Moving Away From Lifetime Licenses

In 2026, together with my team, we decided to move away from one-time lifetime purchases to a per-year payment basis. But we also reduced the prices of developer licenses for some plugins.

Unfortunately, it was an inevitable step, and it would happen sooner or later, because over time, it is impossible to maintain a high level of support quality for lifetime licenses.

For example, let’s say someone purchased a lifetime license for one of our plugins in 2022. Then, in 2026, they contact us and demand support. Maybe it is even an agency that is using our products for tens of their client websites, and over time, they may need our support for different sites and scenarios multiple times. Plus, year over year, it naturally becomes more and more customers like this. How can we provide lifetime support in that case?

In other words, the amount of support requests increases proportionally over time (even though we keep adding new support articles into the documentation), but the resources remain limited. The only solution is to move to AI support, or maybe hire some support engineers from SEA (Southeast Asia), but guys, I am pretty sure, you will not like it.

That’s why, in 2026, we decided to discontinue all lifetime licenses.

However, for our current developer license holders, we will leave the option of lifetime updates and connecting unlimited amount of new sites. But all new developer licences will come with only 1 year of updates (while the licence is active).