Subscriptions make companies lazy and it degrades the product. I'm looking at you: Foundry, Adobe, Maxon, heated seats on BMWs ...
They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.
Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.
Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.
Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.
Man I think you're spot-on. Back in the day the biggest motivator companies had to make good products was that they would be competing in the market with their own old products.
Wow, really great insight--I've never seen it framed like this before, but it makes so much sense. Typically software becomes worse over time, and therefore uncompetitive with previous versions of the same software. The fix? Never make the previous software available, and force users to upgrade to the worse, new version.
This explains a lot about why subscriptions have become the norm.
Subscriptions can create an illusion of a deal, because in principle, you’re ostensibly able to benefit more for a fixed price. But are you?
Netflix is a good example. You can watch as much as you want for a flat rate, but how many people watch enough to justify the monthly fee? (Putting aside the question of whether watching so much is actually a benefit in the first place.) Companies recognize the distinction between potential use and actual use, and so in practice, many are paying more for less and subsidizing the outliers that consume more. When actual use exceeds predicted use, the company will raise the price of subscription.
Subscriptions make sense for situations where there are regular maintenance costs or where the benefits are received at a steady and proportional rate.
The ayes have it. Motion passed, now let's discuss the subscription tiers. How many stickers should we include with the premium 'founders' subscription tier?
The video game industry is plagued by this problem. With live-service games becoming commonplace, there has also been a recent trend of games being released in an incomplete state. The shocking part is that multi-million dollar "AAA" game studios are engaging in this behavior. There's also a strong "own nothing" component to the issue.
I'm sorry to write that all those were problems before subscriptions too.
Managers trying to hit targets and ratchet performance metrics, product managers trying to clear queues, the exponential growth of complexity from size (ala mythical man month)... Fundamentally it's a misalignment of incentives and and as yet unsolved problem of scaling social knowing.
I continue to maintain that the problem here is not greed but laziness. Make money with less effort or make even more money over a longer term with more effort. Building for the future requires effort and investment and has the potential to make more money than focusing purely on the current quarter.
> Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves.
Why can't they expand their customer base instead? With a great product, you sell millions of copies, pay everybody's salaries and pay investors.
Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing?
I have never in my life seen an advertisement for any app with a pay-once offer, even though I have bought most of my apps as pay-once. And they're always several levels higher in quality than other offerings.
Affinity did have a growing userbase, partly because you could just buy the app for $50 and use it perpetually.
I assume with Canva buying them out and making it "free", Affinity will fade away and eventually just be folded into subscription-only, cloud-only "products".
>Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing?
I suspect Adobe's customers look at their tools in a different way to the typical HN poster. They don't want too many new features because that disrupts their existing workflow. They would prefer to get annoying bugs fixed over something that causes them to relearn the software. They aren't even that worried about subscriptions because the software is a means to an income.
Updates were fewer and far between back then, but they were bigger updates with more features. Now, many subscription services seem content to milk fewer feature upgrades staggered over years.
This is how I've felt about Apple, and it doesn't just include a model with a jack, but a worsening of the iOS system, models that are no for most users of previous models. Apple has run out of ideas, and maybe that's the entire smartphone category.
People will still buy smart phones, but I think their will be less enthusiasm for the latest and greatest model.
"It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion. You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore."
That's your decision. I've published an music album on Bandcamp. You can buy it, I'll send you a real physical tape and you can _download_ high quality FLAC you own then.
If you like to own things, you have all the possibilities.
But I agree, we maybe tend to forget about high quality stuff, if we consume conveniently low quality streaming content for example on Spotify.
It’s a descision everyone makes, in almost all cases (okay, maybe only in few mobile app cases) "ownable" alternatives exist.
> You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore
This is the more general statement, once again, alternatives exist. I own almost all my apps and tools, and 100% of my music. Either because they are free, or because I bought them. Sometimes I’d would be easier to go the other way, but it’s still (mostly) a choice.
The point of the article is that Goodnotes stopped selling a lifetime purchase version of the app and a lot of other products go this route. You can't buy things that can't be bought.
It does mention music in the quoted part though. And even regarding goodnotes, it’s a choice to use a tool like that. There are *many* note taking apps.
This is why I collect vinyl records, make my own cassette tapes and have a fairly huge DAS drive with all my media (movies, music, photos, etc). Ironically, I use Plex (non free), but I can pivot very easily if needed.
But even buying your album comes with limitations.
I can not copy and redestribute copies. I can not play it in public spaces for an audience with further ado, etc.
The concept of owning is, rightfully, changing. We are a lot of people who use this planet, and the purist view of ownership simply does not make sense.
