In 1998 bbedit 5.0 cost $120 usd. Adjusted for inflation that would be about $245 usd.
Today an individual license costs $60.
Wild how software pricing and sales models have changed, and good on bare bones for staying away from subscription pricing.
Today an individual license costs $60.
Wild how software pricing and sales models have changed, and good on bare bones for staying away from subscription pricing.
This is a sane AND a sustainable model for companies, and actually creates MORE incentives for the developers to align with the user's interest: if the new update sucks and has features no one asked for, then nobody will pay for the new version and keep the old one.
There is no reason why previous versions of the software you paid a license for should effectively "disappear".
I’ve appreciated that in a few apps where my need for them on a daily basis evaporated but I still need to briefly touch that system once every few months.
1) Purchase a major version and get no updates.
2) Purchase a subscription and get constant updates.
Pay for the major version, get all of its updates. Then pay for update (to next major plus its updates) with a discount.
If you don't prefer the pay, you can keep what you have.
This is what Reaper, Forklift, CameraBag and countless others do, and it works very well.
Edit: This comment contained Forklift as an example before, but they have changed their model, so it's removed.
Let me update the comment.
Choices!
As a customer, so many frustrating things boil down to not being given a choice. Not even having a tickbox to express which way you'd like it even if the default is otherwise.
I, in fact, do NOT want continuous maintenance. Ever. I will literally never turn on auto-updates for the rest of my life.
People use them because the products were good or industry standard. They don't prefer them because subscriptions somehow magically enabled them to be better.
They already preferred them over alternatives before subscriptions. If anything, people often complain that they got shittier after the subscription was introduced, once many are onboard and captive.
And people use their subscription versions because a non-subscription version is not made available anymore. The real comparison of what users prefer wouldn't be "X subscription software vs Y non-subscription". It would be "X subscription or X non-subscription".
Regarding your last point, there's plenty of software offering both options ($$$ lifetime vs $ monthly). I don't have the data but I bet they see a TON more sales for $ monthly.
E.g. Final Cut Pro for macOS is available as a one-time purchase for $299.99. Alternatively, you can subscribe to Apple Creator Studio for $12.99/month or $129/year
It puts the incentives on the wrong spot too. They are no longer incentivized to make shit appealing enough to upgrade.
But I think it's not the case incentives are wrong but the reality of business - what do you do when things are feature complete in all the ways that matter?
I haven't used a Mac in a bit but I remember liking BBEdit back in the 00s, and it still seems to exist without having a subscription model.
Open source needs updates too, but somehow we take that for granted.
BBEdit, Sublime et al. are beacons of what software quality, distribution and pricing ought to be.
three quarters of the saas industry is built around such made-up needs. Not much to be proud of there with a handful of exceptions.
as for price, it feels 100% fair to bleed your enterprise customers to subsidize individual customers.
No, we should not praise software companies for hobbyist practices like selling $1 app on the App Store, which say, 30% goes to a digital distribution store, and then of your after distribution fees, about 20%+ percent goes to the federal and local government.
Pay for updates, and charge rightfully like you're supporting an engineer's salary, and that you have a commercial real estate lease to pay, and the compensation packages of full-time employees with benefits.
And boo people who say otherwise. No other professional field do I know of exists where cheap bastards abound while the entire industry is dependent on monopolies to pay the high wages of engineers.
[1]: https://x.com/smorr/status/521033038713880576
[2]: https://www.barebones.com/company/press/bbedit_back_to_mas_p...
If surgeons could wiggle their fingers and make a better scalpel, at no cost, and give a copy to all their friends, also at no cost, I bet they'd have some pretty spiffy scalpels going around soon and many docs would stop paying for them.
Blacksmithing, metal working?
Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.
Where is this mythical no cost software you're talking about? Is it in the room with us right now?
Where does your income come from again? Is it this same zero cost software we're talking about right now? The same zero cost software that an employer pays you a salary and benefits for, or...?
Yeah, but takes nation-state amounts of money to bring new medical devices to market.
> Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.
Buy a laptop, Linux, self, Linux, Linux, Linux. There, zero cost for an individual person to write software on the laptop they already owned for other reasons.
Put another way, my kid can sit down at their computer and write a web browser without paying a single additional penny.
I don't owe it to anyone to pay them money instead of writing an equivalent version myself. I choose to pay some vendors money because they've done nice work and I'd rather slip them cash than spend the time to re-invent their particular wheel. That's the category BBEdit's in for me and why I buy their apps. But I don't have to. And yes, I give away literally 100% of my off-work software for anyone else to use who wants to. I wrote those things with free tools for free languages to run on free operating systems, so why not give back? I have a day job to put food on the table. My hobby projects are entirely in the FOSS world that you seem to have forgotten exists.
We're talking about a macOS program, where companies don't have to bother with Apple's rules to sell their software, so your comment is off-topic.
Panic is good example of this kind of pricing.
Nova is $99 (last I checked), and gets updates for a year. After that, it's $75 for another year of updates.
If you don't want to update, you don't have to. You can even update every second or third year or whatever you want and catch up with all the missing features and updates.
Let's not just throw up our hands and say, "Oh, well. Apple makes me do this, so there's nothing I can do." Innovate.
The app is most useful, when you can point it at any file in the system, and sandboxed apps can’t see certain directories.
This resulted in an awkward “two-tiered” approach, for a short time, then BareBones just abandoned the App Store.
If you buy it that way, then there is a single setting which authorises access to the sandboxed directories.
They don’t mention it on the site, though, so I guess they aren’t eager to share their money with Apple.
Thanks!
They are building a good product for the fun of it and making good money out of it, which they deserve squarely.
For hobbyists with revenue less than $1 million per year, the App Store commission is 15%.