Is subscription software a good thing or not?

Posted by Andy Brice
Jun 10, 2016 at 08:31 AM

Subscriptions make sense for software where the vendor has ongoing fees (e.g. server costs). It is also good for the vendor as they have a smoother and more predictable cash flow compared to one-time purchase.

Prices in the Apple app store are unsustainably low, so allowing to vendors to extract a bit more value from customers over the long term seems like a good thing. The alternatives being less and less software in the app stores or ever more intrusive ads.

However I plan to stick to my one-time fee pricing for my desktop software, Hyper Plan. It is simple to explain and simple to administer. If I ever add a server component (e.g. to allow multi-user concurrent editing) then I might charge for that on a subscription basis.