One-time purchase alternatives to popular subscription tools
payoncealternatives.com
payoncealternatives.com
So OSS aside (which has its own complicated economics) someone needs an ongoing revenue stream for that work to happen. Whether it's through regular release of paid upgrades (and EOL of old ones) or a subscription model is these days less of a fundamental separation and more of a question of cadence.
Take a look at the much-vaunted Campfire from once.com - there's been zero new features since initial release and I'll bet the cost of a copy come Feb next year when it's a year old there'll be a 2.0 for another $300. How long after that will 1.0 be EOL'd? So are you really 'buying once' for $300 or paying $300 a year just with the auto-renew turned off?
So, how many subscriptions do you need to be able to maintain your software? Is 10 enough? No? Conclusion, subscriptions are not sustainable?
Similarly, how many purchases do you need to recoup the initial development? You will hardly break even after the first 10 sales. But once you do break even every single purchase goes 100% to maintenance and new features. That is a very good position to be in.
Of course it matters what kind of product you have and how big of an audience you can get. If it is very niche product and you only expect 100 sales then maybe a one off payment isn't particularly appealing. But then again, maybe the value lies in support instead. Or, of course, a subscription.
Paying for upgrades is also fine! But without shafting your current users. Compute is dirt cheap. If you sell someone a piece of software for $300 you can afford 20 cents per year for cloud costs to maintain your relationships.
You could easily fix that by a base price and a maintenence fee (per year, since first buy) which would make it easy to opt in/out of a subscription model. The fact that companies are beeing greedy and fail to deliver prevents this from happening.
I was impressed that when Jetbrains raised prices, it seemed a reasonable amount, they gave a few months' notice, and allowed people to prepurchase three years in advance at the old rates.
I'm hoping IDEA and the all products pack continue to survive basically as-is. Jetbrains looks to have launched a couple overlapping enterprise SaaS products, the AI integration, and increasingly specialized individual IDEs.
I think we know how that ends.
Personally, I’ve decide if I can’t buy something and just have it I will do without. So be it.
The idea may be venerable, but I don’t quite understand who would think you could consider a networked online chat server as finished…
What about a phone service? What about cable? WAN? Recent "smart" insanity notwithstanding, those things are not updated on end-user side; every now and then, some hardware or wiring might get replaced, but the infrastructure part on the customer side is generally one-and-done, and customers pay only for the actual telecommunication service.
The chat server requires constant network communications with various devices that change over time, suffers from possible supply chain vulnerabilities it needs to defend against, talks to databases, mobile apps—suffice to say, there's a million interactions that may be failing in the future due to unforeseen changes in the outside world.
A phone line introduces but a fraction of the complexity on-site, and thus doesn't need as much caretaking. I mean, ...duh?
And even if you want to pull through with this analogy; phone service customers still have an ongoing subscription to cover for the eventual repairs and wiring replacement. Just think of the transition to fibre in recent years. You pay for the service on the phone line and the maintenance of your infrastructure. It's a bundle.
It seems to work quite well for both my customers and my products.
After the first year, you can still use the software, but if you want support or to get the newest features and update to the latest versions, you can pay to renew your support period.
For the pricing, usually a renewal for an extra year is about 10-30% of the original license price.
Apple could have done this, but they were so focused on their Services Revenue they want everyone to subscribe to their iCloud. They could have allow the NAS / HomeServer to backup to their cloud.
500$/year (invented amount) for a Photoshop subscription that I’ll use 3 times in a year? But when I want it, I need photoshop, not $SOMETHINGELSE. Sell me a $5/day license and I’ll be happy to pay every time.
Subscription model is ok for heavily used software, but doesn’t properly address whatever I use every now and then.
Software needs to be maintained and developed, and just following the evolving technology (operating systems, libraries, environments) is a lot of work. On top of that, you need to fix bugs, provide support, and yes, develop new features. This is not feasible with a one-time purchase.
