The subscription pricing of today is similar to the way pricing used to be when software was sold in boxes at retail stores. Many of the programs I bought in the 80's and 90's didn't have an "upgrade" version available at a lower cost than the full version. The software developer simply sold their latest major release in a box on the shelf and you paid the same price whether you were upgrading the software or buying it for the first time.
You're blatantly lying. Software in the 80s and 90s was sold with Upgrade Pricing. In fact, Developers were quite generous with how old your current version could be to upgrade to the latest version... Have a version from 1986 and want to upgrade to the new version in 1992? Sure!!!
Competitive Upgrades were very common back then, as well. If you use Word, WordPerfect would give you upgrade pricing to move to their product. Some companies still do this, but it was incredibly popular back then; and a useful tactic to competing against market dominant players (i.e. Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, WordPerfect, Borland/Microsoft Developer Tools, etc.).
Upgrade Pricing has been common place throughout the entire software industry since the 80s and possibly even the 70s. It was also common in the shareware market that boomed on the MS-DOS and Windows platforms in those times.
What you're stating is an outright falsity.
Additionally, many startups and entrepreneurs sold their own products, directly...
Sure, with the ability to transmit software over the internet, software companies don't have to pay for retail space on store shelves any longer, so that lowers their cost to an extent; but the cost of living for the developers has certainly gone up from what it was 20 or 30 years ago. There are hosting and bandwidth costs to be factored in, as well, though those costs are probably negligible in the grand scheme of things.
Retail space was never an issue. You could create Floppies and CDs on demand to ship to customers. You could have manuals printed on demand to ship to customers. It was simply not an issue.
The cost of living for developers has gone up, but also the ability to monetize their talents has gone down. The F/OSS movement has basically destroyed the Shareware and Startup market for client software. Programs like H1B has contributed to stagnated wages for the vast majority of developers. In the case that you do come up with a solution that is good, you'd better hope it is extremely complex and domain-specific, or your product will be cloned and given away - basically destroying your business model (or rather... your entire business - even if your prices were very, very reasonable).
Look at the developer tools market, for example, to see an extreme case of how this happens...
So, all-in-all, I understand why the subscription pricing model has to exist. I gladly pay for subscriptions on software that my livelihood depends on because I know I will make many, many times more than the cost of the subscription back in profits in my business. I suspect that most people who depend on Ulysses for their business will gladly pay $40.00 per year in exchange for having it on all their devices and having upgrades included automatically. For people who don't want to pay every month or ever year, they have other options.
Who depends on Ulysses for their business? What business depends on this product? Scrivener is [probably] better than Ulysses, so I don't see how anyone can realistically be "dependent" on this tool for their business. It doesn't do anything the (cheaper) alternatives can't do. It actually does
less than the alternatives do. It was always more expensive, less flexible, and less powerful. Ulysses is not the Microsoft Excel or Adobe Photoshop of it's market niche. It never was, so I'm curious as to how some business can be so dependent on it that they'd feel compelled to subscript to it in lieu of just dropping it and buying a cheaper product...
There is no compelling reason to pay for this product in a subscription. There are alternatives that are as good or better than it. More flexible. More powerful... And available as perpetual licenses across more computing platforms... Even cheaper, including before the move to Subscription Model...
Any business can easily just "dump" this product and lose, really, nothing at all.
I'm not seeing your point at all.
And as I've stated in other threads, this becomes an issue when more and more products move to subscriptions.
Every developer tells us it's only a "coffee to go," but didn't the people defending Day One's move to a subscription say the same thing? $5 is only a coffee to go. How about $8? How about $18 when you add in Apple Music? How about $28 when you add in Amazon Prime? How about $35+ when you add in Netflix? $40+, cause we love our Evernote... $50 because Dropbox is the best cloud service EVAR! $60 because if it ain't Adobe, it Ain't good (photography plan)...
Per month, mind you...
You do the math.
The issue isn't the cost of the subscription. When viewed in isolation, as many of you people tend to do, the costs for all of those products seems very reasonable. The issue is that with the huge move to subscriptions by everyone, you end up with a [effectively] monthly bill that keeps rising by chunks as the products you feel your business is "dependent upon" move to subscriptions.
A category to which Ulysses does not, and never has, belonged... It is nothing more than a less powerful tool with a prettier interface when compared to competitors, frankly...
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I blame Microsoft and the MS Office subscriptions for this ghastly software subscription trend.
Microsoft Office is still available as a Perpetual License, both for home and business use.
Find someone else to Blame.
Adobe kept CS6 available for perpetual license purchase until January 2017.
This is not the fault of Microsoft or even Adobe. Their products were so expensive that the average home user wasn't buying them, anyways. Also, those products are ubiquitous and infinitely flexible in application.
They are not the same as the "utility apps" we see moving to subscriptions.
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Yes, you've repeated my points exactly. Only people who find value in paying for software that they can find similar software cheaper or for free will find value in paying a subscription price.
I DON'T see any value in Ulysses (or Scrivener, or any other word processor) because I already own MS Office, and my preferred office apps (Pages, Keynote and Numbers) are free. And they're good enough. I wouldn't consider paying a subscription for any of them, because I don't rely on them to make a living and they offer nothing over what I have (for me), thus there is no value for me. But I completely understand people who do find value in them—and I understand why the devs are doing it.
The thing is, we're making legitimate/serious arguments. "Devs are just being greedy" and "it doesn't cost that much to make X app" are stupid, childish arguments made by stupid and childish people.
Microsoft Word is not a replacement for Scrivener, and Scrivener is superior to Ulysses (in a number of ways) for writing workflow. Scrivener is like the modern equivalent of LaTeX for people who prefer GUI WYSIWYG systems.
No one says "I'm not going to use LaTeX because I already own Word and prefer Pages," because these tools serve different markets.
Calling Scrivener a word processor makes about as much sense as calling Final Draft a word processor, or calling Photoshop a RAW Development Tool. Just because it resembles something else in some ways, doesn't mean it's the technical equivalent of that other thing.
And we're talking about stupid, childish arguments by stupid and childish people...
