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.
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!
Fuck
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.
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.
Twisby - 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 twisby 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
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).
Why would you not name the company? If they won’t protect you, you are not obligated to protect them.
Maybe he is an employee who bought the pen with employee discount? Just saying that’s possible, even though it’s a complete guess.
Ah, nope. Average consumer
You are absolutely right.
The company is “Franklin-Christoph”
It looks like you can just ship the pen to them and request a repair or replacement. Maybe just ignore whatever the customer support rep said and follow this instead: https://www.franklin-christoph.com/pages/warranty
It never dawned on me that I can just ship it. I always tend to contact customer service before doing anything.
Anyways I have moved to a new country, it is kind of costly to ship a pen internationally (I am also afraid it’ll get lost somewhere since it’s such small package), added the uncertainty of they (Franklin-Christoph) would honor it, I am quite hesitant to do it.
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.
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)
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.
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?”
Ah so this is how I find out. Sweet.
FUCK
That’s why open source rules
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.
I just installed gimpshop the other day on a whim and immediately I could work at 90% capacity just based 20+ years of Photoshop muscle memory. Gimp never lasted more than a day with me the dozen or so times I’ve tried it before.
There are ways to make it work, and the tooling out there is getting better every day.
Looks like it’s last official version was released in 2007. Are you using a version from gimpshop.com with added adware/spyware? The wiki for gimpshop is pretty eye-opening…
I originally created Gimpshop, but I’m not the jerk who owns that domain and added adware & spyware to the source. Sorry about that. I hate that this guy is out there making my fun little project into an abomination.
I had no clue about this. Thanks for the heads up. Not sure which one I installed but it’s on my test machine and I can check tomorrow
Y’all gimp developers need to grow a pair
GIMP is a special case. GIMP is being getting outdeveloped by Krita these days. E.g.:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/9284
Or compare with:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Krita-2024-GPUs-AI
GIMP had its share of self inflicted wounds starting with a toxic mailing list that drove away people from professional VFX and surrounding FilmGimp/CinePaint. When the GIMP people subsequently took over the GEGL development from Rhythm & Hues, it took literally 15 years until it barely worked.
Now we are past the era of simple GPU processing into diffusion models/“generative AI” and GIMP is barely keeping up with simple GPU processing (like resizing, see above).
From someone with a passing interest, Krita seems on a similar trajectory to Blender - gathering momentum and going from strength to strength, whereas Gimp seems rather stuck.
From what I understand, GIMP fell behind because it refused corporate donations while Krita accepted them. This lead to GIMP reducing in scope as the 1-3 part-time developers (at least when I last really looked into it) realised they’d never catch up, leading to people donating less as they weren’t satisfied with GIMP’s simultaneous underpromising and underdelivering. Meanwhile Krita managed to receive enough money to hire a team of full time developers for several years, leading to better software, to more donations. It’s like the poverty trap, but with software.
‘It doesn’t meet my needs’ seems like light criticism but I understand your point. I’m eternally thankful to devs but at a certain point it either does what you need or it doesn’t.
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.
Allow me to reiterate:
I use a lot of open source apps…and they won’t enshittify.
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.
Tbh I don’t think it’s fixable. Need to make a fresh start.
Literally every meme I’ve ever made was done in GIMP. I can say that the software needs non-destructive editing that applies to transforming layers. So far there’s only non-destructive effects on the layers, but discarding 20 years of work because the software is not a 1:1 copy of Photoshop seems silly.
What are you talking about ?
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.
I think it should be clarified that GIMP’s structure isn’t able to make use of donations to GIMP as a single entity. Edit: or at least wasn’t, I hear they can now.
I agree that Krita is more promising though, I switched to Krita years ago and have never looked back.
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.
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!
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 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.
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
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.
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.
yep I think osprey bags did something similar
It can be your lifetime, if that’s shorter.
With physical products it can be the “reasonable lifetime” of that class of product
Yup. Never ever buy lifetime licenses.
Even on software you love. Especially for software you love.
The alternative usually is subscription, is that better?
🏴☠️🦜
Nope. I’m here to tell you from 20 years of IT experience, you should definitely get perpetual licenses, whether they call them “lifetime” or not. Fuck all subscriptions.
If it’s for software you like, yes. Lemmy apps are a great example of this.
