Take pen and paper and add up you your monthly payment over a year.
Now take the cost of buying outright with no upgrades. Look at how long you can make monthly payments before you equal the cost of buying outright.
Now take into consideration the fact that it is never out of date. New profiles and drivers downloaded automatically. Live support and the fact your not out the cost in one lump sum. Heck i can do one small job and it pays for my software.
When I was giving that example about Adobe, I was actually pricing out perpetual buying outright the first time and then upgrading every new iteration, so in both cases, you were never out of date. Now, I only
need Design Premium, so that was the baseline cost for the Perpetual versus the full suite subscription price, as piece mealing the individual subscription programs would be way too cost prohibitive. If all you
needed was Design Standard, I believe the math came out to 5 yrs before you were paying more for subscription then perpetual.
Again, that was never being out of date which ever method I chose.
That also assumed static pricing on both avenues and both avenues being available. Which you have to make assumptions of some type in order to make projections period.
Now, the above example is for Adobe, but just swap out the name of the company and the pricing figures and see what you come up with.
Some people are still old school and if they dont have a disc or something in their hands they dont think that they are getting anything.
Technically speaking, in both instances you don't own anything. It's licensed, it's the terms of the license that people get hooked on.
Personally, all my installation disks are backed up as ISOs on my NAS, far more reliable storage medium then disks. I have this concern with subscription regardless if I'm getting a digital download or a physical disk.
If your worried they might raise the price sign a 1 year agreement paid monthly and they cannot raise the price in that year.
Just remember to calculate the lifetime costs. Some people just think of it as a monthly cost and that's it. No memory of the previous month's payment (or year or however, you want to calculate your payment). It's over the lifetime that you plan on using it.
Again, you have to assume upgrading every iteration as well even for perpetual.
Like i said it would have been 7-8 grand for me to buy version 11 and then if i upgraded to version 12 when it was released. Looking at 50 a month you can see how long it would take for your to pay dollar for dollar.
Also they do not just cut you off. Your software has a 30 day soft licence so it only checks for subscription every 30 days. So it will cut you off after those 30 days but its not like it just happens at any time.
Again, the biggest variable is what version do you
need (not want, but need). Typically, if you need the full version, it'll take a long time recouping costs (upgrading every iteration, I think it was 20 yrs in my calculations for the Master Suite, I could still be in my trade that long from now (I started young), but that would definitely be pushing it), but if you need some mid range product line, then they are probably making their money on you with the subscription model (over the long haul period, they are making more money, just how long that is varies in your situation).
Again, I'm not saying that it may or may not be better to go subscription for the time that you are needing to do so, I'm just saying that one route is not always the best route in every scenario. Although, eventually rather some of us like or not, there will be only one route no matter what program you are talking about.
