Comment by 8fingerlouie

> There are definitely software out there that do not deserve to be subscription based

My personal experience with software switching to a subscription model is that often that means you will now only get "bugfixes", and new features are usually few and far apart.

There's no longer any incentive to produce major versions with new breaking features, and instead it just turns into a maintenance product, if you even get that.

An Example could be Sublime Text, that while not traditionally subscription based, the license expires after 3-4 years, and needs to be renewed, so it's just a 3-4 year subscription. It was released in May 2021, and receives 1-2 updates yearly, and every update since 2021 has been "fixes" or "improvements". Nothing new has been added for 4 years.

Another example could be Arq Backup. Version 7 was released in February 2021, and while the changelog does have some "new feature" entries, those are mostly just "added the possibility to backup to X service". It does however see much more frequent updates than Sublime Text.

Don't get me wrong, bugfixes and improvements are great, but I expect new features as well. I expect the product to be moving forward, keeping up with current "best practice" standards, and not just turn into a money pit for the developer, just pushing out the obligatory "yeah, we fixed a few bugs" releases.

There are of course also various projects that do things "well enough" that new major releases are not required, like NextDNS. NextDNS works well, and is priced cheap enough to rival the electricity consumption price of a Raspberry Pi running at home. They don't have big releases, are mostly doing maitenance releases, but for the cost, and function of the service that is OK.

And no, not all software falls into this category, and there are plenty of great software that i pay for, which is actively maintained.