Business models are an interesting topic that lives directly at the boundary between business and technology.
The business model describes an abstract plan for how the business is to function sustainably, and is a full time job to develop in and of itself. Then, it must be implemented in the product using technology.
For example, a typical SaaS business model involves subscription pricing at various intervals (monthly & yearly), with a discount given for the yearly plan in exchange for more money paid up front and longer commitment. There may or may not be a limited time free trial period, or alternatively a limited time guaranteed refund. Furthermore, there may be different pricing tiers that unlock more advanced features.
Ultimately, this is all going to end up as code that models the various pricing tiers, plans, timing deadlines, and enforces security (i.e. making sure the advanced features are only available to pro users). Stripe is a common service used to model arbitrary business models and execute payments processing. They provide client libraries offering data models for concepts like users and plans.
While subscription models have grown in popularity as software shifts to the web, it’s not the only model. The older model of buying discrete software packaged versions still exists, mostly used by vendors of desktop software. In this model, customers pay a larger sum for unlimited use of a specific major version of software. Then they can optionally pay again to upgrade to a newer major version when it’s released. A variant of this exists where there’s no upgrade fee (i.e. “lifetime free updates”). Another model exists called “Rent to own” which is like a subscription, except payments stop at a certain point after which there is free unlimited use.
Whether the software runs on the client or server is another dimension to consider which may influence the business model — server side software is most commonly sold using subscriptions these days.
| Client | Server | |
| Subscription | Adobe | SaaS Web Apps |
| One time payment per version | Dash, Ableton Live | |
| One time payment, lifetime free updates | FL Studio, Tailwind CSS (technically more assets than software) | SaaS Web Apps Lifetime Plans (e.g Roam Research) |
| Rent to own | Audio plugins via Splice |
The business model impacts technical strategy in a few ways.
- Branching and release management
- Compatibility of document artifacts
Subscriptions, “lifetime free updates”, and “rent to own” are simplest in terms of branching and release management. All users are expected to run the latest software (because it’s either free or automatic, in the case of server side), so development can largely happen on a single main branch which releases are cut from.
“One time payment per version” is more complex because potentially multiple major versions of the software need to be maintained in parallel. Ideally bugfixes in Version 2 would also be applied to V3 and V4 when appropriate, but no new feature development should make its way back to V2 and risk being included in binaries send to users that only paid for V2. For this situation, long term release branches make sense as they provide code isolation, though they require some mechanism to forward bugfixes, etc.
The second aspect is document artifact compatibility. Again in this scenario, subscriptions, “lifetime free updates”, and “rent to own” are simpler in that all users can be assumed to be running on the latest version — or at least can be told to upgrade at no cost.
“One time payment per version” is again more complex because multiple versions of the software exist in the wild, all producing artifacts of slightly different versions. If artifacts may be sent between users of different versions, it creates a mess of trying dealing with all the compatibility issues that may arise.