You can not own a part of a river to dump chemicals, just for thst to flow to the next owner down stream.
> can not play it in public spaces for an audience with further ado, etc.
Ah that can of worms. When i would play music out loud in the office, the company has to pay a fee to the copyright reimbursement foundation and a fee to the same system representing the artists (actually the studios, but semantics). And that would be for every employee no matter who heard it and if it was audible in public spaces they count for the max allowable. And that comes on top of the fee I'm already paying (double tax, yay). There is a reason most companies pretend they don't know about this system or ask you to use your own devices and headphones.
I have zero qualms within myself copying, saving backups, and playing media anywhere and to anyone. I treat lots of ridiculous laws as other people's opinions, and I believe millions of people do the same, and none of us ever get "caught".
> The concept of owning is, rightfully, changing. We are a lot of people who use this planet, and the purist view of ownership simply does not make sense.
This is a bizarre statement. On the one hand, property rights are considered a fundamental human right, and for good reason. And on the other, digital goods don't take up space - no matter how many copies exist. What bearing does the number of people on the planet have in light of this?
All I see is excuses for exploitation by our corporate overlords.
No, I don't have all the possibilities. I can own movies in physical form, but I can't own the movies I want to own. And it can be even worse. Here I can watch Disney/Pixar movies wonderfully dubbed into local language in cinemas with my grandchildren, but even Disney+ subscription doesn't have these audio tracks.
So, no path to one-time pay for a cumulative upgrade? And, if you stop paying after you "upgraded" the license, you lose access to the thing you bought?
I have seen it done in the past, in a limited way.
You would buy a product, and it would give you access to the thing you purchased at that version number plus a number of versions afterwards. Pass that point, you needed to buy it again. I think it is a good compromise between "I own the thing I paid" and "I have to give lifetime support for people who purchase an item once many years ago"
It's asymmetrical, you publish something online, immediately it is used by social networks or AIs for profit. Vice versa you get an app, it's not even yours.
I think we should strive to avoid playing this game..
But in the end i feel in this particular case, it’s ops fault. He can avoid using that app there’s a world of alternatives for writing apps and organizing apps.
The irony is that a lot / most / all? of these apps and services are built and run on open source software.
(is fully closed source software development even still a thing? is there any popular propriatary programming language / editor / runtime / ecosystem?)
Can you suggest a middle ground that works? JetBrain's pay-to-upgrade but keep the fallback license?
I'm genuinely asking. I'm (finally) making my own app without the VC crap, and my best-case scenario is to sell for a fixed price with no plans to upgrade/upsell later. But the app isn't yours, no, since I'll have to deal with the servers/support/admin/taxes on my end. You're buying a license to use it. Is that not ok?
These aren't related items so there's no comparison.
Let's say you publish a blog post guide on how to set up a MySql cluster and I use that as part of DevOps contract work for a company. Do I owe you money?
What if I form an opinion because of a political piece you published then produce my own blog post?
AI use of public data to produce new information is exactly what we do as people.
No I mean we're in the same community, and perhaps next thing I do is I answer a related question on Stack Overflow that you or someone else can use. Everyone wins, including you, because by writing you also get to structure your thoughts better and perhaps discover some new way.
I mean the degree of use or exchange should matter.
Just earlier this month I was at a recording studio and no ILok plugin worked because of a connectivity issue god knows where. Plugins that did cost a lot of cash for them and were in the advertisement material of the studio.
Now even hardware things that used to work for decades need apps. Some guitar pedals need apps to operate. The first generation of those has already become paper weight: after Digitech was bought by Samsung, all the app servers died.
Apps that need a server are never for my behalf, they are purely for creating a dependency. The real feature is allowing an actual backup of the data.
Streaming has the even worse issues. It promises to pay creators, but after listening to only two bands in a month, as an experiment, no visible fraction of the $10 didn’t went to neither of those bands. It probably went to some major label, of course.
I am 100% disillusioned on anything touched by tech and see piracy as a way to resist this crap. So far only piracy has been reliable in having things work as they should when they should.
In my student years I used DC++ just to watch free movies. With the rise of streaming I kind of forgot about it, until I got annoyed.
I don't like the Spotify. Most songs I like are available, but the 'playlist' experience is terrible. A lot of songs are actually part of an album. "Is an album like a playlist on a disk?" my kid asked. No it's not, a playlist is a randomly assembled list of songs, but an album are songs who belong together, they are the album.
And video streaming is the opposite. The experience is nice, but there is so much missing even if you have multiple streaming subscriptions.
