This story was initially published on LinkedIn, in July 2025. One year later, we stopped selling subscriptions to new customers, shifting our strategy entirely on to a subscription model. I will talk more about this in part 2 of this article.
TLDR; it takes time and a lot of pricing tests, there is no easy playbook to copy.
After 20 years of selling perpetual licenses for Advanced Installer, we now have a complete subscription offering, side by side with our perpetual licensing. It took us almost 2 years and half-a-dozen pricing tests (plus many more internal ones) during which we launched the new subscriptions.
When we released the first version of Advanced Installer in 2003, we generated revenue using a classic licensing model for desktop applications. We sold a lifetime license with an optional yearly fee for updates. That’s what we kept on doing for almost 20 years, with a decent growth rate that reflected our continuous investment in the product.
We were aware that many customers would never buy any additional maintenance, and we accepted this because it was easier to just keep going the same way and focus on the product instead of testing licensing changes. We still had what we considered at the time a decent percentage of our revenue coming from the optional maintenance fees from existing customers.
Not every piece of software should be licensed as a subscription. As consumers, we don’t like getting forced to buy subscriptions for every tool we need. We might need a license just for a small test project, and we don’t want to pay for a subscription just to keep the toolset active when that project is sidelined. Or we might simply accept the higher initial cost of a perpetual license because it will be more economical for a specific project budget in the long term.
That is why we never removed our perpetual licenses from our Pricing page. Our customers can choose whichever model better suits their budget and operations.
Maintenance Fees vs Subscriptions
Both are a recurring revenue source, but with one very important difference. The maintenance for perpetual licenses is optional, and many customers choose to skip it.
When you’re growing every year, you don’t think too much about that “optional” part, but you should. Commited revenue is very important for the long-term financial health of every company. The bigger its percentage, the less fragile your company is against potential market volatility events. And a stable company is something that both parties want, i.e. the employees and the owners of the company, but also the customers.
As a customer, you always evaluate the history of a supplier. You want to make sure they will be providing and maintaining the solutions you buy for as long as you need to. A subscription might be cheaper in the short term and a little bit more expensive in the long term, but a supported solution will always bring a higher ROI to your company compared to any outdated software. It will save you from manually implementing workflows that are included in newer versions, stay up to date against security threats, and allow you to adjust to market shifts or adopt new technologies faster.
How did we handle the transition?
As I said, it took as almost 2 years. We didn’t wanted to just replace our current perpetual licenses and force the customers switch to a subscription.
We first started by deprecating floating license model, which was not very used and just complicated our previous purchase options. Instead, we introduced a new Team subscription which fits perfectly our customers. Advanced Installer is used by development teams or service providers to build and maintain their setup packages. Having a team plan seems natural now, but it took us a long time to discover this, and the sales results confirm this, with a much higher adoption of our team subscription compared to previous years of selling floating licenses.
Setting up the foundation, educating the users, and launching the Team subscriptions spanned about 1 year. In this time, we collected feedback, fixed issues in our new subscription management system, and gave time to all our users to update their version of Advanced Installer and thus nicely integrate with the new subscription registration flow.
Deploying updates to all the users is never easy when building desktop applications. Advanced Installer includes an auto-updater that helps optimize this process, but the users still need to approve the update and test their project.
Back to subscriptions. After the first year and when renewals started to come in, we launched our offering for per-user subscriptions. But this didn’t mean our work was done. In the second year of launching the subscription plans we tested various pricing points, started building an in-house churn monitor because our e-payments provider sucks at it, and constantly analyzed the feedback from our customers.
This kind of work is never done. Even if you are already selling subscriptions, you should always test better pricing models and ranges. Markets change, forcing you to adapt. Otherwise, some competitors will, and you will slowly be losing your customers.
I hope our story will help you start your pricing experiments. And if you like it, share it with your peers or ask me a follow-up question, I am sure I missed something from our subscription journey.