After writing this I realized that I use a general “you“ a lot— by whom I mean the developer, not you specifically, Unregistered.
And, from the customer, there was an expectation of constant free updates.
This expectation was never reasonable, and I’m not sure it was ever really an expectation at all. I never used to get free updates for software, I always had to pay for “upgrades” if I wanted them. Free upgrades forever was an illusion created by app developers fighting for market share in a new environment and they could get away with it as long as they could keep bringing in new users. Now the app market is saturated and that model won’t work anymore.
If customers have that expectation it’s because short sighted developers gave it to them. Now they need to be disabused of it, and gods help us if subscriptions are the only path forward.
There are apps I bought years ago on the AppStore that I keep getting updates for and I keep wondering why. I haven’t paid a cent in years and really don’t expect it to keep working.
They were continually fixing bugs, updating or modifying features AND keeping up with OS changes.
Bug fixes should be free. I expect to get what I paid for, it if it doesn’t work right yet I expect it fixed.
Conversely I don’t expect what I didn’t pay for, so feature improvements and OS compatibility shouldn’t be free.
Not to mention paying support teams to reply to calls and emails about the product.
My expectation of support scales with the price I pay for something. I don’t expect support for something I buy for 5 bucks on the AppStore. If I pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for something, I’d expect a number to call when things aren’t right.
Support falls into to categories for me: is it a feature, or a base expectation. Like above, I have the base expectation to get what I paid for and if it doesn’t work then I need a way to contact the company to solve the problem. That level of tech support shouldn’t be a profit center for a business because that screws up the incentive structure. One of the motivations for building better software should be reduced support costs— if I need to subscribe for basic tech support then a business profits from their failures.
Support is a feature when it becomes handholding, training, and handling me and my mistakes rather than them and theirs. I have far more communication with OmniGroup than I should expect because they are really, really responsive and half the time the response is “go to this inspector pane and toggle this control”— fixing me, not them. To me, that’s a feature of an OmniGroup product and one that I’m happy to pay for in their high but reasonable purchase prices and with regular upgrade purchases.
No, the developer NEVER made a “one time investment”. There’s far more money spent after code delivery SUPPORTING a piece of software than there is spent on the initial release. This reality, over the years, has finally been understood and subscriptions are a response to that reality.
So I basically agree with the premise, but not the conclusion. Most software isn’t done the moment you buy it, there’s significant ongoing costs that need to be accounted for in the purchase price. I don’t think subscriptions are an appropriate response to that. Create something worth buying, price it appropriately, and sell it to me. Don’t charge me monthly for something that you’re promising to roll out over months and years. I’m not an investor, I’m a buyer. Not everything is a Kickstarter project.
Generally I see software transition to subscription when it’s mature— when there’s less innovation happening, fewer new features, and no real schedule for releases. It’s an effort to keep bringing revenue in when developers aren’t convinced people would pay for a new version any longer.
I’m not interested in paying for that, or for fixing bugs in what I already bought. If I incur support costs, then offer a support program similar to AppleCare (free to get setup, but then paid when the problems are more like yours than theirs). Don’t make me keep paying for continued use of existing functionality. If you’re planning to create new features and add more value to the product then do that and give me the option to buy it when you’re done.
