That is not a subscription … that what you describe there is SaaS (Software as a Service) and and 99% of the world would agree sucks lol.
A proper update and support subscription:
Its not a new concept its how commercial/enterprise software has worked for the past few decades. You license the software, sometimes its even free with your first contract. And then you pay for what in enterprise software we call a “Maintenance Service”. This gets you updates and support for a period of time. In enterprise these are usually sold in multi-year blocks but at the smaller scale its done yearly or even quarterly and for indie nothing wrong with monthly.
We already offer our tools via a subscription option.
$15 a month you get all our tools, effectively the tools are free
And the license is perpetual, yours to keep forever
You only have access to updates and tech support if you are subscribed, you can of course use community support and we do provide full source so you can patch and fix it yourself if you don’t want to pay us to.
But if you expect us to patch it, you pay for that service
If you expect us to provide you with live support, you pay for that service
There are channels to license our products that don’t support subscription, for them we use anual “major” releases. … basically its a yearly subscription. You pay for the year, you get that year’s worth of updates and support. You are obviously welcome to keep using it past that but if you want another 12 months of updates guess what … your buying the next year’s release.
Fact of the matter is software has an ongoing cost to maintain and support of software requires technical staff and hours of time per ticket in the best case so there is a real cost that we must account for.
If you think you are being priced out by a sub, if we where to account for the average life time updates and support cost per license I assure you that you couldn’t afford the tool at all. With a subscription, you can get the tool for nearly free and only pay for the updates and support you need. If your looking to do something HUGE and need constant live support and on demand patches … we can do that, if you want to get 1 month of updates and then disappear for 4 years only to come back then and get 1 more month … you can do that to
But no Pay Once and get Life Time updates and support is not even vaguely sustainable and isn’t expected in any other sector of software precisely because the unit economics of it just cant work.