What amazes me are the number of companies selling "lifetime" VPN service or "lifetime" cloud storage service with a straight face.
Like... that is TRANSPARENTLY a scam. You're literally gonna sell lifetime licenses to people with more money than common sense, until the entire system is overloaded, then just go out of business.
at least with standalone software it's going to work forever as long as the OS supports it. cant say the same for live service software that you can't run at home
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How much software is standalone these days, though? It seems like most companies are shifting to SaaS.
as long as you can host the "SaaS" elements yourself (nextcloud, for example) there's a lot more software than you'd initially think. There will always be a market for self-hosted options for cloud software imo: loads of businesses are reluctant to move their internal infrastructure to the cloud
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Nextcloud isn't SaaS, unless you're paying someone else to manage your server. Self-hosting is never SaaS.
Beyond FOSS there's not many, though Steam actually has a big catalogue of non-game software that's standalone
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I just bought a lifetime subscription to Nebula (a YouTube-like service akin to a co-op for content creators) and my rationale was
- Lifetime costs the same as ten years of annual priced subscriptions
- It will be cheaper than that due to inflation
- The service has been operating for 5 years, so it's likely to last at least 10 more
- The service is philosophically opposed to the sort of place that may try to acquire it
Other stuff, no thanks. Too many practical products (as opposed to entertainment ones) have a great supply of methods to screw you and a great desire to screw you.