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Comment by justinlloyd | Hacker News Reader

That is an incredibly myopic viewpoint as subscriptions go much further than a few shows on Netflix or AppleTV.

I subscribe to Shapr3D, Fusion360, Jetbrains, Netflix, Adobe, 1Password, Dropbox, and a half-dozen necessary services. I'd much rather just pay for the software at that point in time and never upgrade. But rent seekers don't like that business model.

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I hear you, but: good software/services require continuous investment. It's kinda hard to set an up front one time price that covers that without it being ridiculously high. You're not buying one copy of a static piece of software: you're buying all the future bugfixes, security mitigations, server maintenance, future integration work (it has to work with the next upcoming version of your phone's OS, or the next version of your browser, etc), adhering to important future tech standards in the space. With a subscription model, those costs can be amortized over the lifetime that you're actually using the software/service, and can increase or decrease as necessary due to economic conditions as well.

> you're buying all the future bugfixes, security mitigations, server maintenance, future integration work...

There's also middle ground that used to be very common: pay a fixed fee and get a perpetual licence + free updates for a certain period (say for a year, or until the next major release). As a user, that's my preferred model as it gives me complete control over my expenditure and over when/whether I upgrade.

(This is mainly about standalone software that fully runs on my own hardware.)

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