this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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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