Why Sell Lifetime Plans, in a Default Subscription World?

Why Sell Lifetime Plans, in a Default Subscription World? | pketh.org

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Kinopio

Dec<br>’25

Why Sell Lifetime Plans, in a Default Subscription World?

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There’s never been just one way to buy software. In ye olden times, if you liked some shareware, you’d mail off a cheque, or call up a hot-line, to get the full version. Later on, you could walk into a store and walk out with a shiny box, manuals, and disks.

(source)

MS Windows 1.0

These were some expensive boxes:

Name<br>Year<br>Price<br>2025 Equivalent

Adobe Photoshop 3.0<br>1994<br>$895<br>~$1,956

BBEdit<br>1993<br>$120<br>~$250

CorelDRAW 5<br>1994<br>$595<br>~$1,300

Final Cut Pro 1.0<br>1999<br>$1,000<br>~$1,850

HyperCard<br>1995<br>$120<br>~$250

Kid Pix<br>1991<br>$50<br>~$112

MacWrite Pro<br>1993<br>$120<br>~$315

MS Office<br>1995<br>$500<br>~$1,025

MS Windows<br>1995<br>$210<br>~$450

No one technically had to upgrade, but in a year or so, everybody did, because we wanted those sweet quality-of-life improvements, nicer design, and exciting new features. But eventually every product being continually developed will become good enough for its target market.

When that happens, companies (especially the VC-backed kind) now need to contrive new and increasingly stick-like reasons for customers to pay again. From made-for-marketing ‘features’ that suck to use IRL, to breaking compatibility with older versions, to spamming you with marketing notifications and embedded ads. Their relationship with customers goes from symbiotic to parasitic.

On the other hand, the pursuit of completeness should be an ideal fit for subscription software because, theoretically, steady monthly payments from long-time customers incentivizes stability, polish, and helpful improvements.

Subscriptions are particularly helpful for businesses:

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) makes it way easier for a business to hire employees because they know they’ll be able to pay their yearly salaries.

Historical MRR can be used to project the rate at which future revenue will go up 📈, which could be used to take on some debt to finance expansion or R&D as safely as possible.

Especially for solo creators, just knowing that you have ~$3000/mo coming in every month is way less anxiety-inducing than making $6,000 in a good month – but knowing that next month you could just as likely make $1000, or maybe even $0. It’s like being a farmer, surviving at the mercy of good weather.

What do you grow, when the future could be anything”

There’s also a third reason: Tier or usage-based pricing prevents customers costing more money than they contribute. But unless you’re burning unlimited money generating LLM tokens, the risk of losing money on a web app customer is either basically zero, or very easy to predict otherwise (even over the long-term).

On paper, subscriptions could be a win-win. But some people, including many readers of this blog, have good reasons to be wary of them.

Subscription Woes

Kinopio subscriptions can be easily cancelled, pricing is grandfathered, receipts are emailed, accidental renewals can be refunded, and there are no cancellation fees or deceptive dark patterns. Many indie subscription apps also offer subscriptions in good faith.

But a business model that’s regularly exploited by well-known corporations, like the New York Times and Adobe, poisons the well for everyone else. Every time someone gets tricked into signing up for a non-refundable yearly subscription instead of a monthly one, or has to call to cancel a subscription they created online, those bad feelings become associated with all subscriptions.

It’s hard to have good long-lasting relationships with customers if they’re expecting the worst.

(source)<br>No one wins in a shootout between a company and its customers.

That being said, I still think subscriptions make sense to offer.

For most people, subscriptions are as normal as the old boxed software model used to be. And the much lower-cost to entry can be very helpful – especially in competitive markets where customers have a lot of options.

The onus is on companies selling subscriptions to earn trust by being transparent about who they are, what they believe, and how they’re funded (i.e. what their long-term incentives are). A public roadmap and changelog also go a long-way towards proving they practice what they preach.

Even to non-technical people, paying for subscriptions makes intuitive sense when the product requires a server for helpful things like file uploads, public URLs, and real-time collaboration. But the per-user-cost of running a production CRUD server is basically zero. Counter-intuitively, what you’re really paying for is the considerable effort and expertise that it takes to keep full-featured software running reliably and continuously-improving.

That’s part of the reason why I increased prices over the years as the app grew in capability and complexity.

How I Priced Kinopio

For context, here’s Kinopio’s pricing...