Firstly, it's tough to avoid subscriptions on platforms like web and iOS because it's awkward to distribute a v1, then 2 years later a v2 as a new purchase, the way desktop software used to work. On web, you'd have to run multiple versions server-side which is tricky, on mobile you'd have to release a separate app which is not what the App Store UX is designed for at all.

As a consumer, of course I have "subscription fatigue" and some apps when I get a $20 monthly charge I question whether I really need it.

As an entrepreneur, it's all just customer lifetime value , there's a lot of factors to whether subscription or lifetime makes more sense. Recurring revenue is easier to build a business upon but given people have subscription fatigue, there's a lot of merit to looking for ways to sell one-off, despite the aforementioned challenges.

With all this said, my biggest theory is that we _think_ people have subscription fatigue, but it's an illusion. What's really happening is that web software was VC subsidized for a long time, both directly (with sites like Facebook having no ads their first decade of existence), and indirectly (with many startups forgoing monetization favoring growth following companies like Facebook's lead). So people got anchored to web software being free/cheap for a long time.

When most people say "I hate subscriptions, I don't want to pay $20/month, just sell me the one-off software!" So as a business owner you say, ok, then give me $200 for lifetime, and they say "$200 for an app, that's crazy! I want to pay $20 lifetime". This debate looks like it's about subscription when really it's a debate about price. And consumers have been psychologically anchored to apps being very cheap for a long time - nobody would bat an eye at a $14.99 book on Amazon but that's considered a hefty price tag for an app that might have taken a fair bit of design and development (in-demand skills).

Last but certainly not least, most software is internet enabled these days. Not all of it, but a lot of it. It's risky as a business owner to offer a lifetime purchase for something that will have ongoing server costs. This is doubly true if there's an AI component that might involve expensive GPUs.

As far as it being "counter-intuitive" to hike prices, the cheap money is gone, and businesses are realizing it's better to make a small number of paying customers happy then a large number of non-paying customers happy.

If you're looking at this purely from a consumer perspective, you're sick of managing subscriptions, you're sick of getting billed for something you didn't use much, etc of course I relate. But if you put yourself in the shoes of software businesses, if people are going to complain and moan about paying $10 a month for an app because they think the most they should pay you is $20 their whole lives, you just can't build a sustainable business around those types of customers, when you have expensive design, development, marketing, and server costs.