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.
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!
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.
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.
I abuse free trial and surprisingly it works really well
But they were all decieved, for another license was made. Forged in secret.
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
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.
Lifetime is only as good as the contract terms.
I have paid for lifetime licenses a couple times and haven’t had an issue
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’m enjoying my Plex one and Nexus Mods. The latter one was in 2013 and cost me $40. Today the yearly subscription is $70.
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.
$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.
Jellyfin 💪🏻
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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.
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!
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!
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.
Subscriptions, here we come! You can’t trust any commercial software company.
Whelp… the Affinity Suite was pretty awesome and robust. Too bad they never did a proper linux port.
It’s so great we have foss to compete with this wave of companies trying to make everything a subscription.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
