By this logic, my house cleaner is rent-seeking because I pay every week, but I could do the work myself. That’s not what rent-seeking is. That is a garden variety service.

All of the anti-subscription sentiment just sounds like “I want perpetual support and updates for a one-time price”, which is just silly. It’s actually bad for the customer because once the service provider has your one-time payment, they have zero incentive to keep you as a customer.

It leads to misaligned incentives as sellers seek to expand to new markets to reach new customers while neglecting existing customers who are nothing but expense.

Further, SaaS produces net lower costs because resources can be utilized more efficiently. Great, you can do an on-premise server, but you need to spec it to support the busiest second in the busiest day of your year. Most of the time it will be underutilized.

Sorry, this whole claim is such a massive misunderstanding of Smith and SaaS that it’s making be a bit crazy.

No, because that would require everyone to own and operate their own servers. I am very happy I do not have to share my bedroom with a server rack so that I can operate my company - not to speak of the cost to deploy a 15gbit/s line to my apartment…

Every commercial company is free to charge whatever they want, it's not rent-seeking (unless there is a monopoly, but your argument is applies to small companies as well).

And yes, the fact that you cannot find the software you need for the pricing model you like sucks.. but it is not rent-seeking. And the fact that my local Home Depot does not have cheap, but reliable refrigerators is not rent-seeking either. At worst, it is collusion between manufacturers.

Many companies don’t have a prem on which to run.