For my purposes, there is no meaningful difference between an Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan, a NYT full access subscription or a season’s pass for skiing. They are all entertainment. If I had season’s tickets to a professional team, that would also go in the same category. I know this was just about paid subscriptions, but it interesting as there are some physical objects that come with a ‘subscription’. That is true for the Garmin bike and running computers. It is also true for most pieces of Apple hardware.
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I used the final perpetual versions of Lightroom and Photoshop for many years until I recently upgraded my hardware/macOS and the old 32-bit versions would not run. I now have an Adobe CC subscription at the now-current price of $20/month. I only wish I had started just a few months earlier and locked in the $10/month subscription. But I need Adobe CC. I’ve tried the rest but they don’t do what I need.
Anyway, looking at my subscriptions
- Internet (mail, domains, hosting)
- Streaming (Apple TV+, Pandora)
- Adobe CC
- Newspaper (print edition; Support Your Local Newspaper!)
Largest subscription expense is Wasabi cloud storage, I’m up to $30/month.
I counted my HP Instant Ink subscription in “Other”.
I didn’t count my Spectrum TV channels, but maybe I should have, because paying for HBO, Showtime, and Starz is what gets me HBO Max, Paramount+, and Starz streaming channels, without ads.
Changing software to a subscription model means the developers don’t have a reason to make the program better. They can just sit back and let the money roll in, especially when the subscription is such that if you stop paying, the software no longer works.
And I don’t buy the argument that they need the income stream to pay for the development. If that’s true then how do so many other industries survive? Mazda doesn’t get income until someone decides to buy a new car, which is years apart, but they are still able to develop new models. I didn’t have to pay a monthly subscription for my washer, or TV, or even the iMac I’m typing this on, and yet all these company are able to keep coming out with new product versions.
I’ll give you that a subscription makes sense when the company has to provide infrastructure for the services you use, like a streaming service. But, they even abuse that: create a “service” whose only purpose is to give an excuse for subscription pricing.
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I’ve never found subscription software to be a good value. Every time I’ve had a choice between a subscription-licensed software product and one with a more traditional model, even factoring in the price of having to buy future versions as they appear, the more traditional pricing comes out cheaper in the long run. And over the years, I’ve kept using many a purchased application that has outlived its expiration date and just kept running, at no additional cost.
I have no problem with subscribing to services in general when I can see the ongoing value. I don’t begrudge businesses their sales model. And some subscriptions, like the Creative Suite, are simply a necessity for people in certain industries. But at least for the software I use, I’ve never personally had a subscription pencil out.
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@ace, Huge Kudos! for taking on the umpteen-faceted-convolusion that is subscriptions!
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Almost all my subscriptions are business related. Hosting, backup, software.
I would not buy subscription software ever.
I use your excellent app Mail Archiver X, but I have counted the cost of regular updates as “subscription” in the poll, because I personally wouldn’t dream of continuing to use out of date versions when a new one exists.
I completely accept that I can use old versions if I stop paying, so it is not a subscription… but for me it is a regular cost. An excellent model.
Perhaps I am distorting the poll results.
And I don’t buy the argument that they need the income stream to pay for the development. If that’s true then how do so many other industries survive? Mazda doesn’t get income until someone decides to buy a new car, which is years apart, but they are still able to develop new models. I didn’t have to pay a monthly subscription for my washer, or TV, or even the iMac I’m typing this on, and yet all these company are able to keep coming out with new product versions
Because cars, TVs and washers wear out and have to be replaced. Computers do a combo of wearing out and becoming obsolete. And there is a spare parts industry.
Manufacturers of hardware are guaranteed replacement business.
This is somewhat over simplified but I don’t buy your analogy.
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If they do this they will be overtaken by their competitors, and I will switch.
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You seem to have an odd utility company. I pay mine for the electricity and gas I have already used to heat water and cook food. And when I stop paying them, the hot water and food I had prepared last month before doesn’t magically disappear or start tasting rotten.
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Think it’s difficult to include items such as Netflix & Apple TV in the same “subscription” category as applications & software, such as 1Password, Backblaze, & Dropbox. To me, those are completely different types of subscriptions. On a monthly basis, my costs are a bit high but that’s due to entertainment (Netflix, Apple TV, Hulu). My monthly costs in the productivity area (Backblaze, iCloud, 1Password, TidBits, etc) are pretty low.
I tend to be very organized (possibly over-organized) & all subscription payment due dates (monthly or annually) are noted on my calendar so it’s readily apparent to me when it’s time to “renew” or the monthly/annual payment is due.
