This isn't glib doublespeak. There's probably a better way to articulate this for people who were formally educated in business (not me). Basically customer lifetime value is variable on a monthly fee, meaning you can always add upgrades and provide support. But if you just sell it one-and-done then depending on the price it can be difficult to find the motivation to provide any meaningful long-term support.

as a customer, i don't have the choice to not pay for such upgrades but continue using the old one.

And yet, the SaaS subscription cost is charged continuously whether the customer likes the upgrades or not.

So no, i don't agree with the SaaS business model. It's more extractive. The point of buying a piece of software is the same as buying capital equipment - purchase once, and have it work "forever" (and since software doesn't rot like real equipment, this should be even more true).

What i would pay a subscription for is live/in-person support.

It's the same with hardware. At one company we used to operate a 3-year hardware refresh cycle and this used to make a lot of sense, 3 years was a long time in hardware, and this assumption was true for a long time. But the pace slowed as manufacturers stopped making big improvements and just started eking out marginal gains. We looked at our kit and our workloads and realised that we had plenty of capacity and instead of refreshing proactively we should stretch it out to a 5 year or longer cycle and replace failed equipment with new rather than disposing of things that still worked perfectly well after 3 years. Saved a ton of money doing this, both in buying hardware and in the effort taken to move applications around. Of course manufacturers got wise to this and looked for ways to get you back on that treadmill.

And while you may still have a perfectly valid use case for hardware, I think the growth of IaaS speaks for itself in showing that variable pricing is popular.

I disagree with that to a degree. Sure the bits that make up your software don't "rot", the compute environment under which it operates is always changing and will lead to it no longer working.

Try taking any PC, whether it's Windows 10 running IE or it's Ubuntu running Firefox, and just stop updating it. How many years will you feel comfortable using it? _Eventually_ you're going to need security updates, interface with new protocols, support/function on replacement hardware when it dies, etc.

I'll acknowledge that in reality, there are internet routers, industrial machines, and the like that can probably run for decades on the same software revision given enough babysitting and like-replacement of the hardware. But even the security software around those like firewalls are going to need to be refreshed and upgraded which costs money. In the grand scheme of things, somewhere in the stack, something is constantly being upgraded and refreshed, and SaaS fits perfectly into that model.

Don't forget every medical lab machine ever made.... some of that stuff is still running windows 95

If I find I actually need any kind of support with any service/product and I can't "just use it" then I start looking for an alternative product/service.

There's something rotten at the core of everything-as-a-service and continuous-improvement and growth-hacking and everything that comes with it... Most people actually like things that are done and stay done, most stuff doesn't need to need to be fixed, and it doesn't need to evolve or improve beyond the glacial pace needed to keep up working on the infrastructure it uses...

For the user however, it means lock-in and their data being held ransom.

A good SaaS manages to remedy the downsides to enable the upsides to shine, i.e. data export, open formats, open core, open source + hosting business, ... and hopefully more diverse and better ideas to cover more markets, use and business cases.

It also seems to work for business customers, who have many tools available to handle logistics of subscription, a more equal position in the relationship, and more ways to deal with cashflow problems.

It's much less beneficial for individuals, though. Some problems:

- Even if the monthly subscription is 10% of its would-be box price, I'm likely going to pay more than I would if I could buy it.

- By subscribing, I gain a new relationship to manage. Managing relationships is cognitively taxing, there's only so many an individual can handle[1]. I don't want that relationship with you, I want to use a software products, no strings attached. Much like when I buy bread, I don't enter into relationships with the bakery, the mall, the flour plant or the wheat farmer[2].

- As a part of being in a relationship with you, I'm bound by your ToC, which limits what I can do with the product. It's not a noticeable problem when dealing with web applications, as limits are often enforced technically - but as more physical, household products become wrapped in services, this is going to become a bigger problem. Right now, the manufacturer doesn't care if I use my dishwasher for steam-cooking[3]; in a service model, this would be disallowed by ToS.

- The modern means of enforcing the core of our relationship - me paying you for access - usually revolve around the software being hosted on your servers. This limits the long-term utility of the product over a version I could keep on my computer, and poke inside if needed.

- If our relationship ends for any reason, I lose the goods. It may be because of me violating the ToS, but it also may be because your company decides to shut down the service, or gets acquired, or goes bust. It's particularly annoying with physical products, which then get taken away or become expensive paperweights. It's a risk I have to keep in mind as part of managing our relationship (and which realistically I won't, and then wake up one day with few days or weeks for figuring out how to replace your service with something else).

- It may seem that incentives of SaaS are better aligned with their customers - I pay, you deliver improvements. But another way of looking at it is, you release an incomplete product, while I pay in hope it'll get improved. Much like "one-and-done" sales have their perverse incentives, so do services (worst case that sometimes happen: making switching costs high on purpose, to ensure I keep paying).

Personally, I'm particularly tired of the relationship angle. I want to exchange stuff for artifacts that give me powers - not bind myself to ever growing number of ephemeral business entities.

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[0] - Not 100% passive because you have to keep the infra running and offer some kind of support, but passive enough that quite a lot of companies seem focused primarily on growing their userbase, not catering for the existing users.

[1] - Rich people and businesses handle this by paying someone to deal with it.

[2] - Actually, I do enter into a relationship with the bakery, but it's entirely handled by consumer protection laws, so the only thing I need to manage about it is knowing what government branch to e-mail with the receipt. And that management cost is shared across all my purchases.

[3] - Worst that can happen is I lose warranty over some more peculiar use cases or tweaks.

Modern appliances aren't really like this. The control panel will start registering false presses or no longer accept keypresses after a few years (especially if it's a heating appliance and the control panel is not engineered to be in a hot environment), and replacement control panels will be discontinued and unavailable.