Software-Subscriptions

Recently I find myself buying software every once in a while. I licensed Little Snitch, Scrivener (in my opinion the perfect tool for collecting ideas and organizing information) and Ecto (a great app to write blog-entries offline). I buy these apps because I think they are great and I want to support their further development. I love the situation the internet is providing independent software-developers and I want more of those extremely focused tools that make my life easier (Things is going to be the next when it finally arrives at gold status).

While the prices are pretty okay (especially when paying USD with Euros) there’s always that chance that tomorrow there will be another application, better than the one I’m currently using, and I effectively wasted money. I’m not going to use that application anymore. This is a major reason for software-piracy: The extremely short lifetime of those solutions we’re buying for our hard-earned money.

I’m still wondering why there’s no “Software-Subscription” service yet. A “club” with a membership fee of, let’s say, $50 a year that offers it’s members access to a variety of software solutions without any extra cost. Or a monthly fee per license – let’s say $1 per month for every program I use. If I’m off travelling for a month I freeze my subscription and when I’m back I go on using, thus also paying the $2 monthly fee. The systems works great for DVDs, so why not push it a step further?