Revisiting Software Subscriptions

Recently I finally got around to cancelling my subscription to Microsoft's Office 365. I had switched to LibreOffice and determined that there was no reason to keep Microsoft Office around anymore. It's led me to look into what software I subscribe to.

I wrote yesterday about how I'm looking for a good photography app for Linux. It's my second search for a photography app after I cancelled my Adobe subscription. I had subscribed to Adobe's photography package which was Lightroom and Photoshop. For only $10 a month, it was a pretty good deal. The problem I started to realize after was that it really locked me in.

Lightroom is a fantastic piece of software. For managing my photography library, it was top notch. I had bought Lightroom 5 and 6. I tried to go back to Lightroom 6, but it kept crashing every time I opened it and all my web searching and troubleshooting came up empty. I would've gladly paid for a standalone license but Adobe no longer offers that option. I sucked it up and cancelled my subscription and went searching for an alternative having decided that I don't want to be stuck with recurring payments to manage my photos.

Office 365 feels a little better in that there's compatibility between Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, Google Drive, iWork and others. It's easy enough to just take your files over to whichever platform you want. Still not good to have to pay monthly to use the software, but easier to migrate to an alternative. With Lightroom, I still had my photo files of course, but the migration was nowhere close to being the same or nearly as easy.

I actually like what JetBrains does. I use JetBrains Rider for my C#/.NET development. It's a fantastic development environment. I pay yearly for it, but if at any point I decide to cancel my subscription, I can still use the version I have. I just won't get any new updates. I think this is a reasonable compromise. I can still use the application, I just don't get any improvements or new features they add.

I'm going to be spending the rest of the year looking at what applications I use that require a subscription and really think about whether I believe it's still worth paying for or if there's a good alternative I can switch to.

At the end of the day, I have no issue whatsoever buying software. This isn't me looking for anything for free. What I want is to be able to buy software (or really a license I guess) and just use it without having to subscribe to continue to use it. If your software is good, I'll gladly pay for it and continue to pay for the updates.