Whenever I sign up for something or start a subscription, it gets added to my calendar, w/the start date, the renewal date, & the amount paid.
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If that’s the way it works out, then that’s great. But circumstances are different for different people.
Take, for example, Microsoft Office. Using Microsoft’s web-site pricing:
- Subscriptions:
- Office 365 Personal (1 user, 5 devices): $100/yr ($8.33/mo)
- Office 365 Family (6 users, 5 devices each): $130/yr ($10.83/mo)
- Office Home 2024: (1 computer): $150 (perpetual)
Non-subscription releases come out about every three years, so the perpetual license is effectively $50/yr, if you want to keep it up to date.
So for one user on one computer, the perpetual license is definitely cheaper. And with two computers, it’s a break-even with the 365-personal subscription. But with more computers, the math shifts the other way.
In my home, there are two users and four computers. With perpetual licenses, we’d be spending $600 every three years ($200/yr), but a 365 family subscription is $130 per year - a 35% discount
And this is MSRP. There are often discounts. The last time I renewed, I paid $130 for a 15-month subscription ($8.67/mo) from Costco. (Sadly, there’s no discount right now.)
Now that we’re thinking about the ongoing financial aspects of subscriptions, I’ll add that a one-time cost of, say, $120 is actually higher than $10/month over 12 months. And the longer the subscription price is locked in, the better it is to subscribe.
Why? Because of the time value of money. The actual amount will vary depending on interest rates (higher interest rates will make the subscription more attractive while lower interest rates will drive the total subscription cost closer to the purchase cost) but the cost of each future month, today, is lower than $10.
[yes, accounting and finance fans, I’m talking about net present value here]
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But subscription prices are not fixed, they can and do rise at any time. One time cost locks in the lower price.
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I didn’t include my broadband. However, I’m at the distal end of six miles of optical fiber strung along rural, tree-lined roads in a part of the world prone to hurricanes. So I also pay $5/month to have standby satellite internet. I rely on internet for my phone service (no cell signal) and email (on-site server) so I’m otherwise really cut off when a tree falls across the road. Still, it somehow feels to me as though the backup internet falls outside the category of “unavoidable monthly connectivity costs” so I’ve included it as a subscription.
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Yes. That’s why the known period of the fixed subscription price is important.
I’ll note also that subscriptions are good for dropping and out of use of, eg, software. I pay for Flighty, the travel app, but only on months where I have a fair bit of travel. So maybe 2-3 out of 6? I’m on the $10/month plan, so $20-$30 / year. A lifetime purchase is $299, which means it would take 10 years for that be cheaper than my current approach.
This works well for streaming services, too. We drop off Apple TV and HBO Max when we’ve finished the shows we want and don’t jump back on until something new arrives.
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This is how we been driving our cost down with steaming services cost since 2022.
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Office vs 365 was definitely one of the things I had in mind.
Office has a five-year support cycle. All I personally need is occasional access to a single copy; Apple’s Numbers is more than adequate for most of my needs. So I paid $150 for 5 years of patches, or $30/year, $2.50/month. The equivalent 365 subscription (without Copilot) is $70 per year.
I could technically have bought a second license and still come out ahead.
Of course, this way I don’t get new features, but so far as I’m concerned, Office was feature-complete 15 years ago. And I don’t get access to Copilot AI, but that service is so hamfistedly integrated that I’d rather skip it. And I can’t use the other cloud services, either…but again, I don’t place any value at all on them, not even “nice to have.”
So I guess I am glad that Microsoft has chosen to offer such a range of licensing models. Even if they are bewildering.
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… Only if you purchased it when it was first released. If you purchase after it’s been out for a year or two, that isn’t going to move the date when support ends.
If you buy on the release date, and upgrade at the end of support, you will end up buying your upgrade two years into that product’s cycle and will only have three years of support remaining. So in the long term, perpetual licenses are still only good for three years of patches, assuming you don’t keep using it after the end of support.
That having been said, I have absolutely no problem using an unsupported version, as long as you only use it with your own documents and don’t use any web/cloud services. Malware doesn’t spontaneously form [citation needed], so you should be perfectly safe if you only work with your own documents and don’t open documents that come from untrusted sources.
Yeah, I skipped 2021 entirely, and held out for 2024 for that reason.
Since you can license MS365 on a monthly plan, it may well make sense to do that for a few months if a you need a current version and the next “perpetual” release is right around the corner, and then transfer to that release train.
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