A lifetime license isn’t going to sustain the dev long term. If you like the app, buy a monthly subscription that gives them predictable income every month. Do a year if you feel confident about it. But honestly monthly is probably best.
For shitty corporate apps like Adobe, pirate that shit.
No. It is not the consumer’s job to support the software developers. It is the software developers’ job to develop a product that they can make a living on.
That’s… what the subscription cost is for. For the developer to make a living.
You act like nobody can make a living without these bullshit subscriptions. That is simply not the case, and anyone who disagrees is brainwashed by subscription pushers. You are being fleeced like sheep with all these bullshit subscriptions.
Software developers have been around for many decades, making damn good money all over the place. Only in the recent years have the software companies turned to the subscription model for everything, because their accountants figured out it makes them more money over the long term.
Again, it is not OUR job to support them. It is THEIR job to support themselves by making a product that people want to buy. I don’t want to buy their subscriptions, so they are doing a bad job of marketing to me.
I bought Affinity Photo because their software marketing was more attractive to me than any of Adobe’s bullshit subscriptions. I will continue to use the product I paid for (once) indefinitely, and if it stops getting updates I will still be able to use it as long as I want because I control its installation locally.
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.
Same here, although I’m still using it. It’s doing what I got it for and some of the additions are welcome (I use live TV fairly often and some friends and I are sharing libraries) but I have been concerned. What made you switch and did you find something better?
I still actively use Plex, but I’ve been trying Jellyfin. It’s almost there but still has some work to do to catch up to Plex fully. However, its wonderfully free from bloat. I can’t stand all the crap they’ve added to Plex. Especially when I search for content that’s IN MY LIBRARY and the result it sends me to is a streaming service I don’t even have. 😡
Plex is such ass
Yeah, I have never really used search for that same reason, I don’t have enough to lose track of anyway.
Thanks for the reply though. I hear about jellyfin a lot and my needs are simple so I’m gonna give it a go.
I still find myself using Plex for its native DVR functions. NextDVR alway seemed a little bit buggier, after finally getting an IPTV source working in Plex I went back (at least for DVR stuff).
Edit: forgot to add, Plexamp and the way Plex does its sonic analysis is worth the lifetime subscription cost to me.
Jellyfin 💪🏻
I tried it, but not only does the experience not feel nearly as polished, the performance is much worse than Plex in my experience.
Similar.
And no Plexamp.
Im using Jellyfin now. It’s great, but it doesn’t have the same support across platforms. It was nice to have a native Plex app on the TV, Xbox, etc. I’m now just switching to Chromecasts on the TVs and teaching my wife to use the app for everything.
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.
Facts
Something about paying for mods seems so wrong to me
You’re not paying for mods though, you’re paying for faster downloads and no ads.
Also you’re supporting modders through Donation Points. Creators get real money proportional to mod download count. The mods are still free, to clarify.
$40 or these days $70 yearly for that?!? Jesus
Oh yeah I mean, it’s expensive. But if you’re very much into modding and like me don’t like your gbit download speed to be limited to 3mbit or whatever the free thing is… I get paying it.
I wouldn’t pay for what yearly costs now, but the 40eur lifetime price 10 years ago sure wasn’t a bad deal.
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.
Plexamp is amazing.
Lifetime is only as good as the contract terms.
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.
I have paid for lifetime licenses a couple times and haven’t had an issue
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.
as long as you can host the “SaaS” elements yourself (nextcloud, for example) there’s a lot more software than you’d initially think. There will always be a market for self-hosted options for cloud software imo: loads of businesses are reluctant to move their internal infrastructure to the cloud
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.
I use cloud storage for audiobooks. It syncs my progress across devices. That’s the reason I bought the app (and got lifetime subscription later).
Oh very cool - that’s a very good use case that I hadn’t considered!
What Android emulator are you using?
I remember I tried one for macOS before but I wasn’t happy with the performance, I did try it for the Tivimate I think, but it was choppy and not worth to use, I was gonna go back to experiment about this it would be because of Pocket Casts for sure.
I just loaded up Android Studio, which has it’s own emulation layer. I’ve tried Bluestacks in the past and had trouble with it - figured that Google’s own environment would be the best option.
Hmm, I see, I’m gonna look into this surely!
