Actuarial science might have a thing or two to say about that. All you need to do is make sure the average amount people pay is greater than the average cost fo

Actuarial science might have a thing or two to say about that. All you need to do is make sure the average amount people pay is greater than the average cost for the life of an account. Before the recent explosion in subscription pricing for everything under the sun, we’d been selling software on one-time costs for fifty years. Subscriptions certainly are attractive and easier for businesses, probably easier to sell with freemium models, but they do have downsides like cancellations and not much money up front (may take longer to recoup investments). > Unless the model included essentially building an endowment the first ten years and then funding the business off interest. Ten dollars is surely much greater than the server costs for a single user for a month, or a year. That one-time cost may well be designed to be an endowment of sorts. Plus the avatar changing fees are probably, on average, not one-time fees.