We stopped buying software and started renting it — and nobody really argued the tradeoff
The move from "buy a license" to "pay monthly" happened one category at a time — creative tools, office suites, note apps, even utilities that run entirely on your own machine. The vendor case is real: continuous updates, security patches, incentives to keep improving instead of shipping a box and vanishing.
But one part never got argued. A perpetual license gave you a floor: the version you paid for kept working when the company pivoted, tripled its price, or shut down. Subscriptions remove that floor — stop paying and the tool stops, including for work you did years ago.
For genuinely server-side products (email, sync, real collaboration) the fee maps to a real recurring cost. For local, single-machine software it often doesn't — you're renting a binary that runs on your own hardware, and the monthly charge is a business-model choice wearing a technical-necessity costume. The tell is an app that phones home to validate a license for a feature that needs no network.
And when everything is rented, you own no tools, only access — your leverage on the next price hike is zero. A lot of the self-hosting and local-first energy is really just a reaction to that.
Not that subscriptions are always wrong; where there's real marginal cost, they're honest. But "everything is a subscription now" wasn't decided. It was a default that won because it's better for sellers and only sometimes for buyers.
Where's your line — what should stay buy-once, and has anything you rented ever been switched off under you?
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