For some reason many people like to play a game of pretending. The person buying pretends that it's a one-time purchase. The person selling pretends that it's a one-time payment. But then it turns out that a new version comes out every two years or so and you need to upgrade, so you end up paying. It's a subscription, but everybody pretends it isn't.
For the software I use and rely on, I would much rather see a subscription model, which is sustainable.
Imagine your stance as a customer instead. Imagine being hostage to every single piece of software, completely at the whim of another business that can increase the prices and/or pivot away from your needs. You have to keep paying regardless of whether you want or need any of the features being introduced. Does it make business sense to allow for that risk?
Both models work and it is getting tiresome to pretend that anything but a subscription model isn't sustainable. Yes, everyone gets the appeal of subscriptions from the perspective of selling software. But it is pretty disingenuous to not acknowledge the other side or pretend that the other doesn't work. You can't be that lazy with anything in life.
This here is the misunderstanding. A better way to phrase it is that you have to keep paying if you'd like the software to work.
On most platforms just keeping up with the OS and library changes requires plenty of work and it is unreasonable to expect someone to do this without constant income.
Now, when I'm a customer, I see things differently: if I use the software and I intend to rely on it, I want the developer to survive, so that they can maintain and develop the software in the long term. Paying a one-time fee will not result in a sustainable business, so the software will eventually die, disappear, or get acquired, none of which is good for me.
Downvote me all you want (HN can be really narrow-minded at times), but when I look at new software that I intend to rely on, one of the main things I consider is whether the developer has a sustainable business model. If they don't, I don't want to invest my time into learning, migrating to, or integrating their software.
Incidentally, I've been running a solo SaaS business for a number of years now. It's B2B only. Seeing the knee-jerk downvoting reaction here only convinces me that not providing any B2C plans was the right choice. I just give my service away for free to hobbyists.
Though it is work the developer has to do regardless, if they want any new sales. And maintaining the software is orders of magnitudes cheaper than develop it from scratch so it is kind of weird to latch on to the maintenance aspect. If your sales paid for all the initial development then it will pay for maintenance. A bigger worry than the maintenance aspect is, will I recoup my initial investment?
The cost will always be arbitrary, software costs nothing to "manufacture" so any one-off payments or subscriptions will only match the costs associated costs for a certain scale.
I agree with what you say, sustainability is crucial. Doesn't follow that subscriptions are the only solution. Subscriptions-is-the-only-sustainable-model is the narrow-minded view I mostly see on HN. Undoubtedly because the audience are developers.
:-)
I am a developer, but more importantly I run my own business. I honestly have no idea how I could run a sustainable business on one-time purchases :-)
Assuming you're actually referring to free software and not open source software, it really doesn't, though. It's straight up better in every way than service-oriented software and commercial software in every way... except actually compensating developers. I'd work for a pittance writing free software if there were any institutional support for it. But who wants to kill the golden goose, even if it means our lives would all be greatly improved?
That's not "complicated", this is the opportunity to make a shit ton of money by charging people for software despite insignificant marginal costs. Even if it means humanity writes the same goddamn software over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, mostly shittier than the last iteration.
Edit: now I realize this is not written clear enough. This rule applies to software/software based services I intend to use regularly to solve a specific problem, like office, storage, etc.
Lifetime payment literally means the specific software is yours and runs even after the business selling it goes out of business one day or is acquired by another business.
We need to consider these issues before selecting pay once option.
Well, that is annoying. Thank you so much, I would rather use anything that is less intrusive.
I’m not a creative, so I’m not paying Adobe subscription (they’re icky in so many ways). But if I were I’d have no issue.
But there is a 3rd category - something like an editor I couldn’t bear if it was tied to a company to ensure it’s survival so that’s got to be open source - even though ironically I’m willing to pay more in that scenario.
Examples of this would be Lens, Postman and now Insomnia. This sort of behaviour is why I use k9s and Bruno instead.
