Since this is a one time price and you need to provide support and pay maintenance costs on monthly/yearly basis, why is this attractive to do (instead of a subscription)?
Typically when you buy a product with a perpetual license it doesn’t include support, maintenance or upgrades. Think of Microsoft and no one runs windows 3.1 or even XP because their newer products are worth the upgrade. Typically they’ll provide security patch updates but not new versions.
Other things like Plex lifetime deals are there because they either want the money on their books for investments or owners want to cash out. It also works kinda like a reverse ponzi scheme where they’re relying on new sales to provide support for the existing sales.
Sometimes the customers won’t even consider subscriptions, like people self hosting their plex servers are willing to pay for the lifetime license and equipment upfront for the sake of getting rid of recurring payments.
Sometimes people need a service once in a while and it’s a peace of mind having access to it and not paying for it while you’re not using the services. I myself am a web developer and I rarely use wordpress but I got a lifetime licence to festingervault which gives me all the premium plugins. Feels good knowing I will always have access to it and I won’t feel bad if months go by and I don’t utilize it (and feel guilty for keeping on paying the monthly fee)
its a short term marketing strategy to gain traction, in the hopes that longer term there will be sufficient customers that the impact of these lifetime customers is diluted. at the same time, since the lifetime customer will pay a greater upfront fee, they can use this to reinvest in growth, lastly, assuming they’ve done it correctly, the avg lifetime of a customer could be not that long meaning lifetime, isn’t actually lifetime.
Everything everyone said. Also, fyi what investors care most about is ARR - annual recurring revenue. They will heavily discount the investment value of perpetual licenses - source: the company I work for went through this when we took on Series A, and it was maybe THE number 1 priority before we secured Series B funding (from the same VCs) to convert basically all perpetual license customers to subscription customers.
Honestly I’ve bought at least a hundred of these deals and I’m mostly saving them to use / implement later on.
Haven’t even logged into 70% of them after signing up. Guessing me not using them isn’t really increasing their costs.
Plus everything everyone else already mentioned.
Seems like something thats done to pump numbers before a sale for instance.