This is a reckless opinion piece and it's going to leave some unfortunate soul with a bill that absolutely wrecks their financial situation.
I'm billed $1M annually for my health care (Stage IV Cancer), and yes, I likely could get that dollar amount lowered through different tactics, but for a measly $9k a year (premiums + deductible), I don't have to deal with any of that nonsense. $9k for $1M in health care is a deal.
Dev.to is pretty good at promoting a constructive community, but you still have trolls who will double down that their opinion must become your opinion
You can take any position you like with your career, but I suspect you’re gonna be limiting yourself on available companies with this stance. A better position would be to improve how you evaluate a company prior to engaging in a coding test.
Lifetime licenses are the pyramid scheme of software sales; it’s not a sustainable model and generally they’re offered for the lifetime of the product, not the purchaser.
Of course that's sustainable, if your license doesn't require me to run some online infrastructure in order for it to continue to be useful.
In the case of the software in question on this thread, the software is useless without the online service.
It's very hard to price a lifetime, one-time-fee license that requires ongoing expenses to provide an online service, in such a way that providing the service in perpetuity is sustainable.
There is a situation I read about but can't properly search for some reason. An English monarch traveling through some town, centuries ago, was sufficiently impressed by something that happened in the town that he left behind an endowment to supply an altar with candles forever.
It’s doable. It’s just you need to know how to make it work. Also keep improving so afterwards people not on those licenses keep buying and paying for it.
Re lifetime licenses, if you offer it for a certain amount of time or until you reach a goal. it can work. At that point, hey! You have funding and you bootstrapped your product/company.
Then you switch to whatever licensing scheme you want.
The model assumes that people who are capable of building software are also capable of pricing it properly. Pricing is really complicated. It is even more complicated if your cost structure relies on other paid products.
Software's development costs are all up-front. Shrinkwrap sales are a one-time monetisation event. Marginal costs of production are nil, so price tends to nil under pressure (that's the producer's downside, if they're unable to create some defensive moat).
As new release dates near, the problem is that the old product has diminished value (or at least is generally perceived to), the new product isn't generating revenues but is generating costs, and the hint of a new release means that the old product has vastly reduced price pressure. The hardware case of this is known as being Osbourned, after Osbourne Computer's ill-timed next-gen product statements.
With subscription service, cashflow is consistent, and is time-averaged over the development/release cycle. From a producer's perspective, this is an upside. For the customer, it's a downside, as risk is transferred, and an inability to make a subscription payment means loss of access to the service.
My sense is that there ought to be a sensible split, where small customers can outright buy product, but large customers (generally, enterprise/government) are on a subscrption basis. The latter have far more consistent budgeting over time, and also comparatively greater negotiation leverage (so that they aren't entirely beholden to the vendor).
Shrinkwrap licensing is actually a very small case of software sales, and is virtually always secondary to subscription, lease, services (contract), advertising, or per-unit revenue models. That last is Microsoft's bread and butter, penultimate, Google, Facebook, and the AdTech-supported Web.
TL;DR: You buy the current release, but there's (possibly) no future.
The idea that the buy-once model is still working is an idea that would need to be justified with some evidence.
I’m having trouble thinking of a significant collection of medium to large-sized successful software companies that still operate that way.
Video Game companies are perhaps a decent example of that model sort of working, except that the industry has a history of constant studio dissolution and poor working conditions.
So, it’s not that I’m assuming you’re wrong, I just think your idea needs to be backed up with some more evidence. It’s easy to declare that everything about the floppy disks in a box software model works fine but I’m not sure reality supports the hypothesis.
Sure it’s sustainable. Of I can serve a user for $4 a year and sell them a lifetime license for $100 That’s a solid business so long as I don’t raise my costs or cut my prices.
yes 1password did that, then they released new version ... and plugin for safari that is available would work only with the new subscription version. no fixed payment version. fantasticCal I bought for 50$ after a year stopped working as new version was released and seems that facebook api on old version was broken - so yolo calendar app another 50$USD for new version. I asked them about broken api and they said it wont be fixed in the old version. There are other examples I can't remember.
1Password actually does still offer standalone licenses, but they don’t advertise them so it’s hard to find.
If you download the app from their website (not the Mac App Store), then there’s an option in the app to buy a standalone license.
I think this points to another factor (besides the cost of running servers) in why so many apps are moving to subscriptions instead of the old purchase-outright-and-pay-for-upgrades model: the iOS and Mac app stores have never supported that model. There’s no way to offer a discount to customers that are upgrading from a previous version.
There is a workaround if you use IAPs for the upgrade rather than pre-download purchase, although you have to release the new version as its own product, not as a simple version bump of the existing app. The newer version can check whether the older version is installed and offer different purchase options.
Apple introduced app bundles a few years ago, and those can now be used, with the same caveat of putting up the new version as its own app. In this case the App Store itself can do the check for the original version and change the price of the bundle.
It's certainly not ideal, but it is possible. Pythonista and GoodNotes are two that I know of that have used each of these workarounds.
My business partners and I had a satire book published through Amazon's platform for a couple years. This past spring the book gained some viral traction thanks to Unilad (or similar site - I forget which), but that attention led to copycats submitting a takedown notice on the book before republishing our book as their own.
The appeal process was a complete joke; we had to get a lawyer involved to get Amazon to release the royalties it withheld because of the take-down.
It’s been 18 months since my company (non-founding engineer) was acquired, and in that time I’ve watched the majority of the team I spent the last 5 years around depart. I was engineer #10, and today only 2 of that original 10 remain (besides myself).
Of the team we had at the time of being acquired, 2/3 have left. Some of those departures were voluntary, others because their roles were eliminated (replaced with different skill sets).
The monolith we built over 6 years continues to live, but its days are numbered, as we’re shifting new development off of the project in favor of an updated stack.
The P/E firm that acquired us implemented a different type of equity system going forward: much like death, you can’t take it with you if you leave before the next exit.
My issue with this article is the narrative: That the truncation technique is applied for the benefit of memory management on the device. What about network throughput? Many of us have the privilege of blazing fast connections, both wired & wireless, but the same cannot be said for other locales.
That's true... to a point. There could be a "load more" button - rather than taking users to a new mail view. There could be a "plain text" mode. There could be a "turn off images" option (there is, but it is hidden well).
There are lots of ways of making things faster for people with slow/expensive Internet connections without degrading the experience for everyone else.
I'm billed $1M annually for my health care (Stage IV Cancer), and yes, I likely could get that dollar amount lowered through different tactics, but for a measly $9k a year (premiums + deductible), I don't have to deal with any of that nonsense. $9k for $1M in health care is a deal.