Somewhere around 2023, a quiet shift started happening in how people talk about software pricing. Not in earnings calls or press releases - in comment sections, Reddit threads, and the kind of low-grade frustration that accumulates until someone cancels six subscriptions in one afternoon. The subscription model didn’t just expand; it colonised software categories where it had no business being. Photo editors. PDF readers. Weather apps. And now that resentment has enough mass to actually move purchasing behaviour.
The numbers back this up, at least directionally. Adobe faced genuine public backlash when it tried to make it harder to cancel Creative Cloud plans - the FTC even filed a complaint in 2024 over the cancellation process, though the case’s resolution remained contested. Microsoft raised Microsoft 365 prices and watched enterprise customers start openly questioning whether the bundle still made sense. These aren’t isolated incidents; they’re symptoms of an industry that over-rotated on recurring revenue without asking whether users would keep agreeing to the terms.
The mechanism that made subscriptions so attractive to software companies - predictable annual recurring revenue, lower upfront sales friction - also created a ceiling. Once a user is subscription-fatigued, they don’t just scrutinise your product. They scrutinise the entire category. A $9.99/month app that would have sold easily as a $29.99 one-time purchase now has to compete with the accumulated weight of every other $9.99 charge on the same bank statement.
The Perpetual Licence Revival Isn’t Nostalgia
Capture One started offering perpetual licences again. Affinity built its entire identity around not being Adobe. BBEdit, the venerable Mac text editor, never fully abandoned one-time pricing and has quietly kept a loyal user base because of it. These aren’t niche exceptions - they’re proof that “we tried the other thing and came back” is a viable market position now.
What makes this interesting is that the companies winning on perpetual licences aren’t doing so by competing on price alone. They’re competing on trust. The implicit promise of a one-time purchase is that the software will keep working after you stop paying, and after years of features being gated behind subscription tiers, that promise lands differently than it used to.
The Hard Part
Software companies built their entire financial models around subscription growth. Reversing that, or even adding a perpetual tier, means accepting lower short-term revenue recognition and angering investors who got used to ARR as the only metric that mattered. Most won’t do it voluntarily.
Which means the pressure has to come from somewhere else - and right now it’s coming from users who’ve simply stopped signing up. Whether that pressure is enough, and how long it takes to become impossible to ignore, is still genuinely unclear.