&gt; Then don&#x27;t stop paying for it.<p>If a tool is good, I will happily pay a large one-time fee for it.<p>Unless there is literally no other choice, I -personally- will not rely on a tool that may cost me an unbounded amount of money in the future. In a subscription model, four things are pretty much always true:<p>1) When you stop paying your recurring fee, you lose access to your tools.<p>2) The rate you pay is subject to change at <i>any</i> time.<p>3) If the company decides to stop offering a given tool, you lose access to it, <i>regardless</i> of how much you relied on it and how unsuitable any replacement tooling is.<p>4) If the company folds, you&#x27;ve a 50&#x2F;50 chance of losing legal access to the tools that you &quot;paid for&quot; forever.<p>I understand that a constant, guaranteed revenue stream makes a company&#x27;s financial planning easier. Unless I have a contract that makes rock-solid guarantees and imposes penalties that far more than cover my losses for breaking them, neither paying in <i>advance</i> for software upgrades, nor <i>renting</i> tools that will become a vital part of my projects makes any sense at all.