Andrew Johnson
Aug 24, 2017 · 1 min read

I would certainly agree that there are some software products that have no reason to be subscription based, but it’s a clear trend. I think App Stores have driven it to a certain extent, in that developers for that eco-system find their income drying up pretty quickly. For established vendors I doubt it’s that simple — and their cashflow models would have been designed for big incomes at version release.

For Adobe, the subscription model works well for me. £8.79 / month for Photoshop and Lightroom is £211 over two years. If I recall, that’s less than the cost of upgrades on that time cycle. I think each person needs to look at how the economics play out, it’s not always bad, from a financial perspective at least. Some consideration for the non-economic issues must be given as well, e.g. the security implications of handing over security passwords to a third party, but I guess that was already done when storing vaults on Dropbox? I’m not a 1Password user by the way.

)

    Andrew Johnson

    Written by

    A person.