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
  
  You can get Plex lifetime for around 80 USD during their occasional sales. I bought a lifetime sub for ≈80 USD on 2020-11-30
- 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

this is why we need FOSS
- 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.
  
  I wouldn't call their licences very cheap for students.
  You can apparently only get discounts on their bundle which includes all their programs and the discount gets worse after year one.
  It's a decent discount but it's still expensive.
  
  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.

For Context here is one Email I got from Affinity yesterday:
To our amazing Affinity community,
Today marks a momentous new chapter in our journey together.
I am thrilled to announce that Affinity is joining the Canva family.
This is a moment of great excitement, anticipation, and profound gratitude for all of you who have been part of our story so far.
We know that those of you who've put your faith in Affinity, some since we launched our very first Mac app, will have questions about what this means for the future of our products. Since the inception of Affinity, our mission has been to empower creatives with tools that unleash their full potential, fostering a community where innovation and artistry flourish. We've worked tirelessly to challenge the status quo, delivering professional-grade creative software that is both accessible and affordable.
None of that changes today.
In Canva, we've found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels. Their extra resources will mean we can deliver much more, much faster. Beyond that, we can forge new horizons for Affinity products, opening up a world of possibilities that would never previously have been achievable.
Canva's revolutionary approach to design democratisation and commitment to empowering everyone to create aligns perfectly with our core values and vision. This union is a testament to what can be achieved when two companies that share a common goal of making design accessible and enjoyable for everyone come together.
I want to express my deepest gratitude to our incredible Affinity team. Your passion, dedication, and relentless pursuit of excellence have been the driving force behind our success so far, and I can't wait to continue this journey with you all.
To our loyal users and the creative community, your support and feedback have been invaluable, we hope this this FAQ will answer many of your questions.
You've inspired us to push boundaries and continuously improve, and we're excited to embark on this new chapter together.
You helped us start a movement.
Today, that movement becomes a revolution.
With heartfelt thanks, Ash Hewson - Affinity CEO
Ashley Hewson
CEO
Another Email I got today:
The Affinity and Canva Pledge
By the Affinity and Canva Teams
As we step into our shared future, we are committing to four pledges that we’re excited to share with the current and future Affinity community.
Earlier this week we shared the news that Affinity had been acquired by Canva. As the dust settles on the announcement, we wanted to say more about our future and our commitment to the Affinity community.
Since our inception, both of our companies have shared the same mission and vision. We were both founded with the belief that design shouldn’t be limited to those who can afford complex software. Our goal has been to make the highest quality design tools available to the largest number of people with fair, transparent and affordable pricing at our core. By joining forces, we’re looking forward to accelerating this shared vision.
Above all, together, we’re committed to continuing and amplifying Affinity’s position as the highest-quality professional-grade design suite on the market, while continuing to empower millions of designers to unlock their creativity and achieve their goals.
1. We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special.
We share a commitment to making design fairer and more accessible. For Canva, this has meant making our core product available for free to millions of people across the globe, and for Affinity, this has meant a fairly priced perpetual license model. We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future.
If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it. This fits with enabling Canva users to start adopting Affinity. It could also allow us to offer Affinity users a way to scale their workflows using Canva as a platform to share and collaborate on their Affinity assets, if they choose to.
2. We will double down on expanding Affinity’s products through continued investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite.
We believe Affinity is the highest-quality professional-grade design suite on the market. It’s non-destructive, super fast, and easy to use. As such, we want to reassure you that it isn’t going anywhere.
In fact, we’re committed to using our shared resources to continue expanding Affinity’s products through further investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite. We’re looking forward to accelerating the rollout of highly requested features such as variable font support, blend and width tools, auto object selection, multi-page spreads, ePub export and much more.
These additions will further cement Affinity as the best advanced design suite on the market and will be released over the coming year as free updates to V2.
3. We will provide Affinity free for schools & NFPs.
Canva, which has pledged 30% of its value as a company towards doing good in the world through its two-step plan, offers premium plans at no cost to schools and NFPs all over the world. More than 60 million students and teachers, plus 600,000 charities and registered nonprofits, benefit from this each month.
We’re excited to extend this programme to include free access for schools and nonprofits to Designer, Photo and Publisher. These professional-grade tools will add enormous value to this free offering, helping millions of students to master the craft of design, and empowering mission driven organisations to amplify their voices and maximize their impact.
We’ll share more details on this in the coming months, including what it means for our education and NFP customers that already use Affinity.
4. We are committed to listening and being led by the design community at every step in this journey.
Affinity and Canva were both founded on the basis that their respective communities – of expert and non-expert designers – deserved better. The tools available were overly complex, overly priced, or both. We know designers deserve better. They deserve the highest quality tools to serve their needs and they deserve to be treated fairly.
We also believe the design community also knows best what it needs. As such, we are committed to shaping our products based on your ideas, your feedback and your needs. To kick things off, we’d love to learn more about what you’d like to see as we embark on this next chapter of our journey. What would you like to see in Affinity? What features have you been dreaming of? What would you love to achieve? We’d love to hear from you here.
Thank you to everyone who has been an integral part of the journey so far. We’re excited for the future and can’t wait to see what we can build together.
With gratitude and excitement, The Affinity and Canva Teams
All links and images are from the email and not mine. I also replicated their email formatting in Markdown to make it easier to read on Lemmy.
- 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.

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.
- 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.

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.
- Nah not necessarily. It can be a great way to get money early on without venture capital.
  Yeah, you will have to provide the service to them forever but they are usually a small bunch so they aren't a big deal if you manage to get big later on.
  I suspect most companies that offer lifetime even when they are big have statistics showing that they lose little money or none because the high price means that the average consumer won't use the service for the required amount of years to break even.
  
  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.

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
- Well on the upside you will keep your access forever and get updates for free for some time still (until v3 comes out).
  If you think the workflow is good now, then it shouldn't matter much because you will keep that workflow.

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

Ah so this is how I find out. Sweet.
FUCK

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?
  
  https://support.pocketcasts.com/knowledge-base/lifetime-access-to-pocket-casts-plus/
  Apparently lifetime only applies to the web app or something.
  I have never heard of that app so I don't know much.
- 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.
- 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!

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

I am thrilled to announce that Affinity is joining the Canva family.

None of that changes today.

You helped us start a movement.

Today, that movement becomes a revolution.

The Affinity and Canva Pledge

1. We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special.

2. We will double down on expanding Affinity’s products through continued investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite.

3. We will provide Affinity free for schools & NFPs.

4. We are committed to listening and being led by the design community at every step in this journey.