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Comment by wowyallsuck | Hacker News Reader

Has any company’s “lifetime” license lasted more than, say 5 years? 10? (I mean for software that is updated or requires a server of course).

I like the jetbrains model well enough.

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My early (2011) purchase of Apple's Final Cut Pro X has been pretty awesome. I originally bought the software using discounted iTunes gift cards so i paid around 200€ instead of 250. Nowadays it costs 350€.

There have been countless big updates, all for free. It can now edit 360° and multicam footage and many more features like object tracking and HDR support have been added for free. Just browse the long list of release notes at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201237 and you'll get the idea.

My Plex lifetime pass is still going strong

Same here. I purchased it in 2013.

I've been a Jetbrains customer from the very first release, introduced the product in every company I came into. Switched to VS and then switched back. I do think Jetbrains does a lot things right, they also honored past licenses and helped when I had license trouble. So now for some years im on an All Products Pack license and it's nice to just install whatever you want.

Industrial software perpetual licenses are really perpetual. Those things will outlast the company that wrote them and they don’t have claw-back mechanisms

Lifetime software license is quite ok: you buy a version, you can use that version while it runs.

What is a real scam is lifetime services (storage/backups/emails/...).

No Man's Sky seems to have provided such a thing, taking into account all the updates with 0 paid DLCs.

Malwarebytes Premium; I've been carrying the same license since Windows 7.

One of my original Joyent lifetime licenses is still active. I had a shared hosting lifetime plan and one of their container services as a lifetime plan, both of those are long gone. But they sold off Strongspace to Expandrive and that's still going, somehow. It's only 100gb, so, not exactly huge amounts of storage these days, but it's all still accessible, though the service doesn't seem to have been updated since I originally bought it either lol.

Image-Line's FL Studio has been going strong for decades

MIRC https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33864660

I have a license for an MP3 tagging software called Tag&Rename from what's probably a one man shop called Softpointer that still works 14 years after purchase. I'd been using it for free for a few years at that point. The last release was in 2018 but it still does what I want. Maybe I'll buy another to show my support.

I think the ones that give a lifetime license to a freemium like version of their app often do better than those who give lifetime to the overall.

But if I pay a few bucks and get 2-3 years of use I'm probably going to be pretty happy. If I spend tons of bucks then I'll probably be less than happy.

My dyndns perpetual tokens lasted 15 years or more. Sadly they got acquired and it finally stopped.

I've had my pinboard "one-time fee" account for 12 years and it still lets me login and do stuff.

They switched to annual accounts in 2015 and have been encouraging people to move but I'm not convinced of the value-for-money if I do so.

I bought a lifetime Plex subscription in 2016 and it's still working

Not sure if anybody ever bought a WinRAR license, but maybe they do?! :-)

Yeah, my key still works on the current version.

Total Commander was first released in Sep/1993, almost 30 years ago.

It's still updated regularly, and all upgrades are free.

(Total Commander is a dual-pane file manager for Windows)

I bought Turboscan Pro by Piksoft sometime in 2016 and it's been one of my most used apps. Still works great. Still gets the latest updates.

Edomondo did provide a workaround for existing customers when they changed tp subscription, - but was later shut down by the new owners.

I think there was a guy that bought a lifetime 1st class plane ticket for 10.000 dollars and used for like 20 years.

I've been receiving issues for my lifetime subscription to 2600 Magazine for well over 25 years.

I’m impressed by the number of people that have long-running still active lifetime licenses!

My Arq backup lifetime license is 7 years to the date tomorrow, still getting all updates.

NFT has entered the chat.

In all seriousness though, I think the only lifetime licenses that come to mind are probably ones like JetBrains and old software where you had the install medium on a disk and a key to install it with and it required no software updates, assuming the software doesn't need the internet to verify, you're pretty much guaranteed what you paid for. Don't you miss lifetime ownership of software licenses? :)

> NFT has entered the chat.

And how would they help in this situation?

In practice after a few months the web server hosting your NFT's image goes down and it's broken.

If the NFT is backed by a DApp[0] it should not matter if the regular web server is gone so long as there's fuel to keep the DApp going.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_application

Oh I understand that. The server doesn't even need to go down, a specific NFT can simply be blacklisted. I was asking to see if there is something I'm missing.

You missed that the thread OP was trolling.

I was making a one off joke about how long an NFT theoretically could last (until the blockchain itself dies due to nobody using it, or what have you). The rest of my commentary was quite serious.

Was a joke about how it just sits there doing nothing.

An NFT wouldn’t do anything. It’s a new release of software and the lifetime license stopped working on it.

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