I deeply want to understand and solve this problem. I’m an indie dev that created a desktop app (electron) to design and print labels. I sell a one-time license

I deeply want to understand and solve this problem. I’m an indie dev that created a desktop app (electron) to design and print labels. I sell a one-time license for $147 but also a subscription for $14.99/month. About 20% of my revenue is MRR. It’s up to the user, and they seem to love it when they have this choice. Is it sustainable for me? I think so. I license per computer. My largest customers have 20+ computers (grocers and franchises). My competition is 2-3x my price, and require yearly support contracts. I purposefully do NOT enable auto updates because when label printing works you don’t want it breaking because I failed to catch a regression. Users can downgrade and their subscription still works. My subscription server/license system is custom built on jwt, so I effectively embed license information inside the signed token and the app verifies authenticity using a public key. Thank you, node and react. So why buys the subscription? Mainly four types of users: 1) seasonal, such as farms who only label a few months a year 2) users who can afford $15 now but not $147 3) users who can put a $15 monthly charge on the cc without filling out an expense form 4) suspicious users, who then fall in love, cancel and convert to a one time license Yet, I don’t offer anything from the cloud. Yet … I’m about ready to deploy a “cloud rendering” service that lets users upload a saved design file, and then you can call an API with variables that get rendered into the label result (barcodes, hide/show logic, color). But here’s the kicker, the result can be a bitmap image, or it can be the base64 data to send to the printer to achieve the exact label you need to print. With this solution you could effectively offload all design of labels from within your app, but still interface with the messy world of label printers. For this last bit subscriptions make sense. I’m offering a monthly service that costs me money. More info at https://label.live/ https://label.live/