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> I'll never in my life pay $30 / year for something like this, but I wouldn't hesitate to buy a perpetual license for $150 upfront if it were useful to me.

I felt the same way for a long time, but then I realized that I was paying so much to upgrade my “perpetual license” software to the new version every year or 2 that it might as well have been subscription software

I do prefer subscription software that lets me use old versions that were available when my subscription was still active, though. JetBrains is a good example of this.

On the other hand, I now have several old 32-bit x86 Mac programs that I can’t run because the OS moved on. The Windows situation is much better and I have some extremely old engineering tools that still work just fine.

> JetBrains is a good example of this.

JetBrains is an example of a subscription designed to damage your development process if you cancel. Rolling back to a year old IDE isn't reasonable. You should get the current version and all previous versions. Once a version is 5 years old they should release patches that strip out licensing / activation.

> I realized that I was paying so much to upgrade my “perpetual license” software to the new version every year or 2

I have no problem with a subscription in terms of the cost. It's cancellation causing the loss of access to tools that I depend on that's the issue for me. JetBrains is the only subscription I pay for because if a project idles for a year then I'm at least into the territory where I can go back and work on it with the original tooling even if I've cancelled my subscription.

I don't particularly like JetBrains' model, but it's half tolerable. They charge $289, $231, $173 for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd year on personal licenses for all products. IMO, make the 1st year $347 and then $173 after that and give a perpetual license for the current version. Updating every 3rd year and being 2 years out of date by the time you update would only save $100 per year over a 9 year cycle and isn't worth the hassle for anyone that actually uses the software regularly. However, having access to the current version of everything if I suddenly need to cancel tomorrow has a lot of value for me.

> I think I might be the only one on the planet that tries to avoid tooling like this that's tied to a subscription

I think it depends on the app. If it's something that I use frequently I want a subscription. Otherwise, not. The reason for that, is that I look at subscriptions as something I have to be convinced to continuously pay every month. That gives me a lot of power to just disconnect at a later time, and this means that those apps tend to listen to user feedback more often than other apps.

> If it's something that I use frequently I want a subscription. Otherwise, not. The reason for that, is that I look at subscriptions as something I have to be convinced to continuously pay every month.

I don't agree. I'm fine with the economic idea of a subscription in terms of creating recurring revenue for developers and think a loyalty discount is a good way to convince people to keep paying, especially for tools that are used moderately to frequently. I want the latest and greatest version of the software I depend on and I don't mind paying for it, but I want to be able to stop paying at any moment and have the only downside be a loss of loyalty discount.

On the workflow / risk side, cancelling a subscription is, by design, intended to be punitive. As soon as you stop paying, the vendor revokes access to your tooling and you're workflow is disrupted. The intent is for it to damage your businesses and processes enough that cancelling becomes extremely painful.

Even the Jetbrains model that everyone seems to love is a total sham because cancelling is designed to damage your development process by forcing you to roll back to a year old version of the software.

> I think I might be the only one on the planet that tries to avoid tooling like this that's tied to a subscription.

It's really unfortunate that things have moved this way, but I'm with you that a desktop client is the thing that feels most alien in this model.