I’ve used most available services, but discontinued one after another along with promises that a better user experience will be provided with reduced content and removed functionality with the slight price hike. YouTube was my first and last video service I paid for, only Spotify remains on the borderline.
“Cloud” based services I genuinely understand the need for a recurring service model. They are paying for hosting of infrastructure on a recurring basis and a one time fee wouldn’t cover that.
Generally, though. I agree. If I’m running the software locally, I want to own my license fully.
The problem is that they keep making stuff that was formerly a purchase (download, physical copy, run locally, etc) into unnecessary cloud services just to justify the transition to “X as a service”. I want to download it and keep it on my home server, not pay a recurring fee to access the same file over and over from a server.
Yeah. That’s a different problem. 😁
I was more referring to the idea that subscriptions themselves are the problem.
I’m also ok with subscription prices increasing over time as costs increase. But I completely agree with removing services being a bad thing.