Customers in the US and Europe hated the usb, especially during COVID. In random places of Africa, where they greatly valued the single perpetual license, it persists. From my perspective, I don’t see anything positive from being an installed application for this use case - he had to hop through so many security hoops that when he rolled out the web solution IT departments breathed a huge sigh of relief and thanked him.
Over a period of about 2 years he converted almost everyone to saas and 4x’d the annual revenue. That also generated enough fcf to hire more developers to ship more features.
Saas is generally the way to go. Installed apps are common in financial services and industrial applications. I can think of a bunch of other niche examples but I personally would never pursue this model. We put bugs into production from time to time and it is nice to be able to instantly roll out updates.
Nitpick: I think you mean “demurrage”: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/demurrage.asp
But indeed, web is typically the most flexible option unless you are leveraging something on the OS that would otherwise be cumbersom or impossible via web (not often the case)
But it requires very careful engineering.
The business reality is often not understood by the users and that's why every company is moving towards SaaS, it allows the company developing the product to continue to stay in business rather than providing a product then shuttering because it couldn't sell enough.
The former is simply more sustainable than the other, much as some (like the vocal minority) might disagree with this fact.
---
That being said, there are many who sell one-time licenses, especially in the indie hacker space on Twitter, such as NomadList and BoltAI. Their model works because they make enough money from their products to retire on, as solo devs, and their products aren't necessarily ones that require constant updates (well, maybe BoltAI as new AI advances come out all the time that need to be implemented, such as RAG, parsing PDFs, storing "memories" like OpenAI, etc, but most advances come through new models, which is just an API call away).
I understand that updating software takes manpower. Same for running servers for sync or online information or similar.
But I might rather pay once for something that works on my machine as it is now. I need no servers or sync. If I need an upgrade later, I’ll buy it.
I do buy some software as a service but for other software if there’s a subscription I just don’t buy.
Every time I updated macOS I find that some program stopped working and I just have to update it and it works again.
As well as the fact that most software these days has an online component that has an ongoing cost to provide.
I tried compiling modern software in Visual Studio, and the number of includes for historical support was mind boggling. "Holy s*t, I think MS just added every printer for the last 30 years to my project. There's like a 1000 includes on a 5 file project. Doesn't even print." (maybe a teeny bit of criticism)
Maybe some engineering course will help. If you make a product that breaks in 6 months, i won't buy it from you. This really means that the amount of testing is minimal and, instead of fixing bugs, you just rewrite the "app" keeping the bugs.
Web APIs, import and export file formats, external resources (maps etc) are all part of the equation.
Gimp kind of has the Open Source issue where it has tons of features, yet there's a large wall of complexity, zillions of little fiddly knobs to tweak on almost every process, and the interface makes you feel like you need to, because they're all exposed immediately.
Photoshop (personal opinion) is better about having an initially functional feature, with relatively "what you expect" defaults, and then layers of fiddly knobs you can tweak if you "really" want to or need to for a project.
IMO Photoshop is just simpler because people are usually used to it. In reality Gimp always had a much more reliable UI
I’ve never seen a superior product to either Photoshop or Excel. Have you? Maybe they’re on top because they really are good products.
For Photoshop I agree that no software has the same amount of tools built in. However I have been Happy with gimp ever since, and know plenty of people who prefer Krita or something because their interesting is in drawing and not design.
And the first time you need sheets to interact with any of the zillion excel spreadsheets running on the planet (all of finance and pretty much all of corporate America) and it fails and it costs you a contract, you'll switch immediately.
I'm guessing you really don't push either much at all.
Despite Sheets having a free version for almost 20 years, Excel sales are at all time highs. Go figure.
Edit:// I am not sure if increased sales means anything when they switched their license model so often and aggressive
If all you do is CSV things then you're not even a basic user of either. The power isn't a viewer for a table of data.
As to increased sales, I find it amusing where there's good evidence for a thing being true, and people not wanting it to be true make up the most fringe excuses. The fact is sales are up by a lot. If you're going to make handwave claims, demonstrate a fact that your excuse is an actual fact, not a wishful claim to save face. If anything, as the world does more and more data analysis, Excel is one of the most used tools, because it's good for that, so it also makes sense there is more, not less, demand for Excel. And if the license model pissed enough off there a completely free "alternative". Why don't they all jump ship if it's usable?
Occam's razor :)
I just did a search on indeed.com to see job listings with "microsoft excel", 500,000 hits. I did the same search with "google sheets", zero hits. Ouch.
Their company was successful too; Apple recently purchased them.
The speculation is that Apple will now compete with Adobe’s subscriptionware.
This is a bold and not necessarily true statement. It really comes down to your target market. A SaaS is a much less disputed cost when it's targeting businesses but you're much more likely to encounter resistance to a subscription when you're targeting individual consumers.
There is plenty of highly successful mainstream modern day software that offers a perpetual license for one time fee. (DAWs come to mind: Bitwig, Reaper, Logic X, Studio One, Cubase, etc.).
Personally, I think a good compromise is the annual subscription with a fallback perpetual license, a.k.a. the Jetbrains model. I've never had an issue with paying a reoccurring subscription fee, but I take great issue with the proposition that the moment I stop paying I lose all access to the software - it's too close to rent seeking.
I suppose the risk to the SW company is that consumers never learn and just keep opting for the one-time perpetual license every 5 yrs or so, so the perpetual license needs to be priced to bridge that time gap (effectively rolling multi-year support agreements into the perpetual license cost).
I don't belong to a country club, but I've heard they work that way. A big one time payment to join, then annual dues to maintain a membership. If you leave (don't pay dues) for a period of time, then you'll need to pay the big payment again because you haven't been contributing to the maintenance/operating costs of the club to 'keep it alive', so you need to back-pay your fare share.
It's due to a-hole fatigue. These are too often just VMs running an installed solution in a 3rd party cloud, run like garbage and cost way too much. There are just too many vendors in the middle to get any expectation of a good experience. And to top it off, every time I buy SaaS the vendor is bought by some private equity giant before the first payment and the product turns to shit by the second one.
That said, it depends what the software does. If it's a platform for sharing or interacting with the public (e.g. eBay), then a true web app makes a lot of sense to me.
I mean, you try making such software and let me know how that goes for you. This type of vague criticism sounds a lot like the typical engineer retort of "I can build it myself in a weekend," discounting the real complexity involved.
As the decision maker (also a software engineer) I will work hard to avoid SaaS because it's a sensible move. And that is especially true if other engineers believe as you do that it's difficult to make a good product.
By comparison, the same app, installed locally, doesn't suffer from any of the above problems. There is no contract, no latency, and I don't have any risk if the company is sold. I will likely just have to find another solution provider, in the last case, but at least I'm not locked into additional years of servitude supporting a poor product for my users.
In summary, SaaS itself might be great. But the subscriptions that it usually comes with tend to incentivize bad vendor behavior and a poor customer experience.
Many very large enterprise software providers (Sage, Oracle, IBM) and small OSS shops (Grafana, Zabbix, ProxMox) offer run local versions of ERPs or entire applications with no usage restrictions. The licensing pays for support and updates, not usage. In this model, the software provider has incentive to provide good support, and quality updates. They care to maintain the product because their care is what they are selling.
So, it won't absolutely be the case at this scale. Business as usual is the opposite of that at this scale. I should have to prove beyond doubt that there is no alternative when I agree to sign for SaaS. I'm agreeing to take on a lot of risk when I do that.
>Why would there be no contract with a local app?
Because that's what I want to buy, and for good reason (see above). And someone has figured that out and sold it to me.
In the 90s, a large driver of recurring revenue for software was that when the OS and hardware landscape changed, you made a new version of the software adapted to that change, and then, if customers wanted to upgrade their OS or hardware (frequently for reasons unrelated to your product), that made them come back to you to pay for the new version of your product. Under the new legal regime, you would be forced to give them the update for free, so if you sell an actual perpetual software license, you have a fixed amount of revenue on one hand, and a potentially unlimited liability to incur additional costs on the other.
Does this include new layers for games, so that customers don't get bored? More seriously, this law is probably targeting big US companies. But smaller companies are suffering the most.
As an open-source project in a niche market, establishing a sustainable development model has been challenging. I set the price at $10, which gives users privileged access to feature requests and effectively makes them stakeholders in the project's future direction. While I acknowledge this might seem high for open-source software, the development costs and ongoing maintenance require significant resources.
So far, I've sold about 60 copies. After platform fees of roughly 40%, the revenue covers only a fraction of the development costs. Some users have criticized this as "money-grabbing," but they may not fully grasp the complexity involved in creating such software from scratch. The development process demands meticulous attention to various aspects, including accessibility features, elegant design implementation, and cross-platform integration.
Maintaining my dedication to the project while seeing modest financial returns has been challenging. There's constant pressure to add value and justify the price tag, which is leading to burnout. Finding the right balance between making the software accessible to users while ensuring sustainable development has proven to be a complex challenge.
The path of independent open-source development, while rewarding in many ways, comes with its own set of unique challenges that aren't always visible to users.
This isn't an easy path to follow.
Source code here: https://github.com/losses/rune
As the software is of the nature that it will require updates indefinitely (as OS updates come and go), and given the fact that the license is specifically for commercial use, I decided to go with a subscription model instead of a one-time payment model to ensure its long-term sustainability.
I am lucky that this specific software is very "sticky" and already has a die-hard fan base. It also helps that people in the Windows ecosystem are used to paying for commercial use software licenses.
This month to date I have made $800 on license sales. It will be interesting to see how the license sales continue to progress (or don't?) throughout the rest of the year.
I have been very clear with the community from the beginning that this is software that I develop first and foremost for myself - new features and bug fixes get prioritized largely according to this.
Additionally, support is not offered as part of the commercial use license and is largely community-driven. Nevertheless, I still spend many hours a week helping out both personal use and commercial use users.
One time payment since it runs whisper locally. Autoupdates through the app store, and I have a lot of folks emailing me positive, negative and improvement feedback.
It is a lot of randomness. Some weeks are low and when it got a small mention in a popular article I saw a sudden inflow of traffic, downloads and purchases.
So far Ive been ok paying the apple tax. Its a little hard going through the hoops to get it through the app store( I kinda understand why they do a lot of it ) but it provides a lot of free discovery and I spend 0 time on payments, refunds, disputes, handling a CDN to distribute binaries etc. Negative reviews without basis are the only thing that bother me, for some reason I seem to take it personally.
I follow the “perpetual license with one year of support/updates” model. So far it’s working great. My customers love it as they’re in control of the software. Some users can run BoltAI entirely offline.
But I’m adding the subscription soon as this model is not sustainable when I’m adding other cloud features such as cloud sync and other collaboration features.
I think the pricing model should reflect the value and cost of the product. If it’s more on the software side (think winzip or other smaller desktop widget where there is no or low operational cost), it should be one time payment. If it’s more on the service side (cloud sync, collaborative features, fast changing niche where you need to update the product constantly…) then it makes more sense to charge a subscription.
But the tricky part here is that potential customers might not see it that way. Many assume it’s just like another desktop app, therefore it has to be one time payment. So in my experience, I’d start with no cloud feature and offer a perpetual license. Then I’ll add a subscription and with other cloud features. Basically 2 different offerings.
[1]: https://boltai.com
Look, this is not a contest. I’m just an indie developer trying to build something that my customers want.
They are smart and they use many different tools.
I’m sure many of them, like you, prefer Msty or other products. But some of them are really like my product because it fits them better.
A product doesn’t need to “be the best”, or to “win the entire market”.
Many people have told me to switch to subscription but I just don't think it's the "right" thing to do with a desktop GUI app.
The irony is in my day job I am developing a traditional downloadable Windows application which will come with an immediate user base. But although I have considerable discretion over the project, it isn't mine (in an intellectual property sense), and I'm not getting rich off it.
But it often makes more sense to sell it as a subscription; you can make it very cheap for the user up front, and get a continuous revenue stream. Subscriptions make more sense if you provide constant updates, support or online services.
If you don't do those things, one-time purchase might be better. Require a new license for major versions, put your killer new features in there. Traditional vendors like Microsoft do this with their software.
You can also just combine the two, and let people purchase it once for one release, and subscribe to get support and more services/features.
If you charge a lot, it's a tough or impossible sell for users who aren't yet sure they'll get that amount of value from it. If you charge too little, you're leaving money on the table from big customers who would be willing to pay much more.
Setting the up-front cost also requires you to estimate a bunch of things: what will it cost you to build (including future time to get to "feature complete" for this version), how many do you think you are going to sell, how much time is each customer going to take up? In other words: this is what you value your time at, but you can't know most of the numbers used ahead of time. You need this for subscriptions, too, but there's a bit more latitude to change, and you don't necessarily have any obligations should you decide to just stop at the end of the next billing cycle.
Longer term, there's also an incentive problem for you as the vendor. If you're very successful and saturate your market, why build new versions? Your incentive switches to making a "major" version with huge upgrades, which has a whole ton of downsides (which smart customers see, or learn the hard way). It's riskier than frequent, small releases: your first major real testing and feedback comes after a ton of massive changes. It incentives change for the sake of change (so you can justify a "major" version) as opposed to real improvements. Even fixing bugs becomes purely a cost, the only real incentives are pride/reputation, and hoping they'll buy the next major version.
Subscriptions help even this out, and tying the cost to some usage metric can make the cost reflect the value even more, even as the usage changes over time (eg: the customer grows).
The worst thing with subscriptions is when the cost doesn't reflect the value. If as a user, you pay $20/mo for something that enables you to make $2000/month, that's a no-brainer. When you have to pay $20/month for something that is useful 4 or 5 times a year, or when it's really hard to figure out what, if any, value you're getting for your money, that's when it becomes a problem.
