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Comment by kuboble | Hacker News Reader

Your kind is more and more of a minority. I'm selling a one-time payment lifetime license desktop software and way too many potential customers either

- think it's a subscription (q: is it monthly or yearly subscription?),

- would prefer it be a subscription (q: I don't want to pay a full price of I don't know if I will use it for life),

- or sometimes demand a subscription so that they can try the full functionality out without paying the full price

And then there are those who pay one-time and are angry they don't get all newest upgrades for free.

My next product will be a subscription for sure.

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For desktop software I think JetBrains have the right model here; it's a subscription, but at the end of the year you have a perpetual license to the version from the start of the year.

If I decide I don't want the subscription with updates I can just cancel and fall back to that version.

Otherwise the subscription ensures that there will be a new version coming along and that the users are the customers.

It feels fair to me as a customer.

Also, the annual renewal is discounted. It seems pretty fair all around.

Yeah, I agree. If I was not a minority, the market would be different.

I don't mind buying major updates for the software I'm using. The issue with software subs is that the moment I stop it, I don't have access to it anymore. But that's not what I want. I want to pay once and be able to use it as long as I want. It should not be different from buying... a bicycle for example. But that's me, as you said.

> It should not be different from buying... a bicycle for example

But a bicycle is a physical object that can't be replicated at no cost. Digital representations of songs can.

A world where music can be purchased once is a world where piracy obliterates that business model. Piracy will unfortunately always be easier than buying the song. You lose the song? You pirate it again. If you buy it, you need log in to some website and download the song. If you lose the creds, you need to reset, log in and download the song. Lost your email account? Now you need to liase with a human on the customer service team. With piracy, the answer is always "just download the file.".

Streaming simplifies this and adds additional functionality that makes it much easier than piracy by allowing you to search for songs easily, suggesting songs to you, letting you make playlists and adding the social element.

Steam is the classical rebuke to this. It's a store for pay-once products, with minimal (trivially by passable) drm, and it's immensely popular.

Steam is the exception that confirms the rule.

Mainstream movies and music are fast food. Made fast and consumed fast. They have a very short shelf life and new songs/movies come out every 2 weeks or so which is an order of magnitude faster than games. Games take longer to play and many have a high replayability factor so you can justify a one off pay.

Essentially you are buying hundreds of hours of experience vs 2 hours of experience watching a movie or 3 minutes listening to a song. And unlike games, movies and songs are literally the same no matter how many times you play them. If you look at games that can be completed in a few hours by casual players, you will see that the pay is extremely low.

> Yeah, I agree. If I was not a minority, the market would be different.

It's more like the market pushed and pushed and pushed until it was close to the only option available and consumers passively forgot that it could and used to be different.

Now everybody is on the quick-buck wagon, and will come with an entire collection of convoluted reasons why it is perfectly normal to have a subscription-based model for everything, especially software.

You may want to consider one-time (full price) and optional annual renewal fees (a fraction of the full price, depending on the value/upgrades delivered in the new version). It's then up to the customer to pay an annual fee to get updates or stay on the old version (which may be a pain to support...).

Basically, what you mentioned—' I don't want to pay a full price' and 'try the full functionality out without paying the full price'—are the primary drivers behind customers' preference for a subscription-based model.

> Basically, what you mentioned—' I don't want to pay a full price' and 'try the full functionality out without paying the full price'—are the primary drivers behind customers' preference for a subscription-based model.

Or a third driver, somewhat related to the first two: the customer is simply priced out of the product in question as a one-time payment.

Part of the reason Adobe makes the killing it does off CC is because it's $55/mo and not $500-$600 or whatever. It doesn't require a consumer to have a chunk of money in their bank account all at once just sitting around, which especially in the case of students and art folks is money they may not have.

>think it's a subscription (q: is it monthly or yearly subscription?),

I've heard from a friend that some of his customers complain that his one off cost is more than the monthly subscription of one of his competitors. If you aren't serving consumers you might be surprised by how financially illiterate the average person is.

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