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.
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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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.
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It's so great we have foss to compete with this wave of companies trying to make everything a subscription.
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.
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.
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I have paid for lifetime licenses a couple times and haven't had an issue
Lifetime is only as good as the contract terms.
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.
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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.
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Yup. Never ever buy lifetime licenses.
Even on software you love. Especially for software you love.
The alternative usually is subscription, is that better?
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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.
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Whelp... the Affinity Suite was pretty awesome and robust. Too bad they never did a proper linux port.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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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
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.
Lionel Hutz: Mr. Simpson, this is the most blatant case of fraudulent advertising since my suit against the film, "The Never-Ending Story"
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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.
Hmm, I guess the app is free now but the "plus" features cost money
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