Tell HN: Never Trust 'Lifetime' Licenses
Just over a year ago I bought an emojipicker for mac (getmumu.com) that claimed to have a 'lifetime license'. It's a neat little tool and I've used it daily. Now I got a new mac and I tried to transfer it over, only to find out that it's rebranded from "Mumu" to "Mumu X" and 5x'd in price.
After hunting through the website I found the tiny "get old version" in the footer. I entered my license key and was told it was already used. I wrote to the support email and was told that "Mumu" was discontinued and "Mumu X" was a new app that I'd have to buy it again.
> And note that “lifetime” means it would work on the lifetime of the app, not the lifetime of the customer.
Yeah, I understand it's "lifetime of the app" but adding an "X" to the name and a few minor features and then not letting me transfer my old app to a new machine leaves a really bad taste.
/rant.
57 comments
[ 8.8 ms ] story [ 1274 ms ] threadI want keyboard shortcut, type 'laugh' or whatever keyword, hit 'enter', continue typing.
When he was on his last pair he prepared for death, and when it wore out he died.
The entire software industry payment culture went to shit around when Adobe stopped letting people pirate so they'd choose their software in enterprise and shifted to a subscription-in-perpