My opinion on pricing for software is pretty straightforward: If its a local app, cloud/sync/whatever "anything" should be optional/opt-in. Developers should c

My opinion on pricing for software is pretty straightforward: If its a local app, cloud/sync/whatever "anything" should be optional/opt-in. Developers should charge an upfront fee for a point-in-time of that release, bug fixes are included for N years, but feature releases are available as an annual/whatever upgrade. If cloud/sync/whatever makes sense for an app, then that should be available as a separate, monthly service fee. If it makes sense, then the developer can "bundle" both that monthly fee and the annual/whatever feature upgrade fee into a single subscription. That unified subscription is what most apps do, but its important that it be separate and opt-in, while giving customers a way to pay you otherwise. That way, your revenue is aligned with customer happiness. I think back to the 1Password transition to the subscription model, where they left tons of customers behind on the non-sync product without giving them a way to pay; now, their revenue is not aligned with the success & happiness of those customers. They're still customers! Yeah, they're not paying you every month. They'll probably pay you again in the future. But, oh no, they can't fit into your MRR metrics that you need to communicate to investors; that's your problem, but you're making it the customer's problem, which means you're actually anti-customer. If we're speaking of a website, then fundamentally, you've willfully unaligned your business model with any ability to price it transactionally. Maybe that's fine; if I think about something like Slack, that app makes zero sense to price transactionally, it's gonna be monthly, so I can't complain about that business model. But, Notion [1] is an example of an app which should have a transactional model; not everyone wants sync. Everything is connected to Money. And, in software, I think the biggest reason why customers have began noticing how much slower and less reliable software has become is literally because of Money; its because every app now needs to be a web service. Because your app is a web service, it has to live on the web. It gets served to customers by underpowered AWS m5.large instances; did you know that your customer's iPhone is more performant than an m5-tier AWS instance? It has to travel a thousand miles over the internet. The data model lives in a database; your customer has a 5Gbps SSD hardwired to the PCI-E bus of their CPU, but instead, by putting the data In The Cloud, you're making sixteen network hops just to query for something. None of this is better. Some of it is necessary, for some product domains, but don't fool yourself into thinking its better. [1] https://notion.so https://notion.so