Besides convenience there is politics, what if Trump wants a list of everyone who thumbed up 'The White House Effect' on Netflix?
So, after many years I took an old Raspberry 3 and started torrenting again. To my surprise piratebay is still active (although my old account doesn't work anymore, no clue how to provide new content).
I'm really happy, the Raspberry has a Samba fileshare. Just download the VLC app on your smart tv and you can stream anything you like.
I know there are more advanced solutions to torrenting, but I like this simple approach, and it makes me completely independent. Let's start sharing great content again!
I was pulled back into it after a work colleague showed me a Netflix-like website that seems to have all the films ever made. Apparently there's several of those, they're just invisible to Google.
In Germany we can't really torrent from home, so those sites are very widespread. People just watch stuff at work during lunch, after hours when waiting for a colleague to finish, etc...
I'm not gonna pay for Amazon because it's Amazon, or Disney because it's Disney. And I'm about to kill my Netflix, since it's also complains about Apple Private Relay which I'm not gonna turn off as much as I also hate Apple.
Funny enough, even the CTO of a past company I worked was back into piracy, even after his company had a successful exit. People are just tired of those services, period.
We used to own tools that made us productive. Now we rent tools that make someone else profitable. Subscriptions are not about recurring value but recurring billing and at some point every product decision starts bending toward dependence instead of ownership.
Back when subscriptions started to be a thing some people (myself included) were cautiously optimistic.
The problem with paid upfront and paid upgrades was that it eventually resulted in bloated programs because the only way to continue having a business was to add features.
Subscriptions, in theory, could leave the focus on user experience and fixing bugs, because in the end the people who are paying are those that like your product as it is now.
Now of course this optimism was misplaced. Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
> Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
Constant internet connection permitted that. Cloud is only a convenience: you don't have to install and update anything locally, it is updated centrally for everyone by knowledgeable admins instead of some users having problems locally and needing support for each upgrade.
I know this from experience, one company has a local desktop version of our product, but they complain that it requires work from administrator, because users can't upgrade their desktop clients automatically, so they want local-hosted webpage version. This is SCADA system for district heating.
Normal internet users don't want to deal with local-hosted own servers, they want to press a button and it should work. Cloud based systems make that a little more possible.
For me it's more like "people used to make free tools so that nobody owns them, no everybody complains they don't come for free without effort". Think of gcc, linux, and many others. There was a huge effort invested in them by people that could sell their knowledge and choose to share it.
We can build today complete products with nothing paid on the tools. This was NOT the case 30 years ago.
Personally, being somewhat technically inclined I find there is rarely much of a reason to pay for the ongoing use of software. The large majority of software I use is open source and self-hostable. The JetBrains IDEs are good enough that I would consider paying for them, if programming was my livelihood (and I didn't have an employer to pay for them). But programming is just a hobby for me so I'm not inclined to pay for an IDE. Really the only class of software I occasionally pay for is games, but that is always a once-off payment, I don't subscribe for anything.
When I pay for subscriptions, it tends to be for ongoing access to content (music, movies, etc) or infrastructure (storage, server usage, etc). Often that stuff comes bundled with proprietary software but if anything I would much rather it didn't and I could just interact with the content/infrastructure using open source software.
I'm not generally thrilled to be paying a subscription for content, which I would rather own, and indeed I am getting more and more into taking ownership over it. But admittedly there are other benefits to things like music subscriptions, like discoverability and the fact that you don't need a load of storage.
Note taking apps are something I see discussed a lot on HN and there seem to be loads of fancy subscription based services in that space. I don't get it at all - I use Joplin to keep notes and already I feel like that is an over-engineered solution and am considering just going back to text editor + .txt/.md files.
I understand this is tangential to your point, but..
> The JetBrains IDEs are good enough that I would consider paying for them
They are also not subscription-based. You get to keep what you pay for. You have a perpetual license to use it. We can quibble over licenses, but in effect, you keep what you bought forever.
Yes, if you want upgrades, you then need to pay for that, and that's where it starts to resemble a subscription. But, it's literally a "You keep what you bought" model. They let you use a years worth of upgrades and then you can decide if you want to pay to keep those upgrades. Which, frankly, is incredibly fair in my book.
Again, I realize this is not the point of your comment, but your Jetbrains remark spawned this line of thinking related to the context of subscription based software.
Readit News
They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.
Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.
Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.
Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.
Not anymore, and it shows
This explains a lot about why subscriptions have become the norm.
Look at how bad Adobe Acrobat got before they even started thinking about subscriptions.
