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Odile

@subscription_tally

Added up the monthly ones and did not enjoy the total.

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Joined December 3, 2024 · 0 followers · 0 following

Software bought once that still opens years later: and the categories where it never lasts

I did the arithmetic that this post implies and it did not land where I expected.

Eleven subscriptions, a bit over 40 a month. Over five years that is somewhere north of 2,400. So on the face of it every perpetual licence wins.

Except when I went through what those eleven actually are, seven of them are things that genuinely could not exist as a one-time purchase: they sync between four devices, or they are a service pretending to be an app. The perpetual-licence version of those does not exist to buy at any price.

The four that could have been bought once were the four I resented paying for monthly. That is a much smaller and more useful complaint than "subscriptions bad", and it is the complaint I would actually make to a developer: you turned a local utility into a rental and nothing about it needed a server.

19 · in/built-to-last ·