I recall a good friend of mine around '89 spending weeks just to put together a halfway decent GUI to what was essentially a glorified ODE solver. When I see Apple’s training videos for coding with Swift it seems like there is so much really powerful stuff you can do with such little effort. I’m always a bit surprised to hear that because my impression (of course as a non-dev, hence not speaking from personal experience) is that the tools have become so much better. That makes the shareware model harder to maintain, since you need to recoup those development costs. I do think that the cost of developing an app has also gone up, at least if you want to do professional level UI and graphics. I guess you can imagine that hasn’t exactly increased willingness to pay. Nowadays everything is at everybody’s finger tips at any time with zero-effort download and install. And back in the day you still needed to get access to the software in the first place, like disks through a MUG. As always, just my 2¢.Īlas, I think that it mostly just didn’t make enough money-too few people paid. And that makes me quite vocal in my opposition to subscriptions. My problem as you of course already guessed is that my future options will be influenced by how consumers evaluate subscription services today. And obviously, others might disagree and assess their cost very different. So obviously that factors into my personal cost calculation. getting locked in is worth a good chunk of money. To me the freedom I get from buying a one-off license vs. My concern here is that once companies get comfy with steady subscription cashflow coming in, they could stop selling one-offs (as some have already done). There’s an iOS app I really enjoy on my iPhone and it’s clearly much better than any of its competitors, but I am trying really hard not to use it and populate it with data because it only offers a subscription plan (for real, unlimited use) and I see no way of getting out of that in the future except if I’m willing to lose all I put into it.ĭon’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly aware subscriptions can in many cases end up costing less, or at least not more than a one-time license. Now I guess you can argue a user should never get themself locked in in the first place and I think there’s some merit to that even if in practice that’s easier said than done. I guess it also depends if the app uses an open data format or at least a format other competing apps could import from (like to a certain degree Office). That’s far far more expensive and objectionable than Microsoft’s scheme. This is in contrast with a more expensive subscription, like Adobe’s, which wants $10-53 per month (that is $120-$640 per year) for an individual license that is only good for one person on one computer. The subscription doesn’t cost more until the seventh year, and it is almost certain that I will want to upgrade before that - which will be another $600-800 for non-subscription licenses at that time. With a subscription, I’m paying $85 per year (thanks to Costco discount pricing) for all four computers. With a one-time-purchase license, it would cost $150-200 per computer ($600-800 for my household). In my case, I switched Microsoft Office to a subscription model because it is installed on four computers at home. Yes, but ultimately, it depends on what the actual cost is. And hence I will elect to not submit myself to that system. The other only allows that if I keep paying and paying and paying. One model allows me to keep doing something as long as I want. Subscription means I am forced to pay up on a routine basis just to keep doing what I did yesterday, irrespective of the fact that nothing on my system has changed or that I wanted nothing new of the app.
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