Lightspeed Changing POS Pricing to Subscription Model

We received an email that Lightspeed Pro retail point of sale is changing their pricing from a one-time purchase to a monthly subscription.

Effective December 3rd, 2013, LightSpeed Pro will be shifting from a perpetual license to a monthly subscription plan. This means that rather than purchasing the software for a one-time fee, a significantly smaller fee will be paid each month for the duration of the software's use.

How does this compare to the existing pricing, for example, for three user licenses:

3 licenses (1 year support) = $2548 = $212 / month for 1 year = $106 / month 2 years = $53 / month 4 years.

In our case, we currently pay about $53 / month considering a 4 year amortization.

The new pricing, pasted from our email, is as follows:

SMALL $79/month paid annually 1 Register $89 / mo. paid monthly MEDIUM $134/month paid annually 2 Registers $149 / mo. paid monthly LARGE $229/month paid annually 4 Registers $259 / mo. paid monthly

For our business, this would be a cost increase of about $2400 / year. Even if you subtract $1000 for an annual support contract, it is still $1400 more. I believe Ecommerce support is extra as well. If this pricing were in effect when we moved to Lightspeed Retail POS (now Lightspeed Pro), I don't think we would have made the move. The ROI may not pencil out versus competitors such as Quickbooks POS which have superior inventory management and cash handling, and now cost less to operate.

To me, the whole point of buying Lightspeed Pro POS is to actually own software you can run on your own hardware. It works if the Internet goes down. You own it. It integrates with an open source web store (well, it is advertised to, but has been broken for us for a month).

Now, you don't own anything unless you pay the subscription fees. Of course we're unhappy that our install still doesn't work with Magento web store as advertised. We had high hopes for this platform, but I can't see new customers adopting the platform with this pricing. It's like the cost of a SaaS or cloud-based POS, without the IT opex benefits. Perhaps Lightspeed is trying to push people to adopt it's new cheaper cloud-based POS instead.