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!
And that’s why I’m still using Tintin++ - it’s free and it’s great!
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.
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.
People who claim GIMP isn’t up to Photoshop inevitably reveal the only actual issue is that they learned photoshop first.
I used GIMP first and then Photopea (basically photoshop but web app) and GIMP is worse despite using it first. It’s just bad.
I really wish I liked gimp but I hate it so much. It’s so unintuitive it actually hurts every time I use it
I feel the same about Krita. I used it for about a year of hobbyist drawing, and I just never could get comfortable using it.
Clip Studio Paint came out with 3.0, and after some deliberation I decided to pay for the update. Felt like coming home. I’ve done more art in two weeks than I’ve done in nearly a year of using Krita.
That’s what I used to think as well actually. I opened it, saw the airplane control center, and closed it. But then I volunteered for editing a photo for my school, and I had to learn how to effectively create borders around the text, as I would have to makes a lot of changes to them. So I searched and came across this video. And then I understood that GIMP is actually a really powerful tool, you just have to learn how the developers intended you to work with it. Admittedly, having to use the drop shadow feature for text borders is pretty retarded, but it lets you fine tune the how the end result will look.
We’re not using that word are we!
Yea, people don’t like it simply because they’re not used to it.
For instance, Cntrl-A, select all. Cntrl-Shift-A is a way more intuitive way to deselect all.
It’s the same reason people complain about OnlyOffice, which is stellar.
I love open office. Partially true though with gimp. I just loathe how it does layers and I hate how the tools and shortcut keys are. Some of the most common design patterns are completely ignored. Unintuitive design is unintuitive design, even if you get used to it.
OnlyOffice is different from OpenOffice. And OpenOffice nowadays is poorly mainted, it has been forked a while back to LibreOffice
Yeah I meant libre office actually. Only office I’m not familiar with.
I’ve become used to an alt modifier being typically negative and shift positive so ctrl+alt+a would be more like the unselect all and shift would add to a selection (though I guess you can’t add more to the selection after “all”)
I think I just learnt about only office. Been using libre office for a while, might switch!
I’ll give the video a watch but yeah I’ve used it countless times at this point. Doing extremely basic things like adding text to a document is painful for me due to the extremely weird way layers and selection works. Not to mention basic stuff like zoom shortcut keys standard everywhere else do not work.
Iphone has always been pitched as intuitive and “it just works”, and it seems like it is that way for iphone users.
But when I try using one I’m lost as hell. It seems God awful. In other words, intuitive is whatever you’re used to.
It’s not just what you are used to, but yes that can play a role. I think apple gets a pass because of the image they have. My mom has an iphone and struggles with anything new or changed on it. But people told her it’s the easiest phone so she’ll never switch…
I say it’s “easy” because you have so little say in what you can do with 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
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!
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
You are a pirate!
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
An easy WYSIWYG content creator for making flyers & posters. Question stands for any cloud-hosted, paywalled service.
Far as I know, you can’t pirate Google Maps or OpenAI services (API key required), for other examples. Or YouTube Premium or Spotify (albeit you can adblock the free versions).
As more programs move to the cloud, I’m imagining piracy getting much more difficult if not essentially impossible.
yo ho ho a pirate life for me!
Whelp… the Affinity Suite was pretty awesome and robust. Too bad they never did a proper linux port.
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 have paid for lifetime licenses a couple times and haven’t had an issue
Yup. Never ever buy lifetime licenses.
Even on software you love. Especially for software you love.
The alternative usually is subscription, is that better?
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.
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.
🏴☠️🦜
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
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.
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.
$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.
Also you’re supporting modders through Donation Points. Creators get real money proportional to mod download count. The mods are still free, to clarify.
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. 😡
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.
Plex is such ass
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
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.
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.
Lifetime is only as good as the contract terms.
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.
Y’all gimp developers need to grow a pair
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
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 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.
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.
‘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.
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.
It’s so great we have foss to compete with this wave of companies trying to make everything a subscription.
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.
Fuck
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.
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?
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
🏴☠️
But they were all decieved, for another license was made. Forged in secret.
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!
I mean, the only time I’ve used official support for some software was when I was having a license issue with Windows. Everything else has been solvable using the open internet.
The reason why I don’t pirate software anymore is you have no idea if the people who cracked it added malware or not and it’s, IMO, a perfect way to deliver malware.
Most of the time, the tools I use to pirate are open source themselves so that isn’t really a problem for me.
I don’t mean the distribution tools like bittorrent etc have malware. If you pirate games or software, you run binaries provided by the people that cracked it, which don’t tend to be open source. At least they weren’t back when I was consuming them.
I mean I used tools like UltimMC to get around having to make a minecraft account. UltimMC doesn’t provide the games themselves, that is downloaded from mojang’s website, UltimMC simply provides a way to get around basic DRM.
I abuse free trial and surprisingly it works really well
Fair point, that is my fear too. I run Ubuntu so nearly all my software is open source already and for the slim number of tools that aren’t in just pay for them because they are good enough to warrant it imo.
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.
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
Thought it was funny that these two comments were next to each other.
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”
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.
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
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).
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.
