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ManyCam dishonored my lifetime license

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Re: ManyCam dishonored my lifetime license

#201

Post by Zak »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #178
freeone3000 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People must be held accountable for their actions; if it cannot be through self-governance, their reputation must meet needs.

Take them to court. File a grievance. But opening individuals to ruin by internet trolls for lulz, or worse making everyone’s life dictated by collaborative filtering - there’s no good to come of it. Human lives aren’t like product reviews. Scarlet lettering people isn’t a good idea - maybe it works for some, but there will be a lot of innocent people destroyed along the way. Or, people who made unethical decisions a…

There's often a big gap between things that constitute a crime, tort, or breach of contract and things that would make me disinclined to do business with a person. I'd like to know if the founder of a startup has a bait-and-switch habit before I decide to rely on their product, for example.

Re: ManyCam dishonored my lifetime license

#202

Post by 3np »

dceddia wrote: post #122
bcrosby95 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, the DLC business model from games comes to mind.

That would be a choice, wouldn't it! The thought crossed my mind but somehow I see people not being happy with having to pay $X to unlock every little feature, heh. "Tell 'em what's behind tab number 3, Johnny! Johnny: More gated features!" There's probably a tipping point somewhere.

It might work, depending on your cadence. If a user is interested in getting a particular feature NOW, they pay for it specifically and then get the rest of the new stuff when they buy the next version upgrade.

Re: ManyCam dishonored my lifetime license

#203

Post by BXlnt2EachOther »

ejb999 wrote: post #123
Someone1234 wrote: post #55

I just want to state outright that OP was wronged, and I side with them. That being said; I dislike both full subscription (i.e. breaks on expiration) and lifetime licenses. Subscriptions are too expensive for software that rarely gets major investment and lifetime licenses are dishonest (e.g. company cannot work for free, so their funded is based on unlimited growth, which isn't realistic for most). My current favor…

+1 for naming jetbrains - I have always liked their way of doing business, including the substantial discount to renew each year - even in years when I don't use their tools much, I renew. Also specifically like how they remind me many times , and many months in advance that they are going to charge my credit card on my renewal date - unlike the scumbag companies that never want to draw attention to your upcoming ren…

when JetBrains raised their prices, last October I think, they gave several months notice, made it clear that it was going to happen on their product pages, and let people lock in the current rate for a few years by prepaying.

Seemed a customer-friendly way of handling a subscription price increase.

Re: ManyCam dishonored my lifetime license

#204

Post by carapace »

papruapap wrote: post #125
qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #12

The problem with such betrayal is, that companies names are all but smoke and mirrors by now. The reputational damage should be tracking with the leading employees. One customer betrayal travels along with the manager who caused it, to whatever company s/he touches. No matter how the company is named, no matter how much branding, one linked in api roll call later you know what you got.

In big enough companies is already hard to know who owns what even when you are working there, I cant image how to track this from outside.

You're not trying to trace ownership, you want to track the people who make the stupid/unethical decisions.

Re: ManyCam dishonored my lifetime license

#205

Post by mthoms »

matsemann wrote: post #181
ejb999 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for naming jetbrains - I have always liked their way of doing business, including the substantial discount to renew each year - even in years when I don't use their tools much, I renew. Also specifically like how they remind me many times , and many months in advance that they are going to charge my credit card on my renewal date - unlike the scumbag companies that never want to draw attention to your upcoming ren…

JetBrains actually ended up with this model after a lot of pushback when they tried changing their model a few years ago. But it's good that they listened, and now are even touted as the go-to best-practice.

They still require you to downgrade if you let your subscription expire.

Users have a perpetual license to the version released when the subscription started and not when it ended. Thus, if you let your subscription expire, you need to downgrade the software you already have installed on your system.

On the surface, it's not that big of a deal. But there's no guarantee that your downgrade will occur gracefully. It could break existing projects which is kinda scary.

Still, you're right that they did walk back some of their initially proposed changed after customers complained. All in all, I like Jetbrains and am happy to support them.

