> the revenue [on a monthly subscription] is much more predictable
That's a common fallacy here on HN. But it's just not true that one-off payments aren't predictable.
If you have a large enough number of potential customers, and some small fraction of them buys your product every month, you'll end up with very predictable revenue, even if each single customer only pays once.
As the number of sales per month increases, the variance goes down, and you end up with remarkable constant revenue. I don't know enough about statistics to explain why that is the case, but I know from experience that it does work like this.
Note that I'm not saying that pay-once is more or less profitable than subscriptions. I have no clue, and I suspect this strongly depends on the target audience. All I'm saying is that subscriptions are not "more predictable".
That's a common fallacy here on HN. But it's just not true that one-off payments aren't predictable.
If you have a large enough number of potential customers, and some small fraction of them buys your product every month, you'll end up with very predictable revenue, even if each single customer only pays once.
As the number of sales per month increases, the variance goes down, and you end up with remarkable constant revenue. I don't know enough about statistics to explain why that is the case, but I know from experience that it does work like this.
Note that I'm not saying that pay-once is more or less profitable than subscriptions. I have no clue, and I suspect this strongly depends on the target audience. All I'm saying is that subscriptions are not "more predictable".