Editing Subscription business model (section)

===Customers===
Consumers may find subscriptions convenient if they believe they will buy a product regularly and might save money. The customer saves time for repeated delivery of the product or service.<ref name=":1" />

Subscriptions which exist to support clubs and organizations call their subscribers "members" and they are given access to a group with similar interests.<ref name=":1" />

Subscription pricing can make it easier to pay for expensive items since they can often be paid for over time and thus can make the product seem more affordable. On the other hand, most newspaper and magazine-type subscriptions are paid upfront, which may prevent some customers from subscribing. Fixed prices may be an advantage for consumers who frequently use those services. However, it could disadvantage a customer who plans to use the service frequently but later does not. The commitment to paying for a package may have been more expensive than a single purchase. In addition, subscription models increase the possibility of [[vendor lock-in]], which can have fatally business-critical implications for a customer if its business depends on the availability of software: For example, without an online connection to a licensing server to verify the licensing status every once in a while, a software under a subscription-model would typically stop functioning or fall back to the functionality of a freemium version, thereby making it impossible (to continue) to use the software in remote places or particularly secure environments without internet access, after the vendor has stopped supporting the version or software, or even has gone out of business leaving the customer without a chance to renew the subscription and access his data or designs maintained with the software (in some businesses it is important to have full access even to old files for decades). Also, consumers may find repeated payments to be onerous.<ref name=":1" />

Subscription models often require or allow the business to gather substantial amounts of information from the customer (such as magazine mailing lists), and this raises issues of [[privacy]].<ref name=":1" />

A subscription model may benefit the software buyer if it forces the supplier to improve its product. Accordingly, a psychological phenomenon may occur when a customer renews a subscription, that may not occur during a one-time transaction: if the buyer is not satisfied with the service, he/she can leave the subscription to expire and find another seller.<ref name=":0">{{cite web |url=http://news.cnet.com/2100-1012-5169536.html |author=Alorie Gilbert |title=Software Execs Bash Their Industry's Approach |publisher=news.com.com |date=March 3, 2004 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20120527035007/http://news.cnet.com/2100-1012-5169536.html |archive-date=May 27, 2012 |url-status=dead }}</ref>