In the jetbrains you only get a perpetual license for the current version. You lose the year of updates.
Also why should companies do that? They could be leaving money on the table as people can continue to gain value from the perpetual version without you getting any compensation for that value. Also you now have to deal wind a fragmented user base on different versions. And the user community has to dear with not everyone supporting the same features and menu navigation as everyone else.
In the jetbrains you only get a perpetual license for the current version. You lose the year of updates.
Yeah, that model is infuriating. While your subscription is running you get the updates. Then they snatch them away if you cancel. It's a dark pattern.
Perpetual licenses were the norm for most of the history of commercial software. They only went away in recent times. The fact that we tolerate this state of affairs is appalling.
> They could be leaving money on the table as people can continue to gain value from the perpetual version without you getting any compensation for that value.
They were compensated when you bought the version you keep. If you get nothing from them after that, then what would they be compensated for? I could understand it if the application required server-side resources, but if it's all local, then no further compensation is due.
If you buy Microsoft Word and make $10 million from a novel, you don't have to kick any of that back to Microsoft. The software company has no claim to the value created by their software beyond the licensing costs.
Nordstrom's liberal return policy increased sales. Probably by mooting the fear of buyer's remorse. Their policy definitely wasn't motivated by altruism.
Maybe something similar is happening with Jetbrains.
I continue to pay yearly for Ultimate, even though I only use vanilla IntelliJ, and sometimes not for years. Why? I have no idea.
I usually cancel subscriptions without hestitaion. Somehow the Jetbrains license doesn't piss me off and I'm content knowing I could cancel without too much inconvenience, should I choose.
Whatever the case, I'm certain they validated their current license maximizes revenue.
> In the jetbrains you only get a perpetual license for the current version. You lose the year of updates.
False unless they changed it recently. It explicitly read last version on the subscription. I actually bought one a few years back and I got fallback to the last version of the subscription timeframe.
Regarding the “why”, it’s simply the option that properly aligns interests. A long enough subscription (ie an year), should cover initial expenses and development during the period, if the company wants to keep a customer paying, it needs to keep making the software better.
It’s putting customer first, which is something companies tend to forget which tend to lead to a downfall if they have not secured a strong prison/moat for their rent seeking behaviors.
Companies with proper alignment on incentives tend to make/maintain/develop better products over a larger timeframe. But ofc that was meaningless when money was “cheap” (negative interest rates), so VCs could just dump a huge amount of money on creating some competitor out of nowhere, put it out for free, operate under losses, and once they have “captured” a big enough userbase and fcked the rest of the competition, and have decent lock in, start the shitification of service for revenue, to make up for all the “investment”, leaving customers with no proper alternative.
A perpetual fallback license is showing customer that you care. And it’s also putting a gun on yourself to keep improving the product instead of stagnating for “captured” revenue.
Also, happy customers tend to give free publicity, look here at hackernews how their tools are mostly praised.
Edit: it seems that indeed they changed the version to the initial plus bugfixes, or 12months old if using consecutive monthly billing
Also why should companies do that? They could be leaving money on the table as people can continue to gain value from the perpetual version without you getting any compensation for that value. Also you now have to deal wind a fragmented user base on different versions. And the user community has to dear with not everyone supporting the same features and menu navigation as everyone else.