I don't think you can ever be saturated in number of customers, if you have a good thing and are on the right track, the moon is the limit. You build new versions to increase the user base.
If you're in a niche market that can actually become saturated, then your customers are likely professionals and willing to pay much more than consumers, since they make money from your software.
Customers often value things by how much they pay for them. I saw my sales increase after my first price rise.
I charged for major version upgrades that introduced substantial new functionality (discounted for existing customers); minor version upgrades were free.
I was probably too generous with support, but it resulted in very satisfied customers and a solid reputation that paid in spades with the more lucrative opportunities.
Not sure how the market is these days for that model, but I can give you a datapoint of one in that I strongly prefer it over subscriptions in almost all cases (the exception being when there's legit ongoing service being delivered).
Speaking for myself, I pushed those minor updates - with lots of little feature enhancements - as soon as they were ready (sometimes mere days after being envisioned/suggested). The major upgrades generally included stuff reliant on larger overhaul efforts or new foundations. I wouldn't typically hold anything back artificially. My team was small (for a good portion of time solo) and our efforts were focused, which probably helped.
On the other hand, I've seen increasing examples in the last decade of meaningless UI changes that trip up the user by moving their cheese (instead of being carefully thought out in the first place), needless bugs introduced with no remorse, and a whole class of "features" there not for the user but instead to serve the interests of the vendor or their data-hoovering partners. (Windows sadly became a great example)
My beef isn't inherent to the subscription model itself, but the shift in revenue structure made it tempting for companies to uncouple development from user wants. Where upgrades used to be forged on the anvil of user acceptance and pitched to our wallets first, they're now shoved down our throats with little choice whether to adopt. (And cloud delivery eliminated the option to stay on that old version you liked better.)
I'm not convinced users jump ship quite so rapidly just to get new features. We saw a big move to mobile even when the apps lacked anywhere near the breadth of their desktop counterparts.
Personally I gravitate toward products which do a good job of solving their primary purpose. As an example, I loved Dropbox for years but plan to migrate away soon because sync got worse and their dev efforts have been focused on all kinds of new fluff I never wanted.
Users tend to be quite happy about it, and we're profitable enough to pay comfortable salaries and have...a lot...of runway.
Of course, this model is possible because there was never any outside investment.
Last I heard, they were still successfully running a (small - 3 or 4 dev) business on this model.
We're building a desktop / SaaS app right now that we'll be selling using a SaaS model. A combination of desktop app built with Electron and a web app for managing accounts and teams. I'd never touch a "once off" pricing model again.
I had the same feeling when I shut down mine last year. In theory I could have left it running for some pocket money but after 23 years I had had enough. After a couple of really slow months I decided to discontinue it and retire.
Obviously this is still a hobby that I am trying to make more sustainable. But this is where I am right now after 3-4 years in this business.
https://loshadki.app - you can check the apps here.
Just the music software industry alone, for example, sells about 4 billion dollars worth of VSTs, DAWs, etc every year, most of it without subscriptions.
Reason is pushing a subscription model hard.
Online services like Splice are sub based for sounds & samples.
Bitwig is a yearly fee. You don't have to upgrade but you're probably going to have issues with newer OS versions before long if you don't.
Overall I agree it's sill a better space than most for software you actually can own.
That's the exception that proves the rule, and it's not really that popular though. They're pushing it more than there's actual update, and I think it's more for the "wanna try a music app" crowd atm (than the 'DAW using crowd'), mostly due to the limitations of the iPad.
When traveling I've actually sketched out music in iPad GarageBand then brought over to my Mac and opened them directly in Logic X. It works pretty flawlessly.
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/subscription/...
I sell perpetual licenses but I charge for updates beyond the first year. I do get 2-3 emails every day reporting bugs and general feature requests.
I have some other apps for iOS as well but they are all subscription based.
it was a one-time purchase of $5.99, though it's unfortunately locked to a specific computer, with a small charge to use it on another machine. no subscriptions, no ongoing charges.
if you use a windows machine and bluetooth headphones with reasonable quality, it's worth a buy.
Its so mind shattering just how dense tape is even without compression.
Tape isn't even that expensive compared to SSD storage or the old reliable rust, its the tape reader that costs an insane amount.
Their are tops of DVD, CD, and vhs readers but somehow we can't make affordable LTO tape readers that don't cost less than a PC or a GPU.
I can't say that this is a very profitable business, especially given that I don't charge any fees for the updates, but I quite enjoy talking to users, finding out their needs, and improving Folge over time. I think Folge has become my hobby.
