For 25 years, Image Line have been shipping the FLStudio DAW as a one-off purchase with free lifetime updates, and since I've been receiving those updates for a significant chunk of those 25 years since I bought the Producer Edition, it seems pretty sustainable.
In their words "Why? Because we believe you should get the program you paid for, bug-fixed and updated for as long as we develop FL Studio." [1]
One time payment and forever free updates means the product dies when the growth stalls OR they create other services around it and sell those.
It can work for some products and often those turn into freeware once they find a subscription or consumables for which the users are eager to pay for.
It also means that the company is incentivized to continually add features that will lead to new sales, rather than improve existing features to make the product better for previous purchasers.
I want to subscribe to pay for the products I depend on. Because I want to be an important stakeholder in product decisions. I do not want the company to consider me as sunk profit and a drag on expenses from here on out.
> It also means that the company is incentivized to continually add features that will lead to new sales, rather than improve existing features to make the product better for previous purchasers.
How? ImageLine and its competitors tend to offer free trial versions of their software, so they're not simply selling feature lists. Users can try out and feel the software, so there is an incentive to refining existing features, because those fundamentally form the basis of whether a potential customer buys or not.
Perhaps you could add more features to try to convincing users that already have a a DAW-of-choice to switch to FL Studio, but I think you overestimate how big this market is compared to the constant stream of new bedroom producers. A DAW can be a relatively big investment for a bedroom producer, not only in terms of money but in time to learn, so the cost to change your mind is high.
You have a "fully up to date" product until an operating system upgrade breaks it or there's a security vulnerability that really does need to be patched.
Although I sold a small-time file manager shareware product for a number of years, I tend to agree that forever upgrades isn't a great model in general. Especially if sales are trailing off over time, I have zero incentive to provide updates/patches especially if some major change is needed. In my case, I decided that a significant upgrade would require major changes and it wasn't worth the effort. Not sure it would have been even with an upgrade fee but certainly wasn't absent one.
>You have a "fully up to date" product until an operating system upgrade breaks it
The amount of Windows executables that cannot work after upgrades is absurdly low, and is often obscure software that either relies on internal behavior or simply hasn't been tested and approved on newer versions by The Powers That Be. MacOS tends to be dreadful on backwards compatibility, but that's more due to Apple's clown-ish behavior when it comes to backwards compat. As for linux, well, welcome to LTS life.
> there's a security vulnerability that really does need to be patched.
So, for an extremely small minority of programs, it's a problem. Unless there's an RCE in FL Studio, you won't ever need to upgrade it. And unless FL Studio takes in unsanitized output from the outside... yeah, no, not a problem.
Buying a dollar for pennies always feels good, sure. However, using products of unsustainable businesses means you can't depend on it. For some products that's not a problem, for others it can become huge problem when you find yourself locked in maintaining old version of an OS or a companion software. The effect of not getting updates is very pronounced in professional or industrial software where to this day some people are forced to secure floppy disc supplies and deal with Windows XP.
In college we had a lab of really old PCs which run a very old version of AutoCAD because the school purchased that version and it wouldn't run on modern machines, I was told. There was another lab in similar situation with Adobe products.
After the subscription model raised to prominence, people get the latest version of the software and pay only as long as its useful for them. It's a win-win because the developer has the incentive to provide the best possible service in order to retain customers.
That’s really not about the business though. People hate on new versions all the time if a behavior or UI changed, this is old as the days of software.
Some software companies handle it better than others.
Therein lies the problem. Growth is always the goal until everything blows up.
It’d be great sometimes to switch from grow to sustain. Instead of going after the next 1000000 customers with new features, just stop and focus on making existing features amazing for existing customers.
No new markets. No doubling ARR. Just chill, make stability the goal.
It doesn’t even work for internally-capitalized companies. For one thing even companies focusing exclusively on serving existing customers will have some churn and that will necessitate new sales to offset the losses.
Sales teams generally work on commission so to keep good sales people you have to develop new features to compete
Reaper does the same thing: ridiculously inexpensive and insanely well built, one edition, updates every couple weeks, supports an SDK, I could go on.
I think it’s also freemium with a nag screen.
How this is sustainable is beyond me, but I’m thankful every day there are still some SW companies who do amazing things without sucking the life out of their customers at every turn.
FL Studio lives off plugins that aren't free. Still, it's great that the producer edition is free forever, but one might need to pay them from time to time when falling in love with some new sound ;-)
Their platform has a neat feature: you can use all the plugins they sell, but you can save projects using only the ones you've bought. It's a more granular version of the crippleware approach to licensing, and yeah, as you say, it can be really effective if you've worked a new sound into one of your compositions.
(It's been a while since I fired up my copy, so this might have changed.)
I too am a long time owner of of FLStudio. However, I have noticed that many new features added to FLStudio are not added to the base program, but rather sold as an add-on.
Perhaps the free lifetime updates plan is the reason for this.
In their words "Why? Because we believe you should get the program you paid for, bug-fixed and updated for as long as we develop FL Studio." [1]
[1] https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio/lifetime-free-updates/