For a lot of developers, a one time payment is not enough to sustainably work on software that is constantly improving over the years. Having one of the following solutions will help:

• A per product subscription: You get free updates and support as long as you pay yearly
• A per developer subscription: same than previous, but for all the products of a developer
• A paid update: give a developer the possibility to mark a specific update (and the following ones) as being a paid one

Thanks for your time

Itch utilizes support for patreon, so you can give rewards to patreon subscribers. You could implement most of the functionality you describe with it. Have you looked at that?

Also for paid updates, you can set a “different price” to an updated version, which if I’m not wrong would force the user to pay that price to have access to that file. However I’m not sure how users will like that, but that’s an entirely different topic.

Hi Dark Dimension, thanks for your answer.

The problem with the "different price" option is that, and correct me if I am wrong (I am new to itch.io), it would have the same price regardless of you having already bought the base file or not.

With the pateron solution, the problem is that you have to get people to go to your patreon, and create an account if they don't have already (this is my case). If options are part of the itch.io store, you will definitely impact more the people who are already there.

My real need is a per product subscription (like for Resharper for example for those familiar with it): users will get updates for free for a year, and then have to pay again if they want to keep getting the newer versions. The other ideas were suggestions based on what I have seen people here and there ask for, so I thought since these needs are kind of related, let's put them all in the same post.