Netflix is a good example. You can watch as much as you want for a flat rate, but how many people watch enough to justify the monthly fee? (Putting aside the question of whether watching so much is actually a benefit in the first place.) Companies recognize the distinction between potential use and actual use, and so in practice, many are paying more for less and subsidizing the outliers that consume more. When actual use exceeds predicted use, the company will raise the price of subscription.
Subscriptions make sense for situations where there are regular maintenance costs or where the benefits are received at a steady and proportional rate.
> Subscription-only will seem great for a while
The ayes have it. Motion passed, now let's discuss the subscription tiers. How many stickers should we include with the premium 'founders' subscription tier?
> Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade
Managers trying to hit targets and ratchet performance metrics, product managers trying to clear queues, the exponential growth of complexity from size (ala mythical man month)... Fundamentally it's a misalignment of incentives and and as yet unsolved problem of scaling social knowing.
Why can't they expand their customer base instead? With a great product, you sell millions of copies, pay everybody's salaries and pay investors.
Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing?
I have never in my life seen an advertisement for any app with a pay-once offer, even though I have bought most of my apps as pay-once. And they're always several levels higher in quality than other offerings.
I assume with Canva buying them out and making it "free", Affinity will fade away and eventually just be folded into subscription-only, cloud-only "products".
I suspect Adobe's customers look at their tools in a different way to the typical HN poster. They don't want too many new features because that disrupts their existing workflow. They would prefer to get annoying bugs fixed over something that causes them to relearn the software. They aren't even that worried about subscriptions because the software is a means to an income.
Now, they're often dreaded, pushy, and frequent.
People will still buy smart phones, but I think their will be less enthusiasm for the latest and greatest model.
That's your decision. I've published an music album on Bandcamp. You can buy it, I'll send you a real physical tape and you can _download_ high quality FLAC you own then.
If you like to own things, you have all the possibilities.
But I agree, we maybe tend to forget about high quality stuff, if we consume conveniently low quality streaming content for example on Spotify.
> You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore
This is the more general statement, once again, alternatives exist. I own almost all my apps and tools, and 100% of my music. Either because they are free, or because I bought them. Sometimes I’d would be easier to go the other way, but it’s still (mostly) a choice.
Bandcamp is a real treasure for this reason. It and buying physical CDs are the only ways I buy music anymore. Streaming is for suckers.
I can not copy and redestribute copies. I can not play it in public spaces for an audience with further ado, etc.
The concept of owning is, rightfully, changing. We are a lot of people who use this planet, and the purist view of ownership simply does not make sense.
You can not own a part of a river to dump chemicals, just for thst to flow to the next owner down stream.
Ah that can of worms. When i would play music out loud in the office, the company has to pay a fee to the copyright reimbursement foundation and a fee to the same system representing the artists (actually the studios, but semantics). And that would be for every employee no matter who heard it and if it was audible in public spaces they count for the max allowable. And that comes on top of the fee I'm already paying (double tax, yay). There is a reason most companies pretend they don't know about this system or ask you to use your own devices and headphones.
This is a bizarre statement. On the one hand, property rights are considered a fundamental human right, and for good reason. And on the other, digital goods don't take up space - no matter how many copies exist. What bearing does the number of people on the planet have in light of this?
All I see is excuses for exploitation by our corporate overlords.
> I bought the previous “lifetime” version of the app, but for WHAT, since I have to pay for the subscription to access the newest features.
Yeah, that's how "ownership" works. When you own something, nobody else changes it–for better or worse–out from under you.
That is certainly not a requirement for "ownership", no.
> And, if you stop paying after you "upgraded" the license, you lose access to the thing you bought?
What part of "nobody else changes it–for better or worse–out from under you" is unclear?
You would buy a product, and it would give you access to the thing you purchased at that version number plus a number of versions afterwards. Pass that point, you needed to buy it again. I think it is a good compromise between "I own the thing I paid" and "I have to give lifetime support for people who purchase an item once many years ago"
I think we should strive to avoid playing this game..
But in the end i feel in this particular case, it’s ops fault. He can avoid using that app there’s a world of alternatives for writing apps and organizing apps.
(is fully closed source software development even still a thing? is there any popular propriatary programming language / editor / runtime / ecosystem?)
I'm genuinely asking. I'm (finally) making my own app without the VC crap, and my best-case scenario is to sell for a fixed price with no plans to upgrade/upsell later. But the app isn't yours, no, since I'll have to deal with the servers/support/admin/taxes on my end. You're buying a license to use it. Is that not ok?
Let's say you publish a blog post guide on how to set up a MySql cluster and I use that as part of DevOps contract work for a company. Do I owe you money?
What if I form an opinion because of a political piece you published then produce my own blog post?
