Subscriptions vs. One time purchase: Is outright always better?

I’ve seen a lot of comments on social media about subscription software. All those I recall are frustrated with the change from being able to purchase outright and forced to a subscription model. I mostly agree, I’d much rather make a one-off payment than keep shelling out regularly. However, while sorting through old papers the other day, I came across an old receipt for Microsoft Office that I purchased in 1994. When I say I prefer outright purchases, my assumption is that I’d end up paying significantly less that way.

The receipt was for Microsoft Office 4 for Windows. It included Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access and was designed for Windows 3.x. The following year Windows 95 was released. So how much did I pay for it? I paid a staggering AU$525 (about US$349) back then. With inflation, that’s a mind-boggling AU$1,195 today (US$795)!

To be fair there were a lot of paper manuals with it and I expect that would have added a bit to the price. The software came on 3.5″ disk, lots of them.

I know I used that version for a few years, but not too long. The following year Office 97 was released. The next version I still own was from 2007, but I think I must have had at least one earlier version before that. I know later they bought out Home & Student editions that were cheaper and that’s what I later purchased.

In this case buying outright was quite expensive, but at that time there were not many options. I don’t know what I’m going to do next time. I still don’t want to pay a subscription. I occasionally use Word but think I could easily change to something else. Excel is more difficult because I still have spreadsheets that use a lot of macros that I have created.

Any ideas for an alternative to Excel that supports macros?

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I’m continuing to experiment with the built-in AI image generator in WordPress. This one was generated using the prompt “Generate an image of a man holding a piece of paper and sitting at a desk with a look of despair on his face. Make it in the style of a drawing from a 1970’s book for boys.”