=> For any software that might be used for hobby or casual use, perpetual licenses target a different market than SaaS offerings.
That's one of the reasons why the Spatial Audio Designer - targeting freelance audio producers and very popular with musicians - sells best with a perpetual license tied to a hardware USB dongle: https://www.newaudiotechnology.com/products/spatial-audio-de...
In my opinion, USB dongles also help with marketing because you make it easier for your power users / evangelists to borrow out the software to others.
So having decided that rather than trade as a fictitious company and go the "personal brand" route, I'm interested to know who has successfully sold their own desktop apps from a website with their personal domain eg. JoeBloggs.com. Do buyers really care so long as the software meets their requirements, or does the psychology of a trading entity really affect peoples' appetites to purchase?
Reasons include authenticity, the ability to self brand for freelance dev work, and being able to list ad-hoc products as I develop them without having to market each one separately.
Comments welcome, as well as success stories, or otherwise.
In fact, they prefer paying too much for software because that impresses management and keeps budgets increasing.
Minecraft - having huge community - still sells lifetime license with upgrades. I wouldn't pay for it monthly neither.
I also bought some software like GuitarTuna perpetual license and they turned it off (the possibility of buying it that way) but I still use it this way (despite they used to nag me to pay monthly). The problem is that one private person cannot hold to many subscriptions. It's killing the budget. Keep this in mind. Also companies tend to switch to cheaper subscriptions after they calculated where did they go in terms of monthly payments.
I know I didn't answer your question because my perspective is different, but I wanted to highlight the other side of the deal. If you want $$$$ go for it. If you have a mission or want to gather community or you want small people to use it from time to time - maybe hybrid both solutions is the way to go?
To be fair, they’ve pivoted a bit these past few years into more experimental areas - game publishing and hardware, for example - but even those experiments have bore impressive successes for a company of their size and lineage.
So yes, it’s possible, and you don’t even have to find a captive audience to find success. Just do good work while nurturing your customer base.
Audio software is another one.
In the end, I decided to abandon that business model and focus solely on businesses. However, now I’m considering the possibility of revisiting that idea, but in the form of a blog, monetizing through Bitcoin payments. Currently, I am fully focused on automation, so the idea would lean more towards a blog/e-commerce approach.
In my original proposal, I didn’t offer subscription-based products like Office 365, but I did offer antivirus software, which has always been subscription-based.
ie. "We shipped early something with loads of bugs we intend to fix as you pay us" vs the model of "We make sure things work first time bug free" of days gone past... but then yeah... things changed and become too complex
I have now shifted my attention to my new product, finding a balance between one time payment and recurring payment by providing option to buy an item with “unlimited edits and yours forever” with a one time payment while still having other items to upsell to the same customer.
The release went all right, and as expected. Hopefully if the numbers are good, I might share some insights otherwise keep on.
a) Audio Hijack [1] - software that should be part of macOS where you can route the audio output of any program to the audio input of any other program.
b) Eazy Draw [2] - I have clients with massive legacy libraries of commercial AppleWorks drawings, and EazyDraw is the only product I could find that would open/convert them.
I know I have many others, just brain dead atm.
Ah yes, I paid for that even without thinking and forgot about it even though I use it rather often.
* https://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescriptio...
Also, Little Snitch, a network monitoring/firewall tool:
Not the type of high revenue startup you see on HN usually but the craftsmanship style of custom C++ plugins has been enjoyable for me. It’s like working on old school WinAMP or something.
I am fortunate in that I have some volunteers helping me with support so all up I spend about 5-10 hours per week doing support and development work.
In terms of business model, I have been quite generous and provide a perpetual support model for free and paid customers and do not charge for upgrades (currently). As my time has become more limited, I am looking at changing this.
Benefits of this model is that my product is the gold standard in the area and relatively sticky.
Rectangle Pro as well.
It was a Ponzi scheme of sorts, and it worked for a while. Obviously it can't go on forever, especially when growth slows down.
Maybe if you could convince your customers to use a subscription-based add-on service on top of the one-time purchase, you might make the business model keep working for a while longer.
At some point adobe has sold photoshop to basically every person who wants to buy it.
All my customers are extremely pleasant to deal with. You hear horror stories about angry or entitled customers but mine are always polite and respectful. When something doesn't work right, they often act like it's their own fault. Even when they want a refund because they don't like it, they ask nicely. I suppose they know I'm a one-man-band so their expectations are a bit lower than for a giant company. But also, engineers don't seem to be dickheads generally, at least not when they're at work.
* Photoshop?
* DaVinci Resolve?
* Table Plus?
* Excel?
* IntelliJ?
Why would you?