When licenses MEAN nothing I PAY for nothing yarrrr

To the people in this thread saying “don’t buy lifetime”, how is that any different than a perpetual license? Your alternative is subscription based… I’d definitely prefer perpetual to subscription.

The only time I ever fell for a "lifetime" software purchase was back when Trillian (the IM client) was popular. That lasted less than 5 years. Then they released "Astas", which was just a UI refresh, but they treated it like it was a whole new company and product. "Lifetime" is always a scam.

this is why we need FOSS

Nah, your lifetime license will be fine. They'll just slightly rename the products, release them as "entirely new, unrelated products" and cease updating it under the old name. You can still use the old, never updated product in perpetuity, if you want...

The first time this happened to me was a MUD client of all things. zMUD discontinued, check out the new cMUD! Also available with a lifetime license just like zMUD was!

I'm still crazy salty about when I invested ~$250 to get the Substance Painter + Designer suite, and got the "We'Re JoInInG tHe AdObE fAMiLy wooo!" Email....

Followed by the "Don't worry we'll still let you get indie licenses" email...

Followed by the "It's gonna be subscription only but you can still keep the never-will-be-upgraded indie version we're discontinuing."

How can the likes of Adobe and Autodesk be so garbage and yet everything they taint with their miasmal existence is or becomes "InDuStRy StAnDaRd"? At this point I refuse to touch Adobe stuff partly because their membership is harder to quit than a gym, and the rest is just out of sheer spite.

I just refuse to use commercial creative software at this point. The blatant rug pulling is just expected now.

I bought a lifetime license for Malwarebytes back in 2012 and I'm shocked that they still honor it to this day. I feel like it's only a matter of time before I lose it.

Canva's UI is somehow more fiddly than Word for making edits, but they've always seemed like a pretty decent company to me.

...of course that only holds true until it doesn't - I'm looking at you, Google.

I learned my lesson about 'lifetime' updates with a Tom Tom GPS unit, from the late '90s, maybe early 2000s. After about 4 or 5 years I couldn't install the latest map updates, so I contacted CS. They said, "Oh yeah, lifetime means the time of the expected life of the unit, which is 4.5 years. We don't support that model anymore. Any other questions?"

That's why open source rules

What amazes me are the number of companies selling "lifetime" VPN service or "lifetime" cloud storage service with a straight face.

Like... that is TRANSPARENTLY a scam. You're literally gonna sell lifetime licenses to people with more money than common sense, until the entire system is overloaded, then just go out of business.

Not only software license, I believe any products "lifetime" comes with a lot of caveates.

Case in point, I purchased a fountain pen a decade ago, and started to leak (a crack around the threads) a few year back. The company is known for its lifetime warranty and good customer service, as per the warranty, it said if the product is defective (which I believe leaking pen body is), I am entilted for a replacement part or a new model of the same price if the pen is no longer in production. I reached out to customer service and was told, they can't supply a replacement part because the pen is no longer in production and I'm not entitled to a new model because they doesn't deem a leaking body a defect.

Whelp... the Affinity Suite was pretty awesome and robust. Too bad they never did a proper linux port.

Buying a lifetime license, also known as... buying.

Products aren't services.

I am so sick of the new age of zero ownership or protections. Instead of greedy companies losing customers, other companies just see it like “oh shit we can do that too?” and consumers are the only ones losing.

Subscriptions, here we come! You can't trust any commercial software company.

I remember Pocket Casts tried to take away lifetime purchases until people complained about it and they went 'fuck it' and gave people memberships that lasted 100 years or something. They did it before they had time to rebrand it as a 'Lifetime Member' in the GUI so good on them for fixing it so fast I guess.

I love it as an app but I'm not sure what it's like for new users that can't get lifetime memberships.

even if they keep lifetime licenses for now, it's blatantly obvious how Canva plans to use Embrace, Extend, Extinguish to move people to a subscription service for newer releases.

If adobe can do it with Photoshop et al. without losing its brand reputation, then Affinity will follow suit in due course.

I've bought VPN lifetime several times, 2 of them have disappeared, 2 are still running. On the other hand, just think about it from the company point of view, lifetime support is not a sustainable business model, so it necessarily must be a scam.

Ah damnit I love affinity. Can Someone fix Gimp already??

It's so great we have foss to compete with this wave of companies trying to make everything a subscription.

License means you paid us for something we'll let you use until we don't feel like it anymore.