I couldn’t find definitive announcement regarding whether OmniFocus 4 would be offered in subscription-only and/or traditional purchase options. Any news on that?
I for one strongly dislike subscription model because it’s like a constant water leak (bank account drain). I’d much rather make a purchase and upgrades at various points that involve actual conscious decision rather than resort to recurring charges that I either forget are occurring or have to constantly keep track of which is mental overload.
We’ll continue to support traditional up-front purchases alongside subscriptions for all our products for the foreseeable future.
As I said when introducing the subscriptions option four years ago, we think the traditional up-front licensing model meets a lot of needs: we prefer for customers to view our apps as an investment, not an expense. And as I also noted in that post:
I should note that subscriptions do have significant downsides. The initial cost to start using the product is lower, but over time subscriptions will end up costing more—and unlike our one-time purchases, it’s not an investment: when you stop subscribing to OmniFocus you’ll lose access to the things that were being provided by that subscription. When a subscription ends you won’t be able to use OmniFocus for the Web any more—and any OmniFocus apps running on your own devices will go back to whatever state they were in before you subscribed. (If you never unlocked those apps, that means they’ll go into a free viewer mode where you can access your data and export it, but can no longer edit it.)
OmniFocus 4 will also be a Universal app, just as OmniPlan 4 is today: buying v4 for any platform will license it for all platforms.
P.S. — Because OmniFocus for the Web is a service that runs on our hardware, not a downloadable app you can run yourself, it will continue to require a subscription to cover the costs of running that service each month. (As noted in that same blog post, that’s the reason we introduced support for subscriptions in the first place—though we’ve decided to make the subscriptions option available across our product lines for those who prefer predictable annual costs to stay up-to-date.)
That’s great news! I like how you describe that software is an investment and not an expense. That’s a nice way to also capture my feelings about why I mostly do not like subscription-based software. The use of OmniFocus for Web as subscription-based makes sense because it uses your cloud services.
