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| ▲ | kstrauser a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Microsoft's revenue in 1990 was 1.18B when they launched Office, sold for one-time payments. Of course they're pushing people to subscribe now so they can get that sweet recurring revenue, but that business model sustained freaking Microsoft for about 30 years. I'm not convinced by unsustainability arguments. Now, it could be that competing with FOSS makes it a lot harder to make money now. I'm sympathetic to that, inasmuch as I can be for someone who wants to sell what others are giving away. That would be challenging. But why is it suddenly impossible to sell software, when they was the common model until rental became popular a few years ago? What's inherently different now that let someone sell programs for decades but now it's just impossible? | | |
| ▲ | trhway a day ago | parent [-] | | buying - capital expenditure with amortization (and usually goes through a lot of approvals, centralized IT, etc.), subscription - expense, frequently decided upon and paid directly by the Line-Of-Business/dept. Expense is generally better, so it is chosen by business when possible (it is all very generic of course, and there are niche cases where situation is different) That matches on the supplying side as subscription revenue is also generally better. |
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| ▲ | PostOnce a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | at $4 a month he is going to need one hell of a lot of customers and zero churn to even keep the lights on over his ramen bowl. | | |
| ▲ | reactordev a day ago | parent [-] | | All it takes is some dev shop to say “give me 5,000 seats” | | |
| ▲ | exabrial 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Your example proves otherwise: 5,000 seats x $200 price = $1,000,000 cash realized, right now, no debt financing needed for funding development, regardless if said dev shop leaves you. 5,000 seats x $4 = $20,000 month. That kinda pays the salary of a single FTE, and development ceases if customer runs away, only safe option would be to finance further development to insulate yourself from churn. | | |
| ▲ | reactordev 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Bro, $200!?! For a SQL browser? Nah… $20 x 5,000 seats = $100,000 realized right now. With that, he could invest it, finish the features, start work on 2.0 and charge and upgrade of $20 to all his customers when he has MSSQL, MySQL, pgsql, SQLite, Oracle. 2.0 could include cloud db’s. Not everything has to be a subscription and if people continue to find value, they’ll upgrade if they think it worthy. Subscriptions tend to be vampires on the wallet and are used to trap users into paying a developer indefinitely. I consider it hostile to users. The exception is if it’s a service that can’t run on my machine. Or a service that does back office for me. |
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| ▲ | groby_b a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Fairly certain it'd be more sustainable than a $4/month subscription, which is a nuisance for anybody who'd actually want to pay for this. $4 is targeting the hobbyist market. Within that segment, the tiny population of devs who'd actually be willing to pay for tools usually uses a large assortment of tools, and is not willing to pay a separate subscription fee for each. |
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