Subscriptions That Respect Users

Almost fully a decade ago now, JetBrains introduced a subscription pricing model — to much uproar from their existing users. Unlike most other vendors that introduced subscription models in the 2010s and 2020s, they actually listened to that feedback, though. Rather than a flat subscription price, they landed on a simple, elegant, and ultimately excellent model. Quoting the most important point from their update after those two intense weeks:

You will receive a perpetual fallback license once you pay for a year up front or 12 consecutive months.

The biggest pain point and problem of subscriptions is that when you stop paying, you lose access to the software. This makes some sense for a hosted service. For a desktop application that does not require ongoing costs, though? It does not. It never has. Paying for updates is reasonable; paying for support likewise; but paying to keep access has never seemed right. Some of that is the history of software having come in boxes, but some of it is not. Most of it, in fact, is the intuition — the correct intuition — that this piece of software, once distributed, no longer imposes any direct costs on the author of the software.

The compromise represented by JetBrains’ approach recognizes this. You pay a reasonable cost for what amounts to an up-front purchase of a given version of the product, and you get permanent access to that version. If you want ongoing updates, you pay for them. But that’s a fair deal!

I was thinking about this again recently becasue I find myself rather frustrated with both Adobe Lightroom CC and Kaleidoscope. Each is adding features I do not care about at all, and which I frankly have no interest in paying for. But because they both run on the “traditional” subscription models, I cannot stop paying for them without losing access to them.

I don’t object in the least to paying for the tools I use. I actually go out of my way, and have done for over a decade now, to pay for important services like email (n.b. affiliate link for Fastmail). I do object, though, to losing access to software for which I have already paid many hundreds of dollars! The compromise represented by the JetBrains IDEs is still unexcelled for software that operates on subscriptions. I wish other vendors would adopt it, if they remain committed to subscriptions.

(The other alternative, which I still like better — especially for desktop software, where it is easier than it is on the mobile platforms, courtesy of the anticompetitive and hyper-controlling platform vendors — is the one Dorico still uses: Sell a license for each major version, and make the major versions big enough and valuable enough that people are excited to upgrade.)