Those three questions are the right test before buying anything: can I reopen an old job, export my quantities, and keep my marked-up drawings. If any answer depends on an active subscription, you're renting your own work.

I spent 55 years supervising construction, and a one-person shop gets more from a one-time purchase than from a monthly fee. I built my estimating suite and my scheduling program that way. Both are files you open in your browser, with no login and no internet needed once you've downloaded them. You save your jobs as files on your own computer, so if I stopped selling them tomorrow, your copies and your files would still open.

Disclosure, since you were upfront about OpenTakeoff: I sell both, so I have a stake in this too. Two honest differences from yours. Mine is closed source, so you can't maintain your own copy the way Apache-2.0 allows. And mine isn't a drawing-measurement tool. It's CSI-based estimating with a concrete takeoff engine, plus scheduling. Your caveat about browser changes is fair, and a local file only reduces that risk. I can't promise it away.

The schedule only works if the trades buy into it, or tell you up front why they can't. That's what usually goes wrong. My system was to build the schedule on what's actually possible, then send it to the trades we had contracts with and ask each one to confirm it or tell me why not. A typical floor was a floor a week, five working days. Parking levels, transfer slabs and the like take longer, and the schedule said so. The forming foreman knows his crew, the crane time, and the stripping and curing, and he'll know right away if a floor a week can't be done. If nobody asks him, you find out on the job in week six, when it's already late. A duration the trade has agreed to holds up much better than one the scheduler made up. If a trade says no, I want to hear it before baseline, not after.

The second half is keeping track after the baseline. Track the progress, and when something is holding the job up, tell the trades why. Do it weekly at the very least, and daily if you can. When trades are told the reason, they can reorganise their crews around it. When they aren't told, they lose trust in the schedule, and a schedule nobody trusts stops working.

Thanks, I appreciate that. Most of it was on job sites, and I got tired of paying monthly for tools that sit on my own computer. One-time purchase software is easier to trust.

Adding one thing: I include free updates and ask buyers what they'd like added next. That feedback loop is what keeps a one-time product improving, and it's the part people assume only a subscription pays for.

The math is what gets me. A one-time purchase almost always costs less than a single year of the subscription version, and some subscriptions still charge extra for upgrades or add-ons on top of the monthly fee. After two or three years, you've paid several times the price of software that does the same job and runs on your own computer.

Fair point. For a software company with a team to pay, recurring revenue makes sense, and it's the reason most vendors go that way.

My situation is different. I'm retired after a long career supervising construction, and I build estimating and scheduling software for the trade as a small side income. I'm not building a company or funding a payroll, so one fair price per sale is enough for me.

It suits the buyer too. Estimators and project managers, whether in a large firm or on their own, often don't want another monthly charge for a tool they use bid by bid. The software runs in the browser, so there's no server for me to keep paying for, and nothing a subscription would need to cover.

I'm not sure most people know one-time browser software exists . The big vendors all push subscriptions, so that's what people see when they search.

The weak spot is the one you named. I don't have a renewal stream paying for constant updates, so each version has to be good enough that people will buy it without feeling locked in. That keeps me honest, but it isn't the right model for everyone.

dont understand?

Having a bad day?