With any serious pricing model you're going to cut a lot of people.
Put a sustainable pricing model in place that can afford support staff.
Sure, a bunch of cheapskates will up and leave - there will surely be a second rate competitor who will pick them up and offer the same poor or nonexistent support all over again.
One thing I learned from experience is that it's the people who pay the least who are the neediest and most frustrating to deal with.
> One thing I learned from experience is that it's the people who pay the least who are the neediest and most frustrating to deal with.
As someone who has partaken in a support organization where 99% were annual payments and 1% were "golden licenses" (pay once, never again), I can confirm that the 1% were by far the worst.
This reflects my experience in other services, but not in this one (where the only model is "golden license"). The vast majority are very polite, and asking for help about as much as everyone else (not more).
Paying once for a service doesn't sit right with me, it may not be rational but I feel that I can't trust that it will stick around. I'd rather pay a smaller monthly fee to keep the lights on, than a one time fee and constantly fear I might just be cut off one day.
And even if it's not technically a service, but say some closed source software or whatever, the same idea still applies for future bug fixes and maintenance, at least in my mind. At least for anything semi-critical.
This is true, and I would normally make it a yearly subscription, but this is https://www.deadmansswitch.net/, where you leave messages to send to your loved ones after you die, and I didn't want people to have their messages lost because they're too old/unable to renew a credit card or something similar.
I would rather pay 1.2 * $X now than $X/months per month over the lifetime of a product. It's not about the money for me, it's about having a fixed cost rather than an indefinitely recurring one that I have to continually decide if it is still giving me $X/mo in value and remember to cancel when I'm done. It's also about the sense of ownership I get over the product versus "this is something I'm renting" which, for me, is a big deal. I get that it is difficult to price in the cost of bug-fixes, but I consider that not my problem.
That said, support as a subscription (or alternatively, pay-per-issue) is totally fine by me. I'm also fine if new features are added to Version 2, and I later have to decide whether to upgrade or not.
And although it is not about the money for me, it frequently does pay off. I usually opt for the longest recurring subscription (if lifetime is not available) which usually has steep discounts and in the case of my XM radio... still enjoying that lifetime subscription.
