johnmcboston said: ... But as more and more products move to this, I'm going to "for a few bucks a month" myself into the poor house as "Just $5 a month" and "for only $10 a month" slowly eats away all my disposable income.
... So how do I personally value 1PW? I certainly use it daily. As a society we're being passworded daily - I have over 700 entries in my database (ugh). But cloud aside, it would be a tough decision for me to subscribe, as I can't imagine a ton of new features ever being added to 1PW, and I already store in the cloud (dropbox). Is there value in helping keep a company afloat just so their product stays maintained? All interesting questions.... And I decision I'll have to make come the day they stop updating the stand-along app and make we legacy people subscribe or hit the road....
Good response and questions. I think having a budget, whether personal or for business and sticking to it is key. I agree that it's *much* easier to over-extend yourself, just a few dollars at a time. But, I guess if that $500 package that you updated every 2 years is now $20/mo, it's a wash. If you can't afford the $20/mo you couldn't afford the $500 package either. My fear, though, is that it's more like what was a $500 package every two years, is now more like $25 or $29.99/mo, so in effect, we're paying more overall than we once were. (Not that it's unfair for them to do so, but it means we do need to reevaluate or look at alternatives.)
But, you're absolutely right about the other downside, in whether we even need continued advancement, aside from basic bug-squashing and compatibility. We certainly need the latter, but I've found a few pieces of software, since going to this model, have actually gotten worse. One example that comes to mind which I use daily is TextExpander. I bought it a number of times over the years, and it was always a nice, solid utility. Since I've gone to the 'cloud' subscription version, I've had a number of issues with it, and adding new snippets has often resulted in (false)-duplicates, warnings, and a time on my part cleaning things up (which I never spent in the past). And, I can't think of any features they've added recently that I even need or want (they've just taken up time to go un-check in the preferences once I got too annoyed by them).
I *want* to pay for the software and services I use! I want these companies to be profitable and stable. But, I (maybe like you?) often seem to question some of the routes to get there.
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But, you're absolutely right about the other downside, in whether we even need continued advancement, aside from basic bug-squashing and compatibility. We certainly need the latter, but I've found a few pieces of software, since going to this model, have actually gotten worse. One example that comes to mind which I use daily is TextExpander. I bought it a number of times over the years, and it was always a nice, solid utility. Since I've gone to the 'cloud' subscription version, I've had a number of issues with it, and adding new snippets has often resulted in (false)-duplicates, warnings, and a time on my part cleaning things up (which I never spent in the past). And, I can't think of any features they've added recently that I even need or want (they've just taken up time to go un-check in the preferences once I got too annoyed by them).
I *want* to pay for the software and services I use! I want these companies to be profitable and stable. But, I (maybe like you?) often seem to question some of the routes to get there.
Just sayin'...