Licenses in a Subscription World

https://wch.io/writing/startups-and-licenses

by robmay • 6 years ago

32 8 6 years ago

wrs• 6 years ago

As a customer, I reject this analysis. I am very tired of being burned by products where you have to be locked into an annual license before you can discover that the product doesn’t meet your needs. And the ones where I have to commit to a number of users or devices for an entire year, and that number can only ever go up? What are you smoking? Whose business is like that?

No. Please charge me for my actual usage, and earn my business by making me happy every month, or at most every quarter, not once a year.

semireg• 6 years ago

This is so tough and I’m still trying to figure it out. A few years ago I built an MVP label printer app on Electron/React using all sorts of native node modules for a seamless design and print experience. I support dithered images, tons of barcode types, excel/csv integration with variables, and can render multiple labels to PDF “sheets” for laser/inkjet printing.

My software competes with free software provided by DYMO and Brother thermal printers, and also competes with $350+ software designed for more industrial printers like Zebra, etc. My software is used by consumers and businesses and I sell it for $47.99 per-computer perpetual license.

I’ve thought about breaking the features out into $20 for a text/image license, $50 for that and barcodes, and $100 for all that and data integration. But that’s a lot of complexity for both implementation and explaining to the user. Ugh.

Another thought is to do a subscription of $10/month and after 12 consecutive payments the user is awarded a perpetual license that will work for that most recent version. But that implementation is also complex...

I feel stuck. Consumers don’t want to spend more than $20, and some businesses will gladly pay whatever I charge. Some consumers want barcodes and data integration. Some businesses just need text.

I don’t know what the solution is to make everyone happy.

Since my app is “a web app” running locally I’ve given some thought to pushing the design interface into the cloud and keeping the electron app around as a print agent. Then, users will have the ability to design and print to any printer with an agent available. This would be an easy subscription sell, but then the user would just prefer the entire experience locally, anyways. Ugh.

Fun problems to think through, though!

antaviana• 6 years ago

Make it only available as a subscription and narrow your focus on B2B by increasing a bit your prices to kick out the bulk of consumers.

Avoid adding complexity and dependency with cloud components to justify a subscription, especially if you are a one-man show. With B2B you do not need to justify anything, just set your rules and they will make the business case.

Have a single license type (subscription). You do not want to innovate with licensing, just have one single offering and then optimize the price of that offering to your market.

tonyedgecombe2• 6 years ago

I don’t know what the solution is to make everyone happy.

You can't.

My own product is split into workstation and server versions. That works for me but I still get customers with special circumstances complaining about it. You just have to accept you can't satisfy everybody.

sumanthvepa• 6 years ago

I agree for small products, it makes sense to just buy a product license. An example that I love is: Viscosity (https://www.sparklabs.com/viscosity/). It's a small OpenVPN client that just works. The license model makes the most sense since I can just buy the product and forget about it, until the next upgrade comes along. (Note, I have no affiliation with the company, they are not paying me in any way, just a happy user)

nicolaslem• 6 years ago

I like what Jetbrain does for PyCharm:

- Great free-for-ever version that only misses advanced features to get you hooked (as no one would pay for an IDE before being able to get a good feel for it).

- Yearly subscription to the pro version with a heavy discount for people keeping the subscription multiple years.

- Canceling the subscription grants you a perpetual license to the current version.

Contrast that with what Adobe does for Lightroom:

- No free version, they know they're the industry leader.

- Subscription with no discount for loyal users.

- Canceling the subscription renders your data useless.

acemarke• 6 years ago

The phrasing for Jetbrains cancellation sounds a bit off. As far as I understand it, cancelling leaves you with a perpetual license for the last release where you had already paid a year's worth of subscription:

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

That means that it's likely that you would no longer own, say, version WebStorm 2020.01, but have to fall back to 2019.02 or something.

That said, yeah, the mixture of OSS-licensed / trial / commercial versions does work pretty well for Jetbrains.

tonyedgecombe2• 6 years ago

The only reason I'm still selling licenses is I don't want to deal with the pain of switching. If I was starting a new project from scratch it would definitely be a service. From a business perspective the benefits are overwhelming.

Licenses in a Subscription World

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