Why Everything is a Subscription and it Sucks

I don't know about you but I am getting tired of paying monthly for my software.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are valid reasons why something should be monthly:

1. Spread the high initial cost over amortized payment plans.
2. The service provision incurs costs to provide (overhead) such as metered API use or storage.
3. Scarcity of resource or opportunity cost, such as pre-allocated staff time or physical space (eg. room booking).

There are likely more.

When Paid Covers Free Folks

But what gets to me is when I sign up for something and the incremental value is low, and it seems the paying customers are subsidizing the free ones, instead of making the free plan more limited/basic and charging a lower price for the paid.

I think Easel, the example above, is amazing, but I don't think the value I get from paying is much better than the free plan, and this is especially true considering the open source alternatives or tools that can be purchased for a single lifetime cost. It's a shame because I would prefer to support the company, I think they are wonderful people.

Really I only upgraded because I was using multiple CNC machines, now I am back to one CNC model I don't need the paid option. This is a shame.

It's hard because freemium is a real thing, and it is how they attract customers, but the balance seems to be off whack.

Coming from an open source background, especially my work in the WordPress world, I fully understand how much of a financial hit supporting free users can be, and how one-time payments don't cover the lifetime of support, so in this case perhaps they should be looking at adding a killer feature to the paid option to make it more worthwhile?

Paid Used to Mean No Ads

Even more annoying is when even the paid plans show advertising, such as how some streaming services are going (Amazon prime, Hulu, etc).

Windows shows ads in the operating system, even Apple tries to push ads on me. This can't be as profitable as their other lines of business so is it just to appeal to the stock market as incremental profit? Using monetizing our data for tracking and measurement?

Paid Lock-In

Leaving the worst to last, is Adobe.

Not only do you not get the remainder of your term refunded if you cancel, but now they have really abusive terms that you MUST agree to if you want to continue using the software you already paid for.

This is what I think a monopoly acts like, but now Adobe has actual competition can they keep this up?

Over to You

What do you think about subscription software?