[buildfocus]

That's an impossible model though - you're asking somebody to do unlimited work for you forever, for a fixed one-off price.

In that world nobody should ever ever sell a lifetime license, it's a huge responsibility with strictly limited upside. Imo "Use the current-ish version forever" is the only reasonable expectation, and that's a fair trade.

It's expectations like this that drive subscription models. People do (quite reasonably) want ongoing support and updates, but that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.

[NoLinkToMe]

> that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.

Not really, perpetuities have existed for a long time in finance, even longer has the concept of ‘time value of money’ existed.

You can turn $3m in revenue today into a US treasury bond portfolio that delivers $120k a year. That’s enough to pay for maintenance and minor development of new features.

You can also say: I’ll just charge 120k a year in fees infinitely. But it has the same present value (see time value of money) as 3m today. These worlds are interchangeable, only in the upfront world there is no risk that some of your customers walk away at some point making further upkeep untenable for the remaining customers.

[ferrouswheel]

I bought a lifetime gold license to Mediamonkey 3, 15 years ago.

I have since gotten Mediamonkey 4 and Mediamonkey 2024.

Unfortunately I don't like the 2024 refresh, but I can use it if I want to. I would also be completely happy if they just did maintenance/bugfixes on the original version.

[CGamesPlay]

Somebody once gave me a free ice cream, so why should I ever pay for ice cream?