
Ask HN: Pricing models – subscription or extend license - chris__butters
<i></i> I use the word license in the most open way possible.<p>I&#x27;m looking at designing and building an app (I won&#x27;t go into too much detail here) and looking at pricing models - whether to have a monthly subscription or a &quot;license&quot; which you&#x27;d extend if you wanted to carry on using it (imagine buying a new sketchbook&#x2F;journal&#x2F;diary once you&#x27;ve filled it).<p>There has been a massive shift towards subscription based services e.g Wunderlist, StandardNotes, etc, and articles stating that they are now the only way to survive in the current market but I&#x27;ve always preferred to &quot;own&quot; the software even temporarily look at Affinity Designer and Sketch.<p>Is there a one size fits all when it comes to licensing or would it simply be based on the type of product and service?
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8draco8
It seems like the best solution is to have monthly subscription model. That's
what most companies are doing.

Personally, as a customer, I like the idea of paying for an update. Let's
consider Adobe CC subscription. Currently it's standard monthly subscription,
if you don't pay, you don't have access to it. I would prefer to pay only if I
want new features and security updates. If I decide not to have them I could
stay of the last version that I updated to. Of course to make sure that you
earn enough you should have to have a limit of minimum 1 year subscription
payed monthly, so nobody would scam you by buying one monthly subscription
once a year.

This of course changes is cloud services are involved (storage, streaming,
etc.). For those you need monthly subscription to be on)

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chris__butters
That's how I tend to feel, I'm just not sure whether a one off payment would
work for this.

With AWS, storage and cloud storage is fairly cheap so that shouldn't be an
issue.

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brudgers
The pricing model should be based on _customers_. Time spent thinking about it
before building something and setting it in front of actual human beings and
getting feedback and responding to that feedback with further design and
implementation looks like productive work. It is not. It is just easier than
building and showing and soliciting feedback and acting on that feedback until
there is something people care about enough to pay.

It is also easier to build a payment system than something people are willing
to pay for. Having to decide how to accept payment is a good problem have, but
usually not the first one.

Good luck.

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chris__butters
To be honest that is one of the reasons for this question, to ascertain what
customers would prefer between the two different options.

