There has to be a reason all these companies love SaaS vs yearly upgrades and I think it’s because “subscriptions” get forgotten or ignored or “it’s not worth worrying about”.
If I buy a month, and never renew, it means I'm done using it or I didn't find it valuable. Don't send me emails reminding me, don't notify me. I'll find out when I open the thing up again and see my sub is gone. If I want it back, I'll buy another month.
The value in a sub for the end user is that I don't have to sign my soul away for a program I'll use once or twice a year. But the common pattern tries to hide that away and fool me out of money. Frankly, it's offensive and gross, hence, fuck subscriptions.
It sounds like you want usage based pricing where for example, you pay $X for each day you use the tool and then get billed at the end of the month accordingly.
Similar in concept to how AWS bills for most of it's services.
As opposed to super lumpy revenue due to bursts of revenue coming in after a new version release.
There's also a lot of business risk because if you have a new version people don't like, they don't have to upgrade and now you don't get that burst of revenue your company needs to stay afloat.
EDIT: also, perpetual licenses create the wrong incentives. We've all complained about software bloat before. With a perpetual license, you only get paid on upgrades ... creating a situation where the software vendor jams in more (unneeded) functionality in order to justify creating a new version release.
I suspect the second is a bigger driver; companies don’t like people not choking down whatever idiotic change they’ve made in the latest version because it makes whichever exec pushed it look bad. With subscriptions you usually HAVE to keep updating.