I'm giving them a year until lifetime licenses start to mean nothing.

When licenses MEAN nothing I PAY for nothing yarrrr

Do what you want cuz a pirate is free
- You are a pirate! Yar har fiddle dee dee! Being a pirate is alright with me!
yo ho ho a pirate life for me!
Is there a way to pirate a service like Canva besides pirating someone’s credit card first?
- I don't funny know what canva is so... I don't know

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.

Software companies don't want you to know this, but the open-source licenses on the internet are free. You can just take them home. I have 458 apps.
- Rookie numbers, I have 307336924 cloned repos
There is always another way
🏴‍☠️
- Yeah but for software you want it to work and sometimes need help, when you steal that software you are often on your own. In open source, there is nearly always an open alternative that comes with community support!
- But they were all decieved, for another license was made. Forged in secret.

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.

I'm enjoying my Plex one and Nexus Mods. The latter one was in 2013 and cost me $40. Today the yearly subscription is $70.
- I got a Plex lifetime sub back in the day. They never got rid of it, but they did enshittify the product out from under me.
- Yep. I bought Plex pass lifetime for $60 a while back. It came with plexamp which allowed me stream music to my phone.
  Which after Google play music was murdered I vowed never to do a streaming service again.
  So that was worth it.
  Say what you want about the direction Plex is going currently... But as of now it 100% meets my needs.
- Scooping up a lifetime sub to Nexus, back when they were still available, might have been one of my best online moves. If a game can be modded, I will be modding it - I get SO much value from that one-time investment.
- Something about paying for mods seems so wrong to me
What do you mean? It was lifetime - lasted for the lifetime of the product.
Ohhh you thought they meant YOUR lifetime! Ooopsies
- If you read the fine print, many "lifetime" warranties are like this too. They mean the "lifetime of the product" which is usually defined in the same fine print as like, 5 years or some other bullshit timespan.
- It can be your lifetime, if that's shorter.
  With physical products it can be the "reasonable lifetime" of that class of product
Honestly the way I always look at it is just take the lifetime cost and divide it by the yearly cost and if I think the product/license deal will exist for that long (and I’ll use it for that long) it’s worth it otherwise not. Like, I have lifetime Plex and frankly I don’t expect the, to exist forever but I like the premium features and I’ve had lifetime for long enough that I’ve saved money.
- Yeah, Plex lifetime was worth it.
Yup. Never ever buy lifetime licenses.
Even on software you love. Especially for software you love.
- The alternative usually is subscription, is that better?
Lifetime is only as good as the contract terms.
I have paid for lifetime licenses a couple times and haven't had an issue

GIMP or Krita might not be up to the standard as Affinity and Photoshop are, but at least while perfecting my skills in GIMP, I don't have to worry about having to find a different software because a random company purchases it.
- I really wish I liked gimp but I hate it so much. It's so unintuitive it actually hurts every time I use it
- Even more so, you don't have to worry about hardware support, since they can be compiled from source code, as long as you have pc with enough power to run it, you can run it, no matter which architecture
- People who claim GIMP isn't up to Photoshop inevitably reveal the only actual issue is that they learned photoshop first.

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!

It's not uncommon to do what you said, but to also kill the old product so that they're not available any more. Sometimes it's the exact same product, but with a different name.
- Sometimes it's the exact same product, but with a different name.
  That's basically what zmud/cmud was. He basically slapped a different name on a major update and declared that since it's a different product it requires a separate license and the old product would no longer be updated.
  No need to kill the old product if you just let it stagnate. Things like OS updates and providing no support will slowly kill it for you, without you generating the ill will of prematurely killing lifetime licenses.
And that's why I'm still using Tintin++ - it's free and it's great!
Honestly that would only mean no more updates for the 2.0 version though, right?
Like you already had to buy a new license for 2.0 so it would be like Affinity+Canvas going "we are releasing 3.0 tomorrow, sadly it's subscription only despite our pledges because blah blah blah..." except in your case it's a name change to allow them to do it without breaking their pledge, no?

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.

They are really good to push product with very cheap licences to students. Then it's not easy to learn a new tool.
- The alternative tools are disabled by the patents Adobe holds. They have to find other ways of implementing many techniques

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.

