Hi sntit,
Thank you for your feedback and point of view that we fully respect and completely take as a constructive feedback.
We have put in place this pricing structure after a long public thread on this forum a few years ago, where we collected feedbacks on pricing and where community members showed that they prefer to pay upfront for their use, instead of afterwards on a per-use base, but still have a moderate price when starting.
By choosing the options, you can get an unlimited users, lifetime license for each customer site, which could be considered as being the "regular/list" price, which is still very affordable for any E-commerce site providing livelihood for one or more persons, and can be considered as unexpensive, when compared to any professional web-E-commerce solution, even if CBSubs offers considerably more features, specially in areas that help increase dramatically E-commerce turnover (e.g. marketing mails, complex conditional promotions, auto-recurring payments, social marketing and so on).
As that price can be too steep for smaller E-commerce side-businesses, we have made the lower options, that can be considered as a discount to make the price even easier, with possibility to upgrade later at just the price-difference.
At 20% per maintenance year, CBSubs pricing is way cheaper than the usual 100% price per maintenance year of most solutions on the market. Additionally, we offer lifetime-maintenance at a very reasonable price, which most solutions don't offer.
CBSubs 2.0.2 has addressed the extensibility issue for Developer members, by providing not only sample source-code under the GPL but also API documentation for integration plugins and payment gateways.
That said, we do value your feedback and understand it too.