinating to me, the lenghts SaaS devs go to make themselves believe rentsomeware is sth people “want” or that is “beneficial” to customers.

> Some apps that I purchased before in full, later turned into subscription based apps(giving me a year of free subscription). This made me feel bad and I lost my warm and fizzy feelings towards these apps.

> That said, I understand why they are doing it. It doesn't make sense whatsoever to receive one time payment and provide updates forever.

This. While justified, so many apps messed up the switch to subscriptions.

We recently switched our app Genius Scan to a subscription model, but tried to do it The Right Way: users who had purchased the pro features automatically got subscribed to our Plus plan for life.

New users will have to subscribe though, as it's the only way to be sustainable.

We also introduced a new plan, Ultra, with more advanced features. This way, we still get a chance for long time users to support us if they upgrade to the Ultra plan.

> Maybe the AppStores can implement something like version limiting and you can ask for a payment for upgrading to the new version

I can only assume this is a deliberate omission to push people into subscriptions.

IMHO it's not that. I think they don't want to have users with outdated apps. It makes the experience of the device worse and especially Apple is very protective over the user experience since that's how they sell iPhones.

IMHO it's a worse experience to own a device that can't be used for what you want to do without paying monthly fees to app developers.

many game offer an option that you can pay for remove advertisement.