AI use of public data to produce new information is exactly what we do as people.
I mean the degree of use or exchange should matter.
Now even hardware things that used to work for decades need apps. Some guitar pedals need apps to operate. The first generation of those has already become paper weight: after Digitech was bought by Samsung, all the app servers died.
Apps that need a server are never for my behalf, they are purely for creating a dependency. The real feature is allowing an actual backup of the data.
Streaming has the even worse issues. It promises to pay creators, but after listening to only two bands in a month, as an experiment, no visible fraction of the $10 didn’t went to neither of those bands. It probably went to some major label, of course.
I am 100% disillusioned on anything touched by tech and see piracy as a way to resist this crap. So far only piracy has been reliable in having things work as they should when they should.
In my student years I used DC++ just to watch free movies. With the rise of streaming I kind of forgot about it, until I got annoyed.
I don't like the Spotify. Most songs I like are available, but the 'playlist' experience is terrible. A lot of songs are actually part of an album. "Is an album like a playlist on a disk?" my kid asked. No it's not, a playlist is a randomly assembled list of songs, but an album are songs who belong together, they are the album.
And video streaming is the opposite. The experience is nice, but there is so much missing even if you have multiple streaming subscriptions.
Besides convenience there is politics, what if Trump wants a list of everyone who thumbed up 'The White House Effect' on Netflix?
So, after many years I took an old Raspberry 3 and started torrenting again. To my surprise piratebay is still active (although my old account doesn't work anymore, no clue how to provide new content).
I'm really happy, the Raspberry has a Samba fileshare. Just download the VLC app on your smart tv and you can stream anything you like.
I know there are more advanced solutions to torrenting, but I like this simple approach, and it makes me completely independent. Let's start sharing great content again!
In Germany we can't really torrent from home, so those sites are very widespread. People just watch stuff at work during lunch, after hours when waiting for a colleague to finish, etc...
I'm not gonna pay for Amazon because it's Amazon, or Disney because it's Disney. And I'm about to kill my Netflix, since it's also complains about Apple Private Relay which I'm not gonna turn off as much as I also hate Apple.
Funny enough, even the CTO of a past company I worked was back into piracy, even after his company had a successful exit. People are just tired of those services, period.
The problem with paid upfront and paid upgrades was that it eventually resulted in bloated programs because the only way to continue having a business was to add features.
Subscriptions, in theory, could leave the focus on user experience and fixing bugs, because in the end the people who are paying are those that like your product as it is now.
Now of course this optimism was misplaced. Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
> Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
Constant internet connection permitted that. Cloud is only a convenience: you don't have to install and update anything locally, it is updated centrally for everyone by knowledgeable admins instead of some users having problems locally and needing support for each upgrade.
I know this from experience, one company has a local desktop version of our product, but they complain that it requires work from administrator, because users can't upgrade their desktop clients automatically, so they want local-hosted webpage version. This is SCADA system for district heating.
Normal internet users don't want to deal with local-hosted own servers, they want to press a button and it should work. Cloud based systems make that a little more possible.
We can build today complete products with nothing paid on the tools. This was NOT the case 30 years ago.
You're setting yourself up for failure from the get go, stop chasing gadgets and 99% of your problems will go away
why not to use actual notepad instead?
Deleted Comment
When I pay for subscriptions, it tends to be for ongoing access to content (music, movies, etc) or infrastructure (storage, server usage, etc). Often that stuff comes bundled with proprietary software but if anything I would much rather it didn't and I could just interact with the content/infrastructure using open source software.
I'm not generally thrilled to be paying a subscription for content, which I would rather own, and indeed I am getting more and more into taking ownership over it. But admittedly there are other benefits to things like music subscriptions, like discoverability and the fact that you don't need a load of storage.
Note taking apps are something I see discussed a lot on HN and there seem to be loads of fancy subscription based services in that space. I don't get it at all - I use Joplin to keep notes and already I feel like that is an over-engineered solution and am considering just going back to text editor + .txt/.md files.
> The JetBrains IDEs are good enough that I would consider paying for them
They are also not subscription-based. You get to keep what you pay for. You have a perpetual license to use it. We can quibble over licenses, but in effect, you keep what you bought forever.
Yes, if you want upgrades, you then need to pay for that, and that's where it starts to resemble a subscription. But, it's literally a "You keep what you bought" model. They let you use a years worth of upgrades and then you can decide if you want to pay to keep those upgrades. Which, frankly, is incredibly fair in my book.
Again, I realize this is not the point of your comment, but your Jetbrains remark spawned this line of thinking related to the context of subscription based software.