This showed up in my RSS feed and is not directly related to us here but this might have knock on effects especially with darktable and RawTherapee having recent releases and updates too:
I have a couple of photographer contacts and friends who swapped to Capture One a number of years ago to avoid the Adobe subscription shakedown and I’m sure they are not alone. The FLOSS photography community may be seeing a small influx of new users over this in the near future.
The only subscription I like to pay for is Netflix and maybe Prime. 
For various reasons, I flip-flop between darktable and Capture One for my editing.
At this moment, I find it most likely that this change in pricing structure is mostly a miscommunication: nothing of substance is actually changing with Capture One, but they -once again- managed to offend their community needlessly with a terribly misleading message.
That said, if this actually is the end of practical standalone licensing for Capture One, I’ll be in a bit of a pickle. Subscription software is not an option for me.
Which makes me wonder, though, why do I have such a strong reaction to subscription software? I tried hard to figure out that question yesterday. Realistically, €180 a year is relatively reasonable price for the software. Certainly something I could pay with ease if I wanted to.
I think what it comes down to for me is not the cost of ownership itself, but the migration cost. I like to flip-flop between darktable and Capture One. Hopefully, this will eventually swing fully towards darktable, but I recon there will always remain an occasional use case for an alternative raw editor — perhaps because there’s an itinerant bug in darktable, perhaps for inspiration, perhaps out of boredom. At the moment, this second editor is Capture One, even if otherwise rarely used. But a subscription would make that use case too expensive.
Crucially, a subscription demands a definite end to your usage. You can’t slowly drift off and use it less and less. Once you stop paying, you can’t use it any longer, it’s gone. I think this is the killer for me. If Capture One makes product ownership impractical in the future, I’ll have to look for a new alternative editor.
Perhaps next year, I’ll check out DxO, then the one remaining commercial raw editor with a reasonable rendering engine (unlike Skylum, ON1, Silkypix, Zoner, X6) and standalone pricing (unlike Adobe, Capture One).
Secondly, upgrade pricing will no longer be available, and instead Capture One plans to replace it with what it calls a “loyalty scheme.”
Even better, they’ve announced it something but not been clear
I never gat the acceptance of the transition between paying for newer version for obvious reasons :
And the transition to sofware as a service when not paying on a regular basis can in certain case :
My personal opinion is that it really is bad practices and completely incompatible with fee software philosophy .
Don’t they say they won’t enhance the software, if you don’t pay for a newer version? That’s not the same as killing what currently have.
Well, they said there won’t be an upgrade discount any longer, and there won’t be intermediate upgrades between major versions. That’s markedly reducing the value and upping the cost of perpetual licenses.
It used to be that yearly upgrades of the perpetual license were similarly expensive as a yearly subscription. Then the prices were changed to make the upgrades more expensive. Still, bi-annual upgrades were still competitively priced. And now they’re probably becoming more expensive still.
So perpetual licenses are not going away just yet, they’re just made less and less attractive.