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I really like 1Password's old model for a user point of view; they asked money for every new major version of 1Password, but old version bug fixes were free. Th

I really like 1Password's old model for a user point of view; they asked money for every new major version of 1Password, but old version bug fixes were free. This way, if you needed the new features or newer OS support, you could pay for the new major version (same as buying a new suit) or you could use the old version if it was fine for you. This model is fair, but still generates more income for the developers from loyal users who upgrade.

Silhouette 9y ago
That's how most software used to work. You paid for the big new versions, but if you had one already, you might get minor updates for free either from the Internet or even going back a bit further from the cover disc on the front of a magazine or a BBS. The thing is, that model relies on the big upgrades being sufficiently attractive to users that they will pay more money just to get the new features. It's clear what you're getting and what you're paying for it. That works well if you keep making big steps forward with whatever your software does that are valuable to your users. It doesn't work so well if all you've got to offer is a few incremental refinements that don't much change the value of your product. As others have been mentioning, sometimes software is essentially complete, and this way you can't just keep selling something that's done to the same customer over and over again. This is why some of these calculations about the cost effectiveness of subscriptions for business software make me laugh (and then not subscribe). They'll compare the cost for an ongoing subscription today with the cost of buying every new version before, ignoring the fact that new versions before might not have been a big advance and plenty of customers probably only upgraded every other version or less, or in some cases not at all.
- alex7o 9y ago
  There are people who have bought Skyrim more than once.
- falcolas 9y ago
  There's another option to "keep building new features for an existing app": Take your expertise and apply it to a new app. Why keep all your eggs in a single bucket when you have a great opportunity to diversify and not risk pissing off your customers with pricing changes?
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    That's also how a lot of software companies used to work. Even the big business names like Microsoft and Adobe added major new products to their portfolios over time. At the other end of the spectrum, there were people writing indie games or little utilities to make your computer work better in some small way, who might have dozens of products in their back catalogue that were all low-cost, one-off purchases. A lot of software today seems to be more like movie or sports franchises: once you've found a winning formula, you just keep cranking it out with slight variations from one year to the next. After all, as long as there are enough suckers in the market to pay your bills if you do that, what's to stop you?
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  All you've said is true, but ignores the fact that many of these companies have large ongoing expenses to keep the old versions valuable. Servers, support, dev time for those bug fixes, etc.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    Perhaps, but how many of those expenses are self-inflicted? In terms of fixing bugs, those are defects in the original product and I think it's reasonable to expect a software company to make a decent effort to correct them, just like any other purchase. That includes providing an appropriate level of customer support if something goes wrong. Updating existing software to support new protocols or maintain compatibility with new hardware or other software is a tricky area. My personal take on this one is that businesses selling software ought to indicate up-front how long they guarantee to provide this kind of support for so that everyone knows what the deal is, but then switching to some sort of ongoing support contract at a reasonable cost to extend the working lifetime of the software if the market wants it is fair, because this does mean extra work and provide extra benefit for the customer. (The crucial difference between this and the full subscription model is that paying for extra maintenance is optional here and you don't lose what you already have if you stop paying.) As for servers when businesses are choosing to store customers' data on their own systems rather than their customers', or to include activation or copy-protection technologies, or other similar issues, I have much less sympathy for the developers. In many such cases, the limitations are entirely artificial and basically only there as a way to enforce the need for ongoing payments or spy on customers' data or otherwise impose constraints that aren't in the customer's interests. Cloud-everything may be very trendy, but much of this new cloud-based software could have been implemented just as effectively on a customer's own network and using VPNs for their mobile staff if the industry had chosen to move in that direction instead.

Silhouette 9y ago

That's how most software used to work. You paid for the big new versions, but if you had one already, you might get minor updates for free either from the Internet or even going back a bit further from the cover disc on the front of a magazine or a BBS. The thing is, that model relies on the big upgrades being sufficiently attractive to users that they will pay more money just to get the new features. It's clear what you're getting and what you're paying for it. That works well if you keep making big steps forward with whatever your software does that are valuable to your users. It doesn't work so well if all you've got to offer is a few incremental refinements that don't much change the value of your product. As others have been mentioning, sometimes software is essentially complete, and this way you can't just keep selling something that's done to the same customer over and over again. This is why some of these calculations about the cost effectiveness of subscriptions for business software make me laugh (and then not subscribe). They'll compare the cost for an ongoing subscription today with the cost of buying every new version before, ignoring the fact that new versions before might not have been a big advance and plenty of customers probably only upgraded every other version or less, or in some cases not at all.

alex7o 9y ago
There are people who have bought Skyrim more than once.
falcolas 9y ago
There's another option to "keep building new features for an existing app": Take your expertise and apply it to a new app. Why keep all your eggs in a single bucket when you have a great opportunity to diversify and not risk pissing off your customers with pricing changes?
- Silhouette 9y ago
  That's also how a lot of software companies used to work. Even the big business names like Microsoft and Adobe added major new products to their portfolios over time. At the other end of the spectrum, there were people writing indie games or little utilities to make your computer work better in some small way, who might have dozens of products in their back catalogue that were all low-cost, one-off purchases. A lot of software today seems to be more like movie or sports franchises: once you've found a winning formula, you just keep cranking it out with slight variations from one year to the next. After all, as long as there are enough suckers in the market to pay your bills if you do that, what's to stop you?
ryanwaggoner 9y ago
All you've said is true, but ignores the fact that many of these companies have large ongoing expenses to keep the old versions valuable. Servers, support, dev time for those bug fixes, etc.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  Perhaps, but how many of those expenses are self-inflicted? In terms of fixing bugs, those are defects in the original product and I think it's reasonable to expect a software company to make a decent effort to correct them, just like any other purchase. That includes providing an appropriate level of customer support if something goes wrong. Updating existing software to support new protocols or maintain compatibility with new hardware or other software is a tricky area. My personal take on this one is that businesses selling software ought to indicate up-front how long they guarantee to provide this kind of support for so that everyone knows what the deal is, but then switching to some sort of ongoing support contract at a reasonable cost to extend the working lifetime of the software if the market wants it is fair, because this does mean extra work and provide extra benefit for the customer. (The crucial difference between this and the full subscription model is that paying for extra maintenance is optional here and you don't lose what you already have if you stop paying.) As for servers when businesses are choosing to store customers' data on their own systems rather than their customers', or to include activation or copy-protection technologies, or other similar issues, I have much less sympathy for the developers. In many such cases, the limitations are entirely artificial and basically only there as a way to enforce the need for ongoing payments or spy on customers' data or otherwise impose constraints that aren't in the customer's interests. Cloud-everything may be very trendy, but much of this new cloud-based software could have been implemented just as effectively on a customer's own network and using VPNs for their mobile staff if the industry had chosen to move in that direction instead.