> there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions

This is clearly incorrect given that there are plenty of software developers who offer lifetime purchases. In fact there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of.

On a lower level, all that matters is the numbers. If your average customer stays subscribed for 24 months, then charging a lifetime fee equal to 24 months is equivalent to a subscription model. At that point it's irrelevant what's "sustainable" since 24 months is the max you can expect to charge on average anyway.

We like to think of physical products as one offs where what you buy tomorrow is the same as what you buy today.

But I have run a bakery for 5 years, and you get better day by day, you introduce new techniques, find different flours, optimize bake times for fluffiness, crispiness, and taste. The croissants we make today are much better than what we made during our first month.

We improved our product just like how software improves, but we did it without a croissant subscription, but by selling its own version as its own thing day by day.

What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited. In the physical world, we have wear and tear, or in the case of croissants, decomposition or consumption which limit customers from using the same product forever.

Can the same not be found for many software products?

To use iOS as an example, the OPs app Castro charges for night mode, but night mode via OS controls didn’t always exist in iOS so a theoretical Castro v1 could have been released without before it, and v2 would include that new feature. Or when inevitably, v1 no longer works on new iOS versions, people would have to upgrade.

> There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions

Such a price clearly exists -- in an extreme case you could charge 50x your annual subscription price and invest it with a 2% yield to get the equivalent of your subscription as interest. More realistically, if you are already considering taking on debt to grow your business it can make financial sense to offer lifetime licenses that are equivalent to several years' worth of subscription revenue to get an influx of up-front liquidity. Of course as your needs change so will your ratio of subscription-to-purchase price and this may result in a purchase price that is too high for your customers to consider, but the number always exists.

> Every one-time price is a gamble

True, but so are subscription prices! Either way, as the person who sets the prices, you are well-positioned to pick ones that are most likely to be successful.

> There is no such price

If it’s sustainable at $1/month, and a customer is willing to prepay $1200 for a 100 year subscription, that sounds sustainable to me.

> Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.

The gambling goes both ways. Your $1 subscription price is betting that you can convince each user to keep on paying that subscription forever, their $24 lifetime price is betting that customers are going to churn after a year on average.

Your gamble is perhaps slightly safer, in the sense that if subscriptions fall so too do the ongoing costs. But there is a floor to costs (i.e. you need to keep paying your team), so both approaches are pretty dependent on the sales funnel bringing in new subscribers

Depends though what you pay for the one-time price. You can pay an offline version of the application (no extra costs afterwards), or a limited period of SaaS application updates (let's say 3 years).

I agree that paying a one time price and expecting continuos updates and new features is not reasonable.

I remember an article in Byte magazine circa 1982 or so which talked about how the software business sucks because it goes like

(1) Raise capital and spend a year developing a product

(2) Release the product, make a certain amount of money, then revenue dries up

(3) Pay yourself a bit and feed the rest of the money into develop version 2.0

(4) A year later it is struggle to sell version 2.0 because you're not just competing with applications from other people you are competing with your old 1.0, your most satisfied customers might be the least likely to upgrade

And that assumes development for 2.0 goes according to plan! As a software developer who gets a paycheck my life is easier working on a subscription based project my life is easier because management is not facing a financial crisis because a project is running a few months late.

As a customer though I often like paying ahead and I've been through a few cycles like this with Plex. Like I see the lifetime offering from Plex and I have the money now and it looks like a good deal... Then two years later they come up with something that really alienates me (that FAST service) and I hate being pushed into something I want nothing to deal with. So I go to Jellyfin and it is a godawful mess that I never get working quite right, just watching a movie with family and friends becomes an exercise in humiliation.

And I'm thinking... I don't have the option of exit [1] because I can't cancel my Plex pass! If on the other hand I was paying for a monthly subscription they are motivated to care what I think [2]

Now funny I had this summer when I was trying to gentle a stray cat [3] in a room in the other house and wound up watching a lot of Tubi, came to the conclusion FAST wasn't so bad, switched back to Plex, got a monthly subscription, and I am highly satisfied.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model

[2] I hate to be this way but when I have trouble w/ amazon I write to [email protected] and point out that it makes no sense to screw me for $20 because I have a say in at least $2M NPV of AWS cloud spending, when you consider a Prime subscription and how much an ordinary person could buy from AMZN in a lifetime, AMZN has a tremendous amount to lose from "exit"

[3] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/bobb

When I go to a bakery and buy a roll of bread, some of the money I pay the bakery will be squirreled away for future purchases, improvements to the business, expansions, cover lean times, etc.

That margin is called profit and has been the standard way every single business ever has managed ongoing expenses outside of per-transaction costs forever.

Despite this "Gamble", businesses continue to function every day. Some fail, but that is a purposely designed part of the market. If you cannot forecast your costs and revenue, you are supposed to go out of business.

It's funny that only in the world of Tech, the supposedly magical world where you can do so much with so little and one individual can "Build" something used by millions, that suddenly customers have to bear the burden of the business's inability to forecast costs and profit.

What, do you also expect me to tip you when I download?

Keep in mind that the vast vast majority of software subscriptions do not let you continue using the product you have paid for when your subscription lapses, even when the product gets no more support!

$1/day forever is around $9125 using the safe drawdown rate of 4% per year.

So if you’re a bakery and a customer offers $9000+ for a fresh roll every day forever, you should almost certainly take them up on that offer. A smart baker could probably get that number sub-$5000, but you’ll always come out okay around 25x the yearly cost (in this case, $365).

Similarly, if the amortized yearly cost of a customer is $12 (ie, $1 per month), then a $300 forever price is financially indistinguishable from a permanent subscription. (Actually, better: time value of money, they can’t cancel the annuity you buy, etc.)

So there always is a price where that is financially viable.