Re: ManyCam dishonored my lifetime license

#206

Post by mthoms »

dceddia wrote: post #102
Someone1234 wrote: post #55

I just want to state outright that OP was wronged, and I side with them. That being said; I dislike both full subscription (i.e. breaks on expiration) and lifetime licenses. Subscriptions are too expensive for software that rarely gets major investment and lifetime licenses are dishonest (e.g. company cannot work for free, so their funded is based on unlimited growth, which isn't realistic for most). My current favor…

From the developer side I feel like this type of license makes the most sense to me too. After selling a desktop app with a license like that for a little while though, I’ve also unfortunately realized that not everyone understands it. I had a number of customers referring to it as a “subscription” (which it wasn’t, because it didn’t auto-renew and you could keep using the last version forever) or “lifetime” (which i…

>you could keep using the last version forever

Note that this isn't what Jetbrains does. You only have a perpetual license to the version released when the subscription started. Thus, you'll have to downgrade and say good-bye to any features and fixes released over the term of your subscription.

Re: ManyCam dishonored my lifetime license

#207

Post by rhaway84773 »

crazygringo wrote: post #150
dahart wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lifetime licenses are dishonest (e.g. company cannot work for free, so their funded is based on unlimited growth, which isn't realistic for most). I don’t really know what you mean by “dishonest”, that seems like a slightly hyperbolic word here. If someone pays for a lifetime license the company isn’t working for free nor necessarily assuming unlimited growth, they just have to understand and correctly price the av…

I'd say it's dishonest in the sense that a company knows the probabilities are such that they can't actually ever truly support a lifetime license, so it's a lie from the start. At the end of the day, companies usually go out of business or else sell themselves to another company within a certain number of years. And a new company (like in this case) may change their mind about lifetime licenses, because it's a total…

I agree. The only time a lifetime license will actually be honored as such is of the company’s product fails and it’s no longer around as a company, so it allows you to continue using the current version as is.

When companies that have offered lifetime licenses don’t fail, they inevitably kill the lifetime part of the license by pulling different tricks like, creating a cloud version which now becomes their future version, while the desktop version is no longer maintained, or rebranding the same app as a new app where actual development continues while the old app gets minimal updates at most, or not updating the app with the lifetime license so it works on modern OSes and platforms.

If you’re lucky, you may have snagged a lifetime license the company offered early in its life, which it then stopped offering once it started getting successful, so it continues letting you use the lifetime license because the owners of such licenses are few enough that any marginal revenue they may earn by pulling the above tricks is not worth the reputational damage.

Re: ManyCam dishonored my lifetime license

#208

Post by nolan879 »

in 2015 I bought a lifetime license for SpeedDial2 Pro, but in 2021 they switched to a yearly subscription model to sustain upkeep and development. I am thankful that their team has grandfathered in lifetime licenses for use of the core feature set. I believe the new features that came after the subscription model are only for the new subscribers.

Re: ManyCam dishonored my lifetime license

#209

Post by Espressosaurus »

pdpi wrote: post #189
TeMPOraL wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a good case study here is/will be Affinity. They produce graphics software competing directly with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, and their core differentiator is that they don't do subscriptions - you pay up front, and get a regular, perpetual license in return. Few months ago, they released version 2 of their software suite. There are some new features and a host of UI and performance improvements, bu…

If you use Affinity Photo for photo work, what do you use for library management? It's basically the only thing keeping me on Lightroom.

One of these days I need to give Capture One or Photo Mechanic a try. Dark Table is a good try but just not very user friendly I've found.

Re: ManyCam dishonored my lifetime license

#210

Post by henriquez »

Remember Google gave early adopters free "lifetime" subscriptions to their Google Workspaces for Business (aka gmail for domain names) and then pulled the rug out a year ago? If Google can get away with this shit then it's normalized in our culture that nothing corporations promise is true, pray they don't alter the terms further.
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