We use a subscription model at Fogbeam, but here&#x27;s the twist: all our software is open source, and you&#x27;re free to use it as you like, with or without a subscription.<p>So why buy a subscription at all?<p>Because you get the kinds of things big companies care about:  certification, maintenance, support, indemnification, somebody to sue if things don&#x27;t work, a vendor to shift blame onto if the shit hits the fan, a discount on professional services work, perpetual upgrades, priority access to influence the roadmap and direction of the product, etc.  Subscriptions are also a win for customers in that (depending on the details) they may be able to pay for a subscription out of an operational budget, rather than needing to go to some committee and get approval for a large one-time capital expenditure.  And with subscriptions you are paying a portion of the cost in future, inflated, dollars instead of today&#x27;s dollars.<p>Of course, like any vendor who does OSS, we run the risk of having a lot of people using our software and never paying, but that&#x27;s just something we accept.<p>But here&#x27;s the thing... we don&#x27;t sell development tools - IDEs and the like.  Our stuff is backend&#x2F;middle-ware that costs in the tens of thousands of dollars and up (for companies with thousands of employees, anyway), which makes things like worrying about capital expenditures more of an issue.  At the kind of price-points you are talking about for IDEs and what-not, I&#x27;m not sure the advantages of a subscription (from the customer POV) really carry much weight.