I prefer the subscription model, as long as the total expected cost is not too far out of line for the service. $5/mo for every tiny utility is too much.
However, before the rise of subscriptions developers still needed income. What often happened were releases with big changes (sometimes completely changing the ui) for the sake of justifying an upgrade cost. Even worse, incompatibility between versions to force an upgrade.
Perpetual license of an older version included with the subscription does seem like a good middle ground here.
I live in an area where cable/fiber is not an option, and have been using T-Mobile Home Internet for a while now.
People in other locations will surely have different experiences, but for me it just works okay and the signal is poor. In rainy weather, it degrades even worse. Even with a Cel-Fi booster and directional antenna, the signal is worse than AT&T without any booster. While I sometimes get 50 Mbps down, usually going over 20 Mbps gets a bunch of latency and packet loss.
For backup, I have an AT&T hotspot, which performs much better but is limited to 100GB. I get 120 Mbps down on this with no degradation.
I live in a semi-rural area and work from home in tech. I am within range of LTE towers, but only T-Mo will serve my area and the connection remains spotty even with a $1000 signal booster.
It is frustrating to see initiatives like this that do not address the actual problems that make work difficult. My throughput is about 25 down / 3 up when it works, and this feels fine to me.
What I do need is a ping that stays under 100ms reliably, even when downloading or streaming. I can usually get 60ms or so, but it jumps up to 1000ms for short periods of time regularly for no reason. This interferes with any sort of voip calling severely.
Just as importantly, data caps should be at least 500GB, and clearly unlimited would be better yet. Plans that offer under 100GB of data are used up very quickly if doing anything more than the bare minimum.
However, before the rise of subscriptions developers still needed income. What often happened were releases with big changes (sometimes completely changing the ui) for the sake of justifying an upgrade cost. Even worse, incompatibility between versions to force an upgrade.
Perpetual license of an older version included with the subscription does seem like a good middle ground here.