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I feel like folks on HN (many of us developers ourselves) give this theory too much credance. Subscription pricing may be necessary to finance continuous develo

I feel like folks on HN (many of us developers ourselves) give this theory too much credance. Subscription pricing may be necessary to finance continuous development, but that doesn’t mean it will. Many developers (particularly larger corporations like Adobe) have taken advantage of this perception to see how much money they can squeeze out of people while making… fewer updates than their users are paying for (to put it nicely). I’m sure there are indie developers who get away with this too (although I feel less bad about that). I’m not totally against this way of thinking, but I do think we need to start presenting it as the double-edged issue it currently is, not the fresh perspective it used to be.

freedomben 3y ago
Agreed, and further I don't think I buy the premise that without updates it won't work. For SaaS that's definitely true. For some desktop software that's true too, but it's true far less than we make it out to be nowadays. I have a handful of Android apps that got updated in a direction I didn't like that I still run and still run fine (sometimes dropping server supported features like old PocketCasts before the NPR acquisition) even though they haven't been updated in years. For apps that don't rely on server support this is nearly always true.
- spacephysics 3y ago
  I agree, and that’s a good argument for an alternative icing model that includes a one time payment for a version, I think jetbrains does this (and a discount on subsequent update patches)