Ask HN: Perpetual Licenses vs. Monthly Subscriptions?

2 points by gl9 3 years ago | 2 comments

A few companies do "forever" licenses in addition to monthly/annual subscriptions, like Plex and Jetbrains.

Plex offers their "lifetime" license for the equivalent of 24 monthly purchases. Jetbrains lets you use their IDE forever upto the version you purchased, and you can pay each year to get the newer version.

As a consumer, I like the idea that I can own the software I bought even if it is a higher price tag.

Do you think these perpetual licenses are a good idea from the business side for SaaS if the cost of running a service is low enough?

PaulHoule 3 years ago |

Plex and Jetbrains aren't really SaaS. There isn't any cost to the vendor in letting you run these on your own computer.

ggeorgovassilis 3 years ago |

With the rate of change in OS, infrastructure and security threats I wonder what the value of a perpetual license is (I understand it doesn't entitle me to patches or version upgrades).