Also, let me offer you a different view on the software you use a lot and therefore want to support. The more a software/service is important to you, the more you should worry about having that as subscription, because it can go away in a matters of hours without you being able to do anything about that.
Think if slack went bankruptcy. Or if it was acquired by someone that shut it down. What would all those people that heavy relies on slack for their workflows? Or what about GitHub?
We all hate subscriptions but at the same time lifetime ownership puts you in a shitty place from a business development perspective. If the product has room to improve within its scope, I want the updates, the maintenance, select new features. If you one-time price that, the business incentives call for acquiring more users, not to make their existing ones happy.
> as soon as you pay for 12 consecutive months, you will receive this perpetual fallback license providing you with access to the exact product version for when your 12 consecutive months subscription started.
So if you do not renew then in practice you might need to _downgrade_ to an earlier version when your subscription expires. But some of their software doesn't even support downgrade, so you need to uninstall/reinstall it and hope you have some old backup of your settings.
Is this what you are referring to?
Of course, "forever" is only until everything around it leaves to the software not working, such as not supporting a new version of the OS it runs on.
Yeah, but that has a few logistical and incentive challenges. Someone buying right before an update etc. And you may not want to create conflicts between semantic versioning and business decisions.
Another approach could be to have features labeled with date, and gated behind flags. Then deliver updates to everyone but features are enabled based on your purchase date, eg within a year.
>Pay for a year and get a lifetime usage license.
Here's why I price like I do:
I can't keep the lights on with one time payments, period. I just don't make enough money.
However as a consumer I prefer them.
My compromise is a subscription that provides a permanent benefit after 1 year. Access to any version of the app released in your subscription period. Forever.
I think it's really fair, and when I made the change I saw an immediate uptick in sales.
Renewal is still opt out though. Defaults matter.
In StarCraft, the focus is on your absolute account balance; you think in terms of having N units of minerals/gas, and spending them on things that cost particular amount of resources to make. In Total Annihilation, the focus is on resource flow - you try to balance how much metal/electricity per second your mines/generators supply, vs. how much metal/electricity per seconds your factories and defenses consume.
In my experience, the two approaches are ultimately the same - you could compute the resource flow for a StarCraft game, and you could pay attention to absolute amounts in Total Annihilation - but they yield entirely different game dynamics, and different player mindsets. Personally, my mind thinks more in StarCraft terms, but I imagine finance people think more in Total Annihilation terms, and in those, subscriptions are the natural mode of spending.
Libertarianism will make its greatest advancements in creating software and systems which render groups redundant and/or impotent vs individuals. A homomorphically encrypting, opaque, Monero-like Etherium would threaten the neccessity of certain governmental functions and lock the government out from observing (like Bitcoin) and manipulating (with force) participants.
Uncensorable prediction markets, DAOs, the possibilities...
If this was true then there would be zero solvent software businesses that don't rely on subscription revenue, which is clearly not the case.
Self-hosting is easier than ever nowadays, devices a lot more capable.
Soon, smartphones will be able to run powerful LLMs locally, so no need to use a paid GPT app subscription.
Take Photoshop for example, it's a product that runs locally on your computer. Why would you pay a yearly subscrption for it instead of a pay-once, use forever? I understand (optionally) paying for updates, but not just to keep using a product that is already on your computer
Especially since products can be one time payment on some platforms and subscription based on others (e.g. final cut pro is listed as one time payment but the ipad version is subscription based).
For many products and services that require active services/cost from the developer to run, it's harder to be sustainable with one-time payments, but for a self-hosted product it makes a lot of sense. Think of how software licenses used to work, or how games still work and do very well.
(Not affiliated, just a happy user)
There is something to be said for both sides. The counterpart to your argument is that, especially in niches or other markets where there is a dominant player, there isn't much incentive anymore to improve software when all your users are subscribers. The money comes in anyway. Besides that, you often see regular price increases in such markets because the user lost all power. If you end your subscription, there is no good alternative. In the pas you could just not update if the new pricing wasn't worth it.
