The trend to make everything into a subscription service instead of a pay-once use-forever model is well-established. I have defended it for professional software, and I am a mostly happy user of Microsoft365. Still, I must admit that I felt mildly annoyed when my favorite screen capture program, SnagIt, announced they would be switching to a subscription-only model.
I have used SnagIt for work for a very long time, always as a perpetually licensed program (i.e., buy once and keep using for as long as I need to). Every once in a while, I would get an upgrade purchased in order to support a new version of Windows or get new features.
The most annoying upgrade reason was that SnagIt 2022 was needed to make it work correctly with corporate One Drive. That conversion was a total failure and I could never get it to convert my old screen captures into its new database format. Still, there were other new things in 2022 that made it incrementally more useful.
The main motivation for switching to subscription makes sense and align with my own thoughts in general on why subscriptions are a good thing. From the blog post:
Why is TechSmith transitioning to a subscription pricing model?
A perpetual model encourages companies to hold features and improvements until the next major release, and that is no longer how we wish to serve our customers.
Our new subscription-only model is not just a change, it’s a commitment to bring customers continuous innovation with the best technology and post-sale care available. This ensures customers get the best value for their investment, with access to features and improvements as they’re ready.
But it seems they also took the chance to make the yearly price a bit higher than the previous price of a perpetual license. That is slightly less nice – ideally you would back-compute and make it so that a subscription costs say half of a perpetual license, on the expectation that a customer would not buy a new version anyway. I just has a bit of a feel of a money-grab. Maybe it isn’t but it just looks a little too much like one.
It is a bit of a pain to go buy yearly subscriptions too. Just from the paperwork.
And finally, it feels wrong to keep paying for a product just to keep it functional. And there is the annoying risk that if the company goes out of business or suffers a major server breakdown I might have useless software on my machine. Perpetual licenses at least let you use it until some Windows update breaks it in the future.
You Get New Features!
Which leads me to a new insight on subscriptions. That the vendor keeps adding new features in order to make it feel like you get value for your money. Which in a way is the same problem as we see with perpetually-licensed software where new features would be invented and added to the product to motivate upgrades. You might get the same problem here, just in a different way.
In addition, the features SnagIt have been adding recently have been rather useless for what I do. I want a tool to grab screenshots and annotate them. I have zero use for AI-powered features that seem to be rolling out into the product going forward. I want what I do to reflect reality, not improve on it with smart editing.
Enough Complaining
That is enough complaining. I am a very happy use of SnagIt, which I basically use every day, many times per day for everything from training materials to bug reports to code reviews. The tool just plain works right, and that is worth a lot of time and money.
And to be fair, I can imagine that keeping SnagIt working on Windows and MacOS is quite a pain as the tool has to hook into the operating system, and both vendors seem intent to make that harder and harder over time as they improve the security of their respective operating systems.