why does a software like this needs a subscription?

To make it sustainable. That's about the only reason, which given the recent TailwindCSS stories, isn't necessarily a bad reason.

	▲	reactordev a day ago \| parent [-]
		>”To make it sustainable” That’s a flimsy argument. Product sales can do that. Doesn’t need to be a subscription unless you know your market is weak or your data mining. We can’t be ok with everything being a subscription. You won’t have any money left or, worse, only the rich can afford the tools. I’m much happier paying for $60 Steam games and forgetting about them after a month. Sell this for $20 forever and do it 50,000 times by building a good product. If you get to market mass where you need a dev team to keep up with all the bleeding edge changes to SQL that are coming out, then charge a subscription.

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oakesm9 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I prefer the pricing model of TablePlus[0].

$99 for the current version forever with 1 year of updates. Once that expires you can keep using the last version you had access to forever, or get another year of update for $59.

Fair and flexible for everyone.

[0]https://tableplus.com/pricing

	▲	thiht 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can also renew at any time. I’ve paid for it in the past, at some point stopped using it for a few years, and when I started using it again I just renewed for a year to get a few years worth of updates at once. I like this pricing a lot too because you actually support and incentivize the development of new features.