this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Nobody likes subscriptions but there's not really another good way to treat software as the living entity it is these days.
Monopolization needs to die in a fire though.
The old system worked fine. You bought a version and you get to keep it forever. You typically got a year of updates along with it. If your didn't want anything new ever, you were done. If you wanted more updates, you could buy another years worth typically with a nice discount. That way the customer chooses how much they need updates and the company gets paid for the updates.
You're right, and that model actually forced/encouraged development and innovation of the software. If they didn’t make it compelling, no one would buy the new version. Now with the subscription model, these companies don’t need to do anything more than putting a new shade of lipgloss on it every year, they have a captive audience. They can basically pull a Valve and just patch security flaws.
It's all a symptom of Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) becoming the primary revenue metric for many SaaS companies. It's a simple metric that provides a good foundation for forecasting future revenues, so it keeps shareholders happy when a company can explain how much ARR they have and how much they expect it to grow / decline.
Like you said, companies don't need to do anything except protect their ARR with a bit of lipgloss and it also leads to the company shaving off any other parts of their business that are not contributing to that ARR metric.
unfortunately with that style of software it also encourages crackers to pirate the subscription in, I know many are doing that with netlimitor because with newer releases it is forcing a paid bi yearly sub in place of the perma license. I'm holding onto my keys and staying on the older version for as long as I can. Sublime Text is the same way
ARR is why I arr
This. I'm totally for FOSS, but among four commercial apps that I use (SublimeText, SublimeMerge, Reaper and Bitwig), all four use this older model. You buy a period of free upgrades, but you may keep using the current version as long, as you wish. I see this model as beneficial for user and the company (providing them with money), but also encouraging it economically to continue developing the product. In the case of subscription-based model, I see little reason for the company to improve the product.