A lot of entrepreneurs hate the saasification of everything, and don't want to create sub services. They tow the line because investors LOVE subs and will look at you like you're insane if you disagree.
The reason is a very simple one - predicting future revenue is extremely difficult if you're selling an $X package one time (even with upgrades etc), but knowing that you have Y subscribers with a $Z subscription and a churn rate of N% gives you some kind of future forecast.
Anything you can do to operationalize cash flows is a huge boon to continuity of business operations
There's also the fact that people are bad about cancelling when they don't use them, and it makes it easy to jack up prices.
I don't argue that they're great from a predatory business perspective. The consistency you state comes on the back of negative value for customers though. Particularly now that everything is a subscription. People are worn TF out by keeping track of the people hoovering their money away.
Yeah personally I think it's absolutely awful and a clear example of the way that financialization has negatively affected a lot of things these days, but if you're in that mindset the reasoning is perfectly clear and valid - it's just lacking the larger picture.
