4 ms·
How about good old "pay for it once, then own it"?
by xg15 4y ago
How about good old "pay for it once, then own it"?
- chrisseaton 4y agoHow can you own an online service?
- withinboredom 4y agoYou own a license, instead of paying for a license in perpetuity.
- shapefrog 4y agoAnd how frequently would said license be renewed? How about for maximum flexability we do a per user rolling monthly license.
- withinboredom 4y agoSurprisingly, people figured this out a long time ago. When you create something substantially different from what the customer originally paid for, you sell it as something different.
- dotancohen 4y agoIt's actually a fair question. The online service still has hosting and bandwidth to pay for at a minimum. Paying them once does not mean that they will be able to pay for hosting and bandwidth for the next twenty years that I expect to use the product. For scale, I've been using VIM for almost thirty years. Twenty years is not an exaggerated number.
- withinboredom 4y ago4.5 people per second turn 18 years old. Surely you can convince at least one of those people to make a purchase every month?
- dotancohen 4y agoOne $10 - $50 sale per month won't pay for hosting and bandwidth. Not to mention developers' salaries, rent, insurance, electricity, equipment, and a few pence into my childrens' funds.
- drdec 4y agoGraveyards manage to do this, i.e. sell once and provide maintenance for a long period afterwards. It might make the software prohibitively expensive though.
- chrisseaton 4y agoWhen the software requires continuous updates and a server component and storage and things, this doesn't make any sense.
- withinboredom 4y agoThere’s a ceiling, a point you can never pass, with a subscription model due to churn. There isn’t a ceiling with one-off purchases.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoIsn't the one-off ceiling much the same: everyone who is interested has bought it, of at least tried it?
- withinboredom 4y agoNope. The one-off ceiling is basically non-existent for practical purposes. Do I pay you a theoretical infinite amount of money to use your product for a small percentage of my income, or do I pay you a small part of my wealth for your product? With a subscription model, there’s a point where the consumer has paid you “too much” and they will either cancel or find another solution. This is also known as churn. If your avg customer pays you for 8 months, this is a pretty good indicator of how much customers are willing to pay, but you can likely charge more for a one-off cost, sometimes 2-5x more. Since you are likely combatting churn by finding new customers, switching to a one-off model means you can just find new customers and not worry about churn since it doesn’t exist. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes subscription models make a lot of sense. Most of the time they don’t unless you’re selling something that has an infinite cost anyway (like immediate access to “all” movies ever made like Netflix) and would be an infinite cost for the consumer to do it in some other way. But if I can pay a contractor to build your app for less than infinite money, then it shouldn’t cost an infinite amount to use your product.
- tomnipotent 4y agoSubscription's exchange a higher ceiling for a higher floor, which makes running a business much easier.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoSelf hosting option.
- isoprophlex 4y agoSorry, no, ridiculous idea. We've hired some MBA's and they say it'll be "milk your customers for that monthly recurring revenue", or bust. /s
- bagaswastu 4y agoIt goes into the premium category only
- koolba 4y agoIf there’s backing services associated with it such as data storage then the duration of the asset and liability don’t jive.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoNo but then it's really a service. The problem is that a lot of things that aren't a service are being rebranded "as a service" just to extract free revenue.
- shapefrog 4y agoWould you like feature updates with that purchase?
- sethammons 4y agoUsually, no. If the updates are worth it, I'd purchase the next version. I used Adobe Photoshop 5 for _years_. I wouldn't have paid for the CS version.
- neximo64 4y agoIf there's no support and no updates. Can't work with web apps unless there's a version restriction/time limit.
- ben174 4y agoThis. The software would get abandoned once they've cashed in on the bulk of people buying it. They can trickle in more sales over time, but that's not going to amount to nearly as much as the initial payload, and therefore the motivation to continue developing dwindles.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoYou can release new versions though. This is what a large chunk of the software industry has done up until recently. Photoshop has gone through a lot of version numbers through the years. Although it does sort of put pressure on the developers to actually refine their product and continue to deliver tangible improvements. Nobody is going to pay for a UI that's been re-arranged a bit.
- tomnipotent 4y agoExcept a "new version" is arbitrary, and the decision to do so was made for financial reasons and not technical. Every new version of Photoshop had some percentage of people complaining "why can't this update just be a patch?".
- marginalia_nu 4y agoYeah sure, although upgrading was optional. My point is the incentive is on the developer to make it worth while to pay for an upgrade, they can't just phone it in.
- tomnipotent 4y agoThere's even more pressure on a subscription service to deliver value, since you can cancel and the business makes less than selling MSRP (and this usually means losing money on the customer after customer acquisition costs). I can't think of a single subscription service I use that doesn't continue to deliver new updates and value on a regular basis, and other than Adobe's bullshit "annual masquerading as monthly" drama I haven't come across something I wished was still packaged.
- chunkyguy 4y agoAnd who pays for the maintenance and bug fixes? Softwares can't sell like hardwares. When you buy a toaster for example, after the warranty expires you pay for every time you take it out for repairing. With softwares customers expect a life time of warranty, bug fixes and improvements.
- dzikimarian 4y agoI will gladly pay for the new version, when they amount to something I care about. Most of them isn't worth it - I would rather accept some minor bugs. Jetbrains has very good model in that regard. Hope they will not ruin it (new pricing for self hosted Spaces is bit concerning).
- XCSme 4y agoThe problem with software is that even though the program itself doesn't change, the OS and hardware that it runs on often changes and customers expect to be able to use the same app on new hardware too. This requires a continuous maintenance work from the developer side. So, it's often not only "minor bugs" but major bugs introduced by hardware or API changes.
- dzikimarian 4y agoI am aware and I have zero issues with that. Honestly until app is connected to some evolving API, probably it will work for many years before OS upgrade makes it non-functional. Lots of software I used 20 years ago still runs ok.
- horsawlarway 4y agoThe customer pays when a feature they actually care about breaks, and they upgrade. Sell it as is, or with a very short one year support window. Exactly like all sorts of companies used to profitably do until they realized they could extract more value for the same work with a subscription. Rent-seeking in the most literal form...
- matwood 4y ago
- matwood 4y agoThis works as long as customers can't complain the app is broken when a new version of the OS comes out.
- InvOfSmallC 4y agoIt would be nice, Intellij does something similar where you pay for one year of updates. If you stop paying it still works. But in general if it's an evolving product, I don't think you can avoid a rolling payment.
- AH4oFVbPT4f8 4y agoHow does that work when there is a vulnerability or updates that are required? How long does the company have to support the software?