The best balance may be in the JetBrains-like model, where you pay a yearly amount, but you keep access to historical versions when you decide to cancel. In this way money flows in for updating and improving the software. But if you fail to provide value, users can always cancel their 'subscription' and continue using the last version.
So using forever is off the table; which brings me back to regularly purchasing the new version. And if I agree to do that, I begrudgingly agree to the premise that I’d rather always have the current version than having to research whether the new creative suite actually contains Photoshop features I need.
An office suite.
I occasionally write documents in Office 97. Yes, in emulation. And despite the emulation, it loads quicker and has no lag.
Some software does "rot" in time. But a lot doesn't. And we shouldn't be afraid of keeping things running.
The world is progressing and software will be obsoleted. Yes, not all of it and not at the same speed (MS obviously being top of the line when it comes to compatibility and being able support it), but inevitably so.
Continuing the Word example, enterprise users may indeed be better off with the most recent versions of MS Office suite, because of SharePoint and all other integrations in use. For a regular user, the best Word version to use is 20 years old.
FWIW, my wife stuck with ~15 year old Office version on her own computers, in spite - or rather, because - of having used more recent ones at work; it was only until this year that she was begrudgingly forced to update, as Windows 7 got EOL-ed and it was just simpler to download the current one than to dig out old disk images.
Enshittification is real. And so is the larger zeitgeist in software development and design, of declaring the users are idiots to justify disempowering them (whether through laziness or malice).
About the only new useful feature in the past decade, that became almost universal and that justifies subscriptions somewhat, is the "collaborative" aspect of syncing between devices. But note that the primary use of that is to be able to edit your work on multiple devices, which is effectively a per-application workaround over OS vendors being greedy and unable to get their collective shit together.
Haven't played Dungeon siege specifically, but there's plenty of games from that era that still hold up, some even graphically. Be careful, or you're going invoke the wrath of the site's retro gaming community :)
I pay once and get $years of updates and the last version I am stuck with I can use as long as it runs on my system.
Updates then prolong/refresh the update period for another $years and cost something like a quarter to a third of the full price.
This way the manufacturer has incentives to deliver new things and I pay them when my live circumstances allow it without them locking in the work I made using their software.
I also routinely run tons of software that I paid once for, it works for me, and I never have need to upgrade. It rarely stops working with a new OS version, as far as Windows and Linux goes at least. Office 2005 will still export all types of formats, or I could print to a PDF, or I could even just send out an old school .doc file and most people can still open it in whatever program they use today, even if it isn't optimal.
Additionally, even if something only works for a limited time, I still got my use and money's worth out of most of that software. I don't expect physical things to last forever, so I also don't expect software to last forever. I'd rather pay once, twice, or more for "pay once" software that I use over 20 years than pay every single month, probably adding up to a lot more than the several copies of different programs over the years would.
On the other hand, I fairly regularly fire up an emulator to play Space Invaders or Galaga. And there's no end of projects porting Doom to pretty much anything with a display and a microcontroller in it.
The graphics aren't always the point, sometimes it's the gameplay, or the nostalgia.
TeX would not be as useful if the only version you had available would be one Knuth compiled himself in 1990, without the original source code; and the fact that TeX solves a contained problem, he intended it to be a „finished“ project, and was an exceptional developer makes this a good example to prove your point, but a bad one to counter mine: most software is just not like that.
To the contrary; a lot of software is highly contemporary, depends on other, external things, and requires a constant stream of security updates to cope with the rest of the world. This causes software to loose value rather quickly.
Software being proprietary is entirely a choice of the vendor. There's nothing inherent in MS software that means it has to be proprietary. It's a pretty essential part of planned obsolescence.
