Perpetual licence versus subscription
- Perpetual licence. Bought once, used indefinitely, usually with paid upgrades later. Increasingly rare.
- Subscription. Monthly or yearly, stops working when payment stops.
A £100 gift card means "you own this" in the first model and "you have this for a while" in the second. Both are fine gifts; they are not the same gift, and the recipient will read it differently.
Where the card has to be spent
Three routes, and they are not interchangeable:
- The vendor's own store. Vendor gift cards work here.
- An app store. The app store's card works; the vendor's usually does not.
- A reseller. Often the cheapest route, and typically accepts neither.
As with streaming, the deciding question is how does this person pay for it now? If they subscribed through a phone or a computer app store, that app store's card is the one that works.
Cloud storage
The commonest software gift there is, and usually billed through an app store or platform account. Platform credit is almost always the right product rather than the storage provider's own card.
Worth knowing: storage plans often bill annually with automatic renewal. A card covering one year is a clean gift; a card covering fourteen months is not.
Business and education versions
If the software is for work, check whether the licence needs to be a business one. Gift cards generally buy personal licences, and moving a personal licence to a business account is often impossible.
Education pricing is similarly separate, and usually much cheaper — worth checking before buying a full-price card for a student.
Choosing an amount
- Subscription: whole billing periods. Yearly is usually better value than monthly, so one year is a natural unit.
- Licence: the whole price, or an obvious contribution towards it.
Who it suits
People with a specific tool they already use and pay for. Poor as a speculative gift — software that nobody asked for does not get installed, and the balance sits unspent.