Also if you want to do just one project (i.e. you don't produce music/video for a living, but you know enough to do your own stuff), then you can probably get away with paying $5 a month for just enough months to finish your project.
That was a use case completely uncatered for with a $400 one-off license fee.
Yep, I totally forgot about this use-case, but there were plenty of situations where it would've saved me. With one a couple a years ago that I vividly remember.
I volunteered to edit a demo video for our internal hackathon project, and had both an M1 iPad and a new macbook. I wanted to go all out on the video just for the fun of it, and I still had some of the final cut pro muscle memory from many years before, even though it was a much older version. iMovie proved to be extremely inadequate even for some basics (on both macbook and ipad). iPad had some third party options, but they were all either unwieldy or expensive or various other issues. For macbook, there were various alternatives (davinci, etc), but they either had similarly high pricing or various other limitations or an insane learning curve (which i don't mind usually, but not in those circumstances). Final Cut was only available as a full-priced option. I would have easily been willing to pay $10-20 for one month worth of access for this project, but no way I am paying hundreds for that. Ended up using iMovie and making the video that i absolutely hated and that wasn't resembling anything I had in mind for it at all.
P.S. I am genuinely baffled by how terrible iMovie is compared to its big sibling Final Cut Pro, given how amazing and well-rounded GarageBand is compared to its big sibling Logic Pro. GarageBand is obviously not competing with Logic Pro, I was just trying to illustrate that Apple has those hobby->pro creative app relationships (iMovie->Final Cut Pro, GarageBand->Logic Pro), and the GB->LP one is imo fantastic overall, and both products are shining in their respective tiers, and I get a good use out of both of them. But with iMovie->Final Cut Pro, I am pretty much fighting against iMovie even for some basic things and would rather deal with Final Cut only. And yes, for basic video editing, I still miss windows movie maker (the newer MSFT replacement for it, Clipchamp, is the worst out of major basic video editing software i've ever used).
Agreed, but only because comparable alternatives are even worse imo. Hopefully, one day Apple will nail it like they did with GarageBand, as GB used to be pretty meh as well not that long ago.
I'll do you one better, I just started the App store on the Mac to check whether they've implemented the same model there. The only music I make is analog, but I'd have liked to try it out for a few bucks.
But you are not paying $5/month. That’s a gimmick. You are pre-paying a full year’s worth. It’s like paying (almost) full price but for only a year’s worth of use.
For Adobe, at least, the actual monthly rate is way higher.
That was a use case completely uncatered for with a $400 one-off license fee.