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I think “subscription” should win an award, for odious tech word of the year.

 

You mean odious BUSINESS word of the year.

 

Just a way to give you a low buying price and then recoup the development costs with profit. How many other subscription apps do you use on your computer. tablet and phone. Tis the way of the world now.

Car - 0
Computers - 0
Tablet - 0
Phone - 0

 

it's competing with 'tariff'

 

I don't see subscription-based stuff as that much of a problem, as long as the numbers pencil out.

I can absolutely see how subscriptions are good for stability- over the history of personal computing, a huge amount of utility and value has been lost because the software was sold one time. The developer had no further revenue to live on, so they just went out of business and vanished, with their code and the devices depending on it simply eventually becoming useless.

So I don't see the subscription model as inherently bad, but those costs must be brought to account in the full cost of ownership. Some subscription fees will be acceptable and others will not.

 

AutoCAD is a case of the latter: yearly subscription rivals what a permanent license used to cost. And to justify their ongoing "upgrades", they manage to mess things around with every release.

 

The annual subscription price would depend on the install base and value it adds to the business or owner.

Every year I look at renewing my Quicken subscription or migrate everything over to GNUcash (free group supported app). Your correct, If the value isn't there - it's going to get dropped. Anyone who asks me what to use for household budgeting, I'll tell them to use GNUcash; then migrate to Quicken if they need more bells and whistles. One of these years, I'll stop getting lazy and migrate over.

 

I think this is the most important part.

But I also think of how it's presented and carried out.

For an example, I hate it when I'm paying for a subscription for Office but Microsoft has to throw ads in there for features that aren't going to make me or anyone else more productive, then they kill features I use daily.

Overall Microsoft Office does make my life a little easier and I probably should keep paying the subscription, but I've had it with their constant nagging and never knowing if a feature I find useful might be axed. So I stopped my subscription not that long ago.

 

That is why, when I retired, I moved to the free LibreOffice. IT is good enough for me and the price is right.

 

Why not just stay with an older version of Quicken? If it meets your needs, just stick with it. Or do they forcibly expire now?

My last paid version was 200x-something. After later learning that they put the then-outdated 2013 out there for free, to allow users of older versions to convert to a newer file format, I downloaded that version, and have used it ever since. It appears to still be available directly from Quicken, for free.