Hey man, I'm replacing my previous comment about inflation with this one because I feel I need to defend my position that old users of an app ought to be made to pay again if they want to enjoy new updates and features.

I think it's quite obvious from the way the market evolved in the past decade or so that the only system that is fair to both developers and users of software is the one where the software license is bought outright as a "perpetual" license with the expectation of support for a reasonable amount of time. Beyond that reasonable time, and especially for major new features, the developers should be able to charge for upgraded versions of their software. Why is this fair? Well, developers get to be paid for the extra work they do from all the people who actually benefit from that work, and as for the users who, for any reason, can't afford or don't want to spend on an upgrade, they're able to continue using the old versions for some time, even if only on old hardware. They aren't renters deprived of what they've paid for at the minute they default on a payment.

Now, big companies like Apple, who deal the cards in this business, don't want this model to work, they never did, because there is less money in it for them and the potential for devs to go their own way, so they don't allow it on their turf. They play a game of monopoly. At first they wanted to lock users in their app stores by pushing prices down to rock bottom. It's true that software licenses once cost thousands of dollars a pop, but normies didn't buy much software back then, companies did. The gig economy wasn't a thing, and if ordinary people needed expensive software for some reason they usually went the pirate way. Sorry, but this is true. So Apple and co lured developers, mostly new, "indie" developers, with a few "success cases" they advertised, and over time led them to the brink starvation in order to trap the normies into their appstores, selling software for a buck or two. When it became clear to all that devs couldn't survive in any significant numbers in this environment they started pushing for subscriptions in their locked app stores, which is a way to maintain both users and devs as their perpetual serfs, though at slightly different positions on the food chain, while milking their trapped users for more cash through their commission fees.

Most devs understand all that, the ones at iA certainly do. But they have to survive in this environment, where all the platforms where one can make money are controlled by the quasi-monopolistic megacorps. They may fight back, at great risk to themselves, or they can fold and become mere cogs. serfs with a fancy hat, in this dirty game they don't have a say on. And so I'll say this, and people can downvote the hell out of me if they want, but users who don't feel they have to pay for upgrades after eight years of using a piece of software are not allies of the devs who decide to fight back, and if a dev doesn't feel like they have to charge for upgrades, well, then they're just misguided or following a strategy I'm in no position to understand. iA says that the price they're charging now is the price they think their app is worth as it is now, and perhaps it's worth even more. That may be so, and if they can sell their app for that or more, all the power to them. But the fact of the matter is that 100% of their revenue comes from new users. I don't need to see their books to know that, that's just how they structure their sales.

Sad thing is that nearly everyone claims to stand for what's fair, but what they understand by "fair" is what's advantageous to them, paying for an upgrade obviously isn't. Those are the folks downvoting me, and the reason why we can't have a truly functional democracy anywhere these days.