Hell, I bought a hex editor with lifetime lic back in 1996. The fucking guy answered my email and sent me an upgrade almost 30 years later. Hats off to you.
I see so many ads for malware bytes that it almost looks like malware itself lol. I'm pretty sure they have a lot of money.
- I'm pretty sure they have a lot of money.
  Yes but not all of the monies. - Every single MBA ever to curse the earth with their presence.
Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
It's my old go-to whenever I accidentally downloaded something nasty that AVG (back when it was actually okay) couldn't find. Are they actually still good?
- Gold standard free antivirus these days (and by that I mean the only one that isn’t useless)

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

I use a lot of open source apps which aren't as polished, the UIs need work, they're clunky, and they won't enshittify.
- Yeah and there's just as many paid for programs with the same issues... What's your point? Want me to show you some open source programs that are polished? Heard of blender before? That's not the point I was making anyway... The issue with non foss software is that you have ZERO control over it. Big corporations can decide to drop support at any moment or make a free tier paid.
I love FOSS but GIMP and Inkscape aren't nearly as usable or feature rich as the Affinity suite, let alone the Adobe suite.
- Man i just hate these comments. Imagine you’re gimp / foss developer and you see an uncritical, unactionable, and dumbass comment about how a multimillion dollar company beats your software. Like of course mate Affinity & Adobe developers get money thrown at them, while gimp developers have to stand your ungrateful ass.

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.

Thought it was funny that these two comments were next to each other.
I mean, you ARE getti ]ng what you pay for, just not until the end of YOUR lifetime,
at least with standalone software it's going to work forever as long as the OS supports it. cant say the same for live service software that you can't run at home
- How much software is standalone these days, though? It seems like most companies are shifting to SaaS.
I just bought a lifetime subscription to Nebula (a YouTube-like service akin to a co-op for content creators) and my rationale was
Lifetime costs the same as ten years of annual priced subscriptions
It will be cheaper than that due to inflation
The service has been operating for 5 years, so it's likely to last at least 10 more
The service is philosophically opposed to the sort of place that may try to acquire it
Other stuff, no thanks. Too many practical products (as opposed to entertainment ones) have a great supply of methods to screw you and a great desire to screw you.

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.

Why would you not name the company? If they won't protect you, you are not obligated to protect them.
- You are absolutely right.
  The company is "Franklin-Christoph"
- Maybe he is an employee who bought the pen with employee discount? Just saying that's possible, even though it's a complete guess.
they doesn't deem a leaking body a defect
Does that mean they purposely design their pens to leak? If it's not a defect, it must be by design, right? Unless the user did something to break it, accidentally or otherwise
- I believe they just chalked it up as normal wear and tear.
  Update: The leak is from the threads where the pen cap screws on the pen, there is a argument here as to I twist it too tight, and over the years there developed a crack. You can barely see the crack, but its enough for the ink to leak bleed through.
Twsbi - a Korean pen manufacturer - had some bad plastic in one of their production runs, the body of the pen would crack in its threads at the tail of the pen
They handled it properly, I sent them an email with a photo of the damage, they asked for my postal address and sent me a replacement body. The reassembled pen has been working happily now several years later
I now have five twsbi pens (four piston fillers, one vacuum filler - the vac mini doesn't leak on planes)
I have never tested the warranties on Zippo lighters or Maglite lights
*Edited spelling of twsbi
- You meant Twsbi, its a Taiwanese manufacturer. Yes, their customer service is top notch! I also have a cracked cap from my Twsbi mini, and they sent me a replacement even without a picture (infact they sent it twice, because I didnt specified my pen color, so they sent it again).

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.

The service is the developers releasing bug fixes and features that should have been there to begin with.
- As a programmer, I cannot throw that stone. Software is hard.
  But leaving software alone is the easiest thing in the world.

None of that changes today
(It'll take weeks, at least before we start screwing you)

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.

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.

