Oh, and I forgot to mention this-Agenda.app offers separate pricing for iOS and macOS. One of the things that the calendar folks are promoting is one subscription fee covers apps on macOS, watchOS, iOS, and iPadOS, which doesn’t impress a user that only wanted a premium calendar app on their phone.
This is true only for apps that don’t require a high learning curve to master.
Personally I am not fond of subscription software, but we must acknowledge that writing software requires talented people and talented people (and the associated overhead) costs money.
So far this is true, but it undoubtedly costs more for a developer to offer and support multiple licensing options. I wonder how much longer they will continue doing this.
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Unfortunately 1Password made it nearly impossible to find the purchase option on their website. I just spend 5 minutes searching and still came empty handed. Last time I saw it it was about $67 to purchase no upgrade pricing available 
It’s still there. On the 1Password.com page, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Downloads”. You are correct that there is no upgrade pricing.
That’s always been the case, for decades now. It’s only recently that software developers have decided that pricey subscriptions are the only way to survive. Fantastical used to charge what, $5.00 USD for its iPhone app, and ‘upgraded’ it for a new version every 4-5 years? Now my subscription cost for four years for a family of 4 is 4x40x4=$640? You think that’s not a money grab?
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It’s only recently that we’ve seen a fast, inexorable drive to free and freemium apps whose prices have become unsustainable.
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Nope this link doesn’t lead to the purchase of the license only a “discussion” where to download it.
On the “Downloads” page there is a button “Download 1Password7”. Download it, install it, and then (as I neglected to mention and @bowline helpfully added) you can choose the standalone license or the subscription license. Or no license.
It’s a response from a team member saying how to purchase a standalone version: by first downloading the normal version and doing an IAP.
So you think that $640 over 4 years for a calendar for my family of 4 is sustainable? Or $960 over the same period If pay at the $5 per user per month fee? That’s not a money grab? There has to be a solution where users are willing to pay a fair price and as a result software developers can make a good, sustainable living, but this isn’t it.
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Ah why make it so hard, just make an option “Purchase 1Password” with its price. Either way no upgrade pricing available last time I checked…
Sustainable? That’s up to the market to decide - but clearly this is what enough devs are choosing to do, partly because of the unsustainable nature of extant pricing.
Not so hard if you google right! 
They want to migrate people to the software they’re supporting; and of course they want to be able to make the case for the subscription as well.
I think the “why” is obvious: they want to sell subscriptions.
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To keep with your example: what some apps going the subscription route are doing is:
- option to purchase the instrument $800 is gone
- add some minor update
- then you can get the great deal of subscribing for $24 (charged daily, but yearly cycle)
So, if the purchase option ($800) is gone, what would be a “subscription” you’d be comfortable with?
$67 monthly assuming a 1-year usage? $34 assuming 2 years? Instruments last long, so $17 might still be something you’d consider expensive, even if it’s “just some coffees”…
Moving to subscription is hiding some steep price increases. But there are examples of proper subscription pricing: LR+PS became CHEAPER with a subscription (as compared to buying the full product and buying the updates and calculating yearly cost).
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Exactly that the $800 one-time purchase no longer is an option at all is a problem in that hypothetical scenario.
Let’s append on that little tale:
Another problem is that you might have already bought a $800 dollar tool for your little hobby turned side-business, which would work perfectly fine for many years thereafter, if just for example a $100 maintenance would be performed to make it compatible with the new 64V electrical system, instead of the previous 32V one that the government of the U.S. of Apple just imposed on all inhabitants.
But instead someone from the government, called Mr. Auto Update or his colleague Mr. Accidentally Hit Update that brought the new intern Mr. Can’t Even Undo along, just came to your workshop and took that tool away. You can’t complain, because the state allowed it and created the legal framework for this.
So your only option—if you want to continue your work—is to rent the tool for $24/day, but only if you sign up to pay $24 as a daily installment, if you commit to a yearly plan. So now you will pay $24 x 365 = $8670 just to continue using basically the same tool that you’ve previously owned. You complain that this is unaffordable and the manufacturer points out that they offer a month-to-month plan. In that case your daily rental fee will be $48 instead.
There is no option to rent it for the time you actually use the tool, which might be just a couple of hours per week.
Even though you considered this option due to the lack of alternatives, it is impossible for you to cram all the work you would usually do spread out over the course of year into one month in which you then rent the tool ($48 x 31 = $1488). This is an unreasonable idea. You customers won’t wait for up to a year and also you have a main job that you can’t just put on halt to follow your small side-business.
After one year of sucking it up and taking the cut in earnings you realize that out of the 20 tools that you have previously owned and irregularly used for your little side-business, 15 have switched to a similar subscription model. Some now only offer a very limited free version and require a “pro” subscription to even export your work. The “pro” subscription is outpricing you from using it at all. Some are only compliant with GDPR rules, if you buy their business plan and others seem to now focus on a service, where you physically have to send your work piece in to their storage facilities, where they will paint it pink, which you neither ever needed in the first place, nor your customers want.
So you decide after long and tedious research to replace some of your previously owned tools with alternatives. Now you are using 30 instead of 20 tools, while still paying practically “a second rent” for subscriptions of tools that are essential to your work. You have to charge more for your work and your already small number of customers is decreasing.
In addition some of your little side-business’ customers are complaining, because the output you can created with those replacement tools is not 100% compatible with the quintessential industry standard anymore. You try to convince them, but it is a David vs. Goliath fight. You end up losing more of your customers.
The city of St. Ore (APP) doesn’t care. They earn their 30% sales tax from the sales that were generated by locking you into some of the yearly plans. The tool manufacturer also doesn’t care. They consider you not worthy enough to use their tools, mock you and point to their revenue charts, which for the moment actually increased. (No wonder with a over 10x mark up). Blind to the fact that they significantly decreased their potential market size and therefore will already reach market saturation in just merely a year, they feel assured.
However what all three, the tool manufacturers, the city and the state are not seeing is that there is an ever growing dissatisfaction amongst their inhabitants and users …
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If one logically thinks about these matters the extant pricing model can be made to work, if you look at Agenda for example. The subscription models are clearly unsustainable in the long run, and I suspect most of the Apps that have gone this route wont last long (perhaps 1Password. Office 365 excepted)
Hope that helps
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Agreed. I don’t think it’s necessarily better or worse, just different.