Subscription Software: REALbasic
Posted February 24th, 2003 @ 09:01am by Erik J. Barzeski
Some people think subscription software is the future. That - eventually - we'll all be paying for our software by the hour, month, year, whatever. Guess what? For some, it's already here: REALbasic 5.0 is out.
REALbasic seems to have seen yearly upgrades since it's 2.x release or so (1998: 1.0, 2000: 2.1, 2001: 3.0 & 3.5, 2002: 4.0 & 4.5, 2003: 5.0). Who wants to bet we'll see 5.5 around July of this year? This far outpaces several other standard applications, like Office, Photoshop, the Mac OS, etc. Guess what? You sucker RB developers are already using subscription software, and REAL Software has you hooked, raking in two upgrades per year that run as high as $250 (and as low as $30). I'm looking at paying $50 to upgrade version 4.0 from less than a year ago to the cheapest license available just so I can release a freeware app for Sound Set Central.
I previously wrote about RB once on this site, and didn't get a letter from Lorin or Geoff, so let's see if I can pull it off twice. Long story…
Donate Life
Posted 10 Jul 2004 at 1:32pm #
No one forces you to upgrade any software. You do it or not by choice. We used to do one upgrade a year (for about twice what we now charge - or about half the cost of REALbasic). Now we attempt to have two upgrades per year at about half the cost. So it doesn't cost our users any more than it used to and we provide upgrades with new features and bug fixes more often in an effort to be more responsive to our customers.
We sell subscriptions in addition to regular licenses because some of our customers asked us to. While they appreciate getting frequent updates and upgrades, they only want to get purchasing approval at their companies once a year.
Posted 10 Jul 2004 at 4:14pm #
So much for "didn't get a letter."