The ones who don't benefit is individuals. I wish more products had one time costs for hobbyists (individuals with zero revenue) while having subscriptions for businesses and commercial. Lots of products have loopholes for education/OSS/etc so adding "hobbyist" doesn't seem like a big difference. And I think it would drive sales. If I use a product at home I'm likely to lobby for buying subscriptions at work.
When people ask why I don't like copilot and want a worse alternative when copilot "pays for itself", it's not because I don't want to pay, I just want to buy something and have it.
There’s replit-code[1], which is pretty much that I think.
You are buying time. Never pass up an opportunity to do that.
Maybe a few larger companies as well, because those subscriptions tend to come with support, and larger companies love to throw maintenance to non-employees. But if they cared enough about not having a subscription, they'd make it themselves.
Why do I want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for a perpetual license of photoshop when I hardly use it? A 30 day subscription once a year is perfect for me.
Even for those of us who are heavy users - can you see the game theory? The provider of your services has to deal with a huge amount of inertia in their product because of the continuous distribution model. The bigger the subscriber base, the more inertia there is. The consequence of this is that you are essentially guaranteed that impacting changes will be delivered slow enough that you or your business can adapt to them. Contrast this with a big bang software upgrade that requires explicit retraining and disruption to ops.
Not all subscription products are run this way, but the good ones are. Any product that has a 4 digit number in its name is a bad example. Visual Studio 2022 is not how a subscription model should go. Netflix is.