Software breaks, sometimes very easily. Who knows if the next OS update or 3rd party add-on will screw something up? Maintenance is important, and unlike some

Software breaks, sometimes very easily. Who knows if the next OS update or 3rd party add-on will screw something up? Maintenance is important, and unlike some other products you can't just look around your city and choose from 10 or 20 businesses to do a repair. With a lot of software you're screwed unless one person, the author, can keep it working. I'm not sure this is entirely clear to the average person buying software. The problems that software can solve may not "stay solved"; they depend on their entire ecosystem to be stable solutions. You aren't paying $10 to obtain something. You are paying $10 to temporarily solve a problem. That's a little unusual among products that are sold. For instance, if you buy a toaster, the infrastructure dependencies are pretty low; there isn't much risk that the voltage in your wall will change and prevent the toaster from behaving the way it was designed. Not only that but there are many regulations governing how such a product can be made, minimizing the chance that people buying toasters will have to replace them every 4 days. If you buy an appliance, it tends to last. But the reasons for appliances lasting don't really apply to software. It's bad for consumers to pretend that it's the same type of purchase.