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Comment by klabb3 | Hacker News Reader

Can I propose a compromise? How about a yearly subscription with opt-in renewal. If you stop paying, you don’t get updates (or locked out in case it’s a service - not standalone software).

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.

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Jetbrains does this well. Pay for a year and then you fallback to that license/version forever

The Jetbrain licensing model caused a lot or confusion when it was introduced (as can be seen in posts on their forum and reddit), and when I check now it still seems to be the same.

> 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?

Yow, I hadn't realised that twist. Having just read the JetBrains documentation around it, I don't like that.

Looking at a lot of this stuff, "lifetime" is a bit misleading. It's for the life of the version. Buy v1.x and you can use v1.x forever, but if you want v2.x, pay again.

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.

> Buy v1.x and you can use v1.x forever, but if you want v2.x, pay again.

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.

I saw this adopted by Beekeeper DB manager - https://www.beekeeperstudio.io/pricing/

>Pay for a year and get a lifetime usage license.

Hey! I run Beekeeper Studio.

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.

That’s the model of Nova from Panic. Stop paying, and you stop getting updates after the moment your subscription lapses. That’s it. There’s no other complex system. It works great!

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