Subscriptions are slowly taking over the software industry, and there's a reason for that.
One common misconception is the thought “You make software only once and sell it a million times”.
Well, that’s a nice idea, but in reality, very few software companies don’t have millions of *paying* customers. Being a small 2-person company, we obviously don’t 😉. And, even if we did, our costs increase with each new user because each new user consumes Cloud resources. Last month, for example, there were 2.7 million recipes stored in the OrganizEat Cloud Servers. We must pay a fee to store this data in the Cloud. OrganizEat is not like a simple calendar app or note-taker app, that has no ongoing costs.
Take OrganizEat, for example. The service we provide is something called “Web service”: it means that it requires constant usage of the internet. Every time you save a recipe from the web: our Server has to access the original recipe webpage, and process the recipe information to import it. All of this is called “Web Traffic” and we have to pay for each and every such operation to our servers providers.
It also involves Cloud Storage: we must pay a fee each month to store your recipe data and images in the cloud so that you could share them with others and across your own devices. All those high-resolution recipe photos take up a lot of space! It also takes internet traffic: we must pay for every read and write operation too, which means that every time you sync to the Cloud, it costs us money. Providing a service like this, that involves recurrent costs of ut – and at the same time not charging for it repeatedly – it’s simply not economically sustainable.
But, “aren’t you mostly done developing OrganizEat?” This is another common misconception about software. You’re never really “done” developing software. The concept doesn’t exist. In our case, the OrganizEat feature set has expanded to the point that it is a challenge to just maintain it all and keep everything working. For example, the recipe import from the web is fantastic – but for that feature to work, we must continuously make changes to the source code every time a recipe website changes.
Every year, there’s a new version of the Android, or iOS Operating System. Each time the OS changes, we must shift OrganizEat too. Modern mobile devices go out every year – we must add support for them all the time so that when you’ll upgrade to a new phone, your OrganizEat app will run smoothly on it. Software changes tremendously fast these days, and just keeping the existing service working is costly.
To summarize everything we’ve said so far, in software, two unique issues are preventing it from being a “product”:
1) Cloud Storage costs & Web Traffic costs, that increase with each and every user 2) Rapidly changing technological environment, which means that software is never “done” being developed (unlike a bag of chips for example…)
