Subscriptions and Personal Value
There was a fair bit of chatter in the blogs that I follow today that Smile’s TextExpander is changing from an upgrade pricing model to a subscription model (details at their pricing page). It’s an interesting decision, which I guess probably works out well for them since everyone that I see writing or talking about TextExpander seem to be daily users. I say interesting, since it brings to my mind a question of conflicting values: the perceived value to the customer against the value to the developer. To generalize, I think upgrade pricing for software lets it become more valuable to the customer over time as they can amortize their initial investment while retaining the original functionality. From a developer’s perspective (especially if they are active in maintaining software for platform updates, bugs etc) their software gets less value over time as their time investment increases with no additional return per customer. ...