I bought pocket casts for like $4 a very long time ago. I'm not sure what you're talking about, and the app says I have a free account. What is the difference in buying the app and subscribing to it?
- I only came along after Google podcasts announced that it was sunsetting, so I don't know what the lifetime membership entailed. But I have no need for any of the paid features they offer, so I'm happy to remain a free member. I don't really understand why I would need cloud storage... from my podcast app... and on pc, I just run the Pocket Cast app in an Android emulator since for some reason you can't use a web browser without a subscription. Completely mystifying decision, but I'm not paying $4 a month for it.
Use antennapod. They literally highly discourage donations now because they have enough donations to cover their operating coats and then like 50% extra on top.
Because updating a podcast app is literally not a full time job if it is so stable as these two apps. They both release small feature updates and bug fixes for a while. Antennapod even did a full UI update to the new material standard.
Pocketcasts devs seem to want maximum profit from it. They probably have an order of magnitude more income already than antennapod due to how many more people use it and how they push subscriptions. I just don't understand why they need that much money.

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

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.

Yep, they'll probably stop updating the Affinity product and launch a new product line with annual subscriptions. Probably cloud-based.
- I was more expecting Affinity to integrate and replace features with Canva until a subscription is all but required for basic functionality.

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.

- Yeah, it's kind of like crowd-funding. The early customers get a great deal, but also have the risk of the company going out of business.
I bought one on sale for 20 bucks like 9 years ago. It's still running, though it's not a particularly great VPN. Performance is meh, the clients are really basic. I still use it because after this long it's basically free
If my Windscribe Lifetime VPN eventually disappears, I'll of course be pretty upset. However, for the 35 bucks I paid for it in 2016 I feel like I've received an amazing value.

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

It's worth mentioning that GIMP is mainly developed by two developers. If you wish for the development to be faster, you should consider donating.
- GIMP is an odd project, one that I'm not sure is actually being held back by money, considering they've been sitting on a donation of bitcoin since 2014 that now amounts to 1.3 million, and just... haven't used it, at all?
  Krita seems like a more promising project, IMHO.
- Tbh I don’t think it’s fixable. Need to make a fresh start.
Adjustment layers are literally coming this year via GEGL.

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.

Lionel Hutz: Mr. Simpson, this is the most blatant case of fraudulent advertising since my suit against the film, "The Never-Ending Story"

That’s totally inappropriate. It’s lewd, lascivious, salacious, outrageous. - Jackie Chiles

Man I JUST got affinity photo for RAW work cause its a good workflow and way better than lightroom and now I find out about this? Ffs cant have shit on earth

Try darktable

The only two that have been good to me and still going strong is Plex and PocketCasts with their lifetime memberships. That was a good deal. But too many to name that turned out to absolutely not lifetime. GPS systems definitely the worst culprits.

Wait, do we actually get something for our old lifetime Pocketcasts licenses? Because I remember when they switched the app to being free, with any extra features being locked behind a subscription, existing licenses holders got... not anything, as far as I remember. I've been using the app daily for years now, and have no reason to give it up, but I don't feel like having bought the license back in the day is getting me anything extra over what a new free-tier user is getting now. Am I missing something?
I was so close to buying PocketCasts' lifetime license, and then they switched to subscription-only. Still salty about it, because it's the best podcatcher by far!
Huh. Years ago I tried pocket casts, podcast addict, and podcast republic. I chose republic since it fitted my usage better. They have not gone subscription. I bought the app once years ago and that's been it. I'm not sure if the free version is ad supported.
I would have been very disappointed had I bought pocket casts and then found I was locked out of some features later. I have dropped other apps that did that, after leaving them bad reviews
Plex has been good to me but I grow ever more concerned that they will drop lifetime Plex pass features as they become more focused on being a provider of media and not just a streaming middleman.

Ah so this is how I find out. Sweet.

FUCK

Plex lifetime is the gift that keeps on giving. Same with some indexers like nzbgeek.

Plex turned shit years ago.
Switched to Jellyfin and never looked back.
Even rubbed it in my just deleting my Plex accounts with the lifetime pass on it, means nothing to me now.
- I see the value of both, and like both. The future of plex with the social aspect is definitely concerning. The future of jellyfin looks great. But as of now I find myself using plex more.

Fuck