On the subscription side, I think it's an issue as it moves the control away from the consumer when doing those upgrades. With the older, one-time purchase upgrade model, which has since fallen out of favour; I could evaluate once a year whether the updated product was worth the additional cost. With a subscription model, there's a chance I could end up funding the development of features that I neither want nor need.
lolinder|2 years ago
The internet changed that, because people began to expect you to fix bugs in a released product indefinitely. Declaring that you are all done fixing bugs is now not just an obvious necessity given the infeasibility of distributing small updates on CDs, it's now a conscious decision that has to be explained to the customer in sufficiently clear terms that they don't come complaining to you later. Failing that, you just have to plan on supporting a purchase indefinitely, and the easiest way to organize that is as a subscription for a single main release channel.
JetBrains has what could be a good model for products that lend themselves to a regular release cadence—it's a subscription, but you keep the license for the version that was current on the day of your last payment. But not every product lends itself to that kind of regular, predictable release cadence.
conductr|2 years ago
I'll try it because of hype/marketing/good Show HN/etc, and then never really adopt it. So my thought is it's better to just make it easy to cancel the subscription otherwise I'd probably never even try it.
toastal|2 years ago