As for new platforms, what new platforms? I can still buy a complete system that can execute x86 code that was written decades ago. And, in any case, we've been able to write platform agnostic code since before many programmers were born.
Not all software needs to care about the "rest of the world". There is a ton of software that doesn't need any kind of network support at all to deliver value. The only real reason for software to become less valuable is if the problem it solves goes away. This can happen, of course, but I don't think it happens as much as MS and other want us to believe.
Software that is designed well is able to be adapted and re-used for new purposes. TeX didn't have good support for separating style from content. But we didn't say "TeX isn't valuable any more", people simply built further tools on top of it like LaTeX and ConTeX etc. This is also why Unix remains just as valuable as it always has been. Unix surely delivers more value to more people today than it ever has done. It turns out the world really doesn't change as much as we sometimes think it does.
Has anyone documented the process of getting the original TeX82 source release to compile on a modern system? I imagine it would be an ordeal, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
Some software had a high value at some point but is pretty worthless now because there is cheaper or even open source competition now.
If cars were like software then they wouldn't wear or rust, the only reason they'd "lose value" is if the roads or fuels changed. But the roads haven't changed fundamentally since the invention of the car and newer fuels can usually be used with minor tweaks rather than starting from scratch. It's completely irrelevant if I could buy a "better" car. I wouldn't be on the market for one because my current car continues to deliver value.
The "roads changing" can happen to software too, it's true. If the x86 platform became obsolete then clearly a bunch of software that is too intrinsically tried to that platform would be less valuable (because you can't run it). But that hasn't happened. In fact, we can't even seem to change the "roads" when we want to (see IPv4). Much of the change in software is artificial and created by those profit from it.
No, and that’s exactly my point. A car with technical specs from 1970 wouldn’t be worth as much today as in 1970 because the standards are higher today. I wouldn’t want a perfectly restored house from 1600, just because it was the greatest way to live in 1600. Because I am used to stuff from now.
This is not to say a newer model can't deliver more value than my current one. But that's not the same as saying my current model suddenly delivers less.
> Thing is, I don’t believe in owning software forever anymore. Things loose their value too quickly: what would an Office suite from 2005 yield me now, other than the need to run an ancient VM to produce files nobody else could work with? Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002? No. It looks unbearable today.
The point as I understood it was: why would I pay a high fixed fee to own a software “forever” if I am not really going to use it forever? At some point, a subscription will be cheaper overall. Because people buying an office suite in 2005 for a fixed fee aren’t using it anymore, they can also use LibreOffice now. So if they had a choice between “one time $500” or “$5 per month”, the monthly option would have been better. Software not degrading because it’s digital doesn’t change that.
On that note, the makers of the Eufloria series from back-in-the-day have started working on a sequel. :)
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/221180/Eufloria_HD/
They have a Discord channel too which people are welcome to join:
I still play Virtua Cop 2, and many companies/individuals aren't tech savvy but still use windows XP/7 with Office 2007.
My point is that if we can't distinguish which things are our assets, liabilities, precious, interests and hobbies then we won't understand where we pay once or in subscriptions.
I'll choose to pay once and own software forever if those software are too good for the next 3 to 5 years (like how we buy a smartphone or other things in life) or are being updated regularly.
Funny, considering many games I play to this day are older than that.
In many ways, I think they look great still. Pixel art for example ages very gracefully.
I was not saying anything OS specific, just that if the developer has to actively work to implement changes, those development time should be paid for.
If it was a major version upgrade I would happily pay it. But even premiere pro never broke between OS version updates on macOS or windows. So it seems like a FCP thing.
Because most issues arrise in this thread are about future updates, not the ownership of the current product.
With FOSS you get no guarantee for future updates.Many products that started FOSS, did it just to use it as a lead magnet, and once they had enough leads, they switched to SaaS as their main model, stopping support and updates for the FOSS version.
and then someone usually picks up the Last open source available and forks it. thats ownership. happened so often already it's a pattern.