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Jetbrains only “did it right” because there was huge community outcry about their move to pure subscription so they moved to the “if you subscribe for X amount of time you get to keep the last version you had when you stop subscribing”.

Props to them for listening to the community but question whether they should be the gold standard given it is still a compromise position.

> But before you start waxing lyrical about the halcyon days of software you "own", you've either forgotten or never experienced the shady things software compnaies did to maximize revenue then as well.

Just because there was shady shit back then doesn't mean it wasn't, in some ways, a better system.

I remember purchasing the latest version of 1Password every other year for around $40. And if I didn't need the latest features, I would postpone the purchase. Everything continued to keep working if I didn't get the latest version.

Nowadays it's $2.99 a month. If you cancel or miss a payment they lock you out of all your passwords at the end of the current billing period.

Heya! 1Password employee here. We have never locked anyone out of their 1Password Account for missing a payment, and we never will.

Whenever your subscription lapses your 1Password account will instead go into a "frozen" state. While your account is frozen, you can still view, use, and even export all your items, copy your passwords, and even copy items to vaults outside your account.

The only things you won't be able to do while an account is frozen is add new items to vaults, edit existing items, invite people to your family or team, or autofill items in your browser.

Can't that same argument be applied to subscriptions? Just because there is shady shit that doesn't mean it's not a better system?

Adobe gating new camera RAW formats behind paying for an upgrade was a real problem. You buy the latest Nikon DSLR and Adobe makes you buy PS CS5 for literally no reason other than that.

But bugfixes was a real problem. So a colleague of mine had an old iPhone or iPod Touch. I forget which. He used it for testing. He kept it on iOS 7 (this was years ago) because later upgrades just slowed the phone down. This ultimately became a problem when heartbleed [1] came out. Of course, Apple pushed a fix but that fix required upgrading iOS. If you didn't want to upgrade iOS or couldn't because your device wasn't supported, well you were SOL.

So this isn't exactly the same as paid software but you can in some ways view the phone as buying hardware and the software. And there defeinitely have been cases where bugfixes (including serious vulnerabilities) were only fixed on later versions.

When upgrades are paid, people stick to old versions. This can be bad for everyone. There's an awful lot of botnets, for example, that rely on old versions of Windows and other software that's never upgraded. I suspect this is why Microsoft abandoned paid Windows upgrades because it ultimately hurt them and it was untenable to fix every bug in every version of Windows.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed

> Jetbrains quite literally did everything right

The problem I have with Jetbrains is that they do continuity discounts. If I cancel my subscription because I don't need it for the job I'm doing the next year, I will lose my 40% continuity discount and have to pay a lot more after re-subscribing. So I let my subscription continue for that period instead, but that also doesn't feel right.

I don't know if it counts as a dark pattern but I don't particularly like it.

Like it or not, I’d say it’s still better to have the opportunity to get a loyalty discount than to keep paying the initial price as with all other subscriptions.

> But before you start waxing lyrical about the halcyon days of software you "own", you've either forgotten or never experienced the shady things software compnaies did to maximize revenue then as well.

I don't think software developers not giving me new features and support options for free after purchase was ever shady. Bugfixes maybe is a grey area. Neither of these things are anything close to the level the outright scam dark patterns subscriptions now utilize almost as standard.

At the end of the day it is about leverage. With the old model the companies didn't have much leverage after the sale so there was only so many abuse angles available. With subscriptions there are tons because the customer has much less leverage.

> Then there's Adobe. The subscription prices are pretty outrageous. No warning. Hard to cancel. Easy to get a recurring charge. Adobe, like many companies, seems to have decided that whatever the sticker price was for the standalone software, charge that every year in a subscription.

I believe the pending lawsuit against Adobe is because if you cancel your subscription early for a "pay monthly yearly subscription", you have to pay 50% of your remaining subscription balance.

I mostly agree with you. I think there is one thing you are hand waving a bit though. When you bought version X, you could use that forever if that was sufficient and your cost basis and value proposition to upgrade was known and you could personally amortize it. The problem now is that the subscription can jump from a reasonable $5/month to $40/month for literally no reason. You have sunk time adapting to their tooling and have no ability to just do the one thing you started out doing. Sure, you can switch to another tool but that has a different cost and lots of them have moved to similar models. These kinds of subscriptions can really feel like a bait and switch. The example you cite above sucked more for people who needed each new raw format for camera Z but was great for all the people who didn't care.

Who has gone from $5 to $40 overnight?

Jetbrains also gives a 2nd year and 3rd year subscription discount if I recall correctly.

> And what constitutes a major version requiring a paid upgrade anyway? Well that's completely arbitrary but the company is incentivized to make that happen as often as possible.

Okay, but I don't have to buy it. I can more easily move to a competitor. Or, just use the version I bought and be content.

> The gold standard for subscriptions is Jetbrains. Cancel anytime. When you do cancel, whatever version you had you got to keep, basically.

No. You can keep a 1 year older version if you subscribed for 1 year or more.