Still working out the details (personal vs. business use, subscription vs. perpetual license, pricing, OSS and student discounts, etc.), but here are some preliminary thoughts (TLDR: difficult choice because people don't like subscriptions):

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OrbStack is a product that requires continuous maintenance to components in order to improve over time and prevent security issues. Subscriptions are the only way to align our incentives with yours: we’re incentivized to keep improving the product and moving forward; you want improvements, and you can always cancel if you don’t feel like you’re getting that.

Lifetime: Unsustainable. OrbStack's components need continuous updates: compatibility with new macOS versions, Linux kernel, Docker, other assorted pieces, and new features to stay competitive. This would make it more likely to be discontinued.

Major version upgrades: This incentives us to withhold features for months when they would otherwise be released much faster; we'd rather deliver gradual improvements so you get constant value. Also, major upgrades have a high risk of introducing breaking changes, bugs, and other issues due to a lack of gradual testing. You don’t want massive changes in your dev tools every year, do you?

1-year updates + fallback perpetual: Isn't this more or less a yearly subscription in disguise? Just cancel if you don’t want to keep paying. I know JetBrains does a hybrid of this + subscription — not entirely opposed to it, but it shares a lot of these issues (e.g. incentivizes slower feature development). Realistically, would anyone revert to a year-old version and stay on it forever?

(Also, from our perspective: Sure, less people will pay if it’s subscription-only, but I'd expect long-term recurring revenue to be higher. I’d love to be able to keep expanding the project.)

All that being said, I'm still not sure. Compared to Docker, not being subscription-only could be an advantage, and I want to keep pricing simple. It's a hard problem.

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There's more in the docs at https://docs.orbstack.dev/faq#free, but this is most of it. I'll have to figure out what the best choice is for OrbStack.