Ditch the MONTHLY PAYMENTS

How much do you pay for your software subscriptions? It might be more than you think. Consider some of the most common desktop applications: Microsoft 365 Family is £7.99 a month, Dropbox Plus is another £7.90 and QuickBooks adds £24. If you need the Adobe Creative Suite then add almost £50 on top of all that, coming to a total of nearly £90 just on software, or more than £1,000 a year. That’s before you consider things like VoIP services, web hosting, domain registration, VPNs… the list goes on.

There are ways to make savings: you might be eligible for an education licence, for example. And it can be helpful to spread the cost of an expensive software suite over several months rather than paying an upfront cost. However, the subscription model means you’ll need to continue coughing up forever, beyond the point where you’ve paid what would have been the full asking price.

If you’ve had enough of all these recurrent payments, don’t despair. For almost every application that requires a software subscription, there’s an alternative that lets you pay once for a perpetual licence – or that you can use entirely for free.