One-Time Payment vs Subscription: Who’s Using Which Model and Why?

Currently offering both at storypitch.ai:

• One-off payments for founders who need a pitch, pitch deck copy and other non recurrent content
• Subscriptions when it comes to generating the above + social content and other recurrent needs

Both are selling as they address different needs.

Generally speaking I think there's clear subscription fatigue, and founders sometimes overlook the idea that one-off payments can still generate near stable revenue once their project takes off.

For Indie Hackers we have both:

• one-time payments for advertisers
• a subscription for Indie Hackers Plus, access to the best features on IH including paywalled content from our newsroom

Subscriptions are obviously better if you can pull them off. But your product has to be retentive: something that people get lasting value out of. That's the hard part. To do that with content, the content has to be extremely novel (i.e. literal news) rather than information people eventually "graduate" from, like how-to educational posts.

Im thinking of building email organizer and this product should be charged subscriptive way. In this way people who don’t want to use it can cancel subscription anytime.

I find subscriptions to be very annoying to deal with, if you've a high churn rate, and you have people subscribing for a day, and bailing out as soon as they've gotten what they wanted, especially if you've a free trial configured.

One time payments so users can sign up, get some credits and use away. Users almost always know what they are paying for, and don't complain too much even if the experience wasn't A1.

I have both—one app with a subscription, and one with a one-time purchase.

I certainly understand subscription fatigue, but it's sometimes a little frustrating that users seem more willing to pay (bigger) subscription fees to a giant corporation than a small fee to indie developers. It can make it very difficult to compete.

I've noticed that users don't seem to understand that the "old" model of pricing typically did involve continual payments from time to time. The software would release a new big upgrade with new shiny features, and users would pay to upgrade.

We recently launched a version 2.0 of our one-time-purchase app, and, even though most users got it for free, some of the ones who wound up needing to pay an upgrade fee complained they'd already purchased a "lifetime license" (not a thing we advertised). We don't plan on doing upgrade pricing in the future (this was just an oddity of moving all our users from Paddle to the App Store), but it does seem like people have been trained to think software is either a recurring subscription or a one-time use-it-forever get-all-the-upgrades sort of situation.

That definitely makes subscriptions more appealing from a longevity/ability to continue supporting the software perspective, although I'd love for the market to prove me wrong! 😉

At the component.co (Framer UI kit), I am offering a one-time payment. I don't see why someone should pay a subscription for such a service in the first place, because I am not planning to add more sections very often, and second, people are generally tired of subscriptions.

Subscription is essential for SaaS offering cloud service

Hey, Stephen.
We're building a tool for companies to recruit top nearshore talent in seconds thanks to our inteligent matchmaking algorithm, and they can hire and pay their international workers in a single monthly transaction too. ---> Jobbi .me

We have a different pricing model.
If you want to recruit, you pay per match (which means if both parties are interested - such as Tinder for example - you get the contact information revealed = 1 match). However, you do not pay each time you make a match, you accumulate your matches until X date in the month, in which the payment is processed. This princing model is atractive because our customer pay only for what they "consume" = cost-effective. It is pretty easy for them to keep using the tool, without worring about renovating "credits" or having many transactions issued in a few hours.
And we also offer an unlimited matches membership, which is a fixed price MoM. Now, this one allows the users to save costs when using it in volume and gives us more predictable revenue.
The first one is like a twist of the tipical 1-time payment, that works better for us than selling "credits" packages, or charging a commission per worker placed, for example.

What I'm trying to say is that revenue models don't have to be just one-time payment or subscription, you can try both at the same time to find which works best for you or take advantage of the benefits that come with each, OR you can "make your own".

It's all about ongoing support. I've never joined AppSumo for this reason.

Better choice is annual subscriptions, where as customers must opt in for the next year.

My product is a regex search tool for Windows (https://www.abareplace.com/). I could earn more if I used a subscription-based model, but it takes time to implement subscriptions properly. Consider that you need to handle cancelling and block the canceled users from using the paid version, which is not so simple for desktop software. It's much easier to charge a fixed price once.

The users are happier with this approach, too; you have no support requests like "I forgot to cancel and you charged me for the next year", so you can focus on development instead.