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The argument they're making in this longwinded post applies to most software today. Standalone licenses made sense when your life revolved around one PC saving
by brandonarnold 5y ago
The argument they're making in this longwinded post applies to most software today. Standalone licenses made sense when your life revolved around one PC saving data to its own hard drive. Today, if you want that, there are great free/DIY options.
- avidiax 5y agoSubscription based licensing is mostly rent-seeking. The cloud storage, compute, and egress for a password manager is fractions of a penny per year per user. Yes, engineering and upkeep and new features costs money. If those features are truly valuable, then the market would bear paying an additional one-time fee, just as photoshop 8 had to be better than photoshop 7 in some way to justify the purchase.* But what new features could a mature password manager possibly have? Support for newer version of IOS and Android is the only must-have that comes to mind. * File format changes not-withstanding.
- thatswrong0 5y agoSubscriptions are not rent seeking.
- arepublicadoceu 5y ago> Subscriptions are not rent seeking. Subscriptions for expensive products that relies heavily on deals, licensing and huge cloud infrastructure like Netflix, Spotify, etc? Yeah, it's not rent-seeking. Now, for an app that store your passwords, maybe some attachments and, since forever, allowed local vaults. Nowadays being intentionally crippled unless you adhere to this, comparatively, expensive annual subscription? Yeah, that's totally textbook definition of rent-seeking behavior.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoHaving dabbled in productizing desktop software I think it's more because of API churn on modern OS's. It used to be you only need to buy once, and things work for years. Maybe a modest paid upgrade after a major OS upgrade. Now OS's evolve continuously. Semantic versioning be damned!