There's a particular small dread that arrives with a bank statement. You scan the recurring charges and one of them you can't quite place. £8.99, every month, for something you're fairly sure you stopped opening in the spring.
Most software is rented now, and most people couldn't recite the full list of what they're renting. That isn't carelessness or a personal failing. It's a business model that won, and it won more recently than people remember.
The month the default changed
In May 2013, Adobe announced that Creative Suite 6 would be the last version you could buy. Everything after it — Photoshop, Illustrator, the whole suite — would be available only as a monthly Creative Cloud subscription. No more owning a copy. A petition asking Adobe to reverse the decision gathered more than 50,000 signatures. Adobe did not reverse it. By the end of 2014 it had 3.4 million subscribers, comfortably more than had ever bought the boxed software, and the rest of the industry took notes.
The thing worth noticing is that this was a choice, made on a date, by people in a meeting. Software didn't become a subscription because of some law of physics. It became a subscription because recurring revenue is easier to forecast and pleasant to compound, and because a customer who pays every month is worth more than one who pays once and walks away content.
That is a perfectly reasonable thing for a company to want. It's just worth being clear that it's what they want, and not the same thing as what you need.
What you rent when you rent
A subscription isn't a price. It's a relationship, and the relationship is lopsided.
When you rent software, the thing you depend on can change under you. The button moves. The feature you relied on becomes part of a higher tier. The price drifts up a few percent each January, never enough on its own to make you cancel, which is rather the point. And the day the payment stops, so does the access — including, often, to the records you made with it.
Renting software means the tool you lean on answers to someone else's roadmap, someone else's pricing, and someone else's quarterly targets.
There's a second, quieter cost. A 2025 CNET survey found the average person wastes around $204 a year on subscriptions they've forgotten they have, and that 42% of people had at some point kept paying for something they'd entirely forgotten about. The genius of the model is that forgetting is profitable. Forgetting about software you bought outright costs you nothing. Forgetting about software you rent is a slow leak with your name on it.
Pay once, then stop thinking about it
Here is the part the model doesn't advertise: paying once is still allowed. There is a small, stubborn category of software you buy outright, that lives on your machine, and that keeps working long after you've stopped thinking about the company that made it.
What buying once actually gets you is short enough to list:
- The price you paid is the price. It doesn't climb because a board meeting decided next year's number.
- It keeps working if the company folds. Nothing on a server was holding the lights on.
- You can forget about it safely. There's no recurring charge to forget to cancel, so forgetting costs nothing.
None of this is nostalgia for shrink-wrapped boxes. It's just the older, plainer arrangement: you give someone money, they give you a copy, the copy is yours. The same shape as buying a book. The publisher can go under and the book stays on your shelf, doing what it always did.
The maths nobody runs
A tool at £8 a month sounds like nothing. It's £96 a year, just shy of £500 over five years, for something that often does roughly what it did the day you signed up. Bought once, the same kind of tool amortises towards zero — a few pounds a year by the time you've used it long enough to forget the purchase.
But the money is the smaller half of it. The larger half is that a thing you own can't be taken away from you by a pricing change or a shutdown notice or a quietly expiring export window. It sits where you put it. It does what it did. That's a rare quality in modern software, and it used to be the only kind there was.
You don't have to rent everything. Some things genuinely suit a subscription — the ones that really do change every month, that really do run on someone else's machine for good reason. But a tracker, a log, a small tool that holds your own records? That can be a file you own. It probably should be.
OneFileClub makes powerful one-file tools you buy once and keep — habit trackers, training logs, food diaries, sleep logs. One file. One payment. No monthly charge to forget about, and nothing on a server with your name on the bill.