I know everyone complains about Adobe's switch to subscription, but it would fit the model you'd want where you could pay for a month of usage and then turn it back off.
Even with large relationships, they refuse to provide utilization metrics. So our team has to implement obnoxious processes to validate your use, or pay 15-25% more than we need to.
Yes, exactly.
The parent comment says they are not going to pay to use it for another 5 minutes. So if it were usage-based, would they pay to use it for the 21st times, after they run out the 20 free uses?
And they only use it once per three months. So the 21st use is 5 years later. Will the software still be maintined by the time? Will the dev still exist? Will the problem itself still exist?
That was my point. If I'm using something for only the 2nd time, then statistically it's very unknown whether I'll ever use a 3rd time. If I paid for it now, there's a good chance I'd be throwing away my money.
Whereas if I've used something 20 times, then it's extremely likely I'll be using it another 20, 50, 100, or 1,000 times. It's clearly worth paying for after 20 times.
In your example above (needing it every 3 months) it would take over 5 years to reach that point.
I'm going to guess that within those 5 years it's likely that the developer would have released a new major release (with a new trial period), or that you would have reinstalled your OS (resetting the trial timer), or that you would have gotten a new computer...
In other words, you'd never pay for the software.
> I would pay for it *by* the 21st time.
By the 21st time != the 21st time.
By the 21st time == at some point prior to the 21st time. Possibly the 5th or 6th time. Maybe the 10th time. Maybe the 3rd time.
That wasn't my example. It was 3 months between the first and second times.
In my experience, your need for a tool often increases gradually. You have a one-off project that needs a tool briefly, then a couple of projects a few months later you need to try it more, then it becomes a regular thing.
It's pretty rare that I go from never needing a tool to needing it constantly as an instant switch. Which is the only scenario where 7/14/30-day trials make sense.
Then that's a terrible business model.
As a business, you want both customers to come back.
If a contiguous time-based trial model results in losing half your potential customers, while a usage-based trial model results in keeping all potential customers, then the contiguous time-based trial is objectively terrible.
So it doesn't demonstrate the usefulness at all.
Maybe its still better to let them get a long free trial so they tell their friends about it, I dunno. Not a marketer, but it struck me as kind of disingenuous that if you came back to a tool after 3 months where you know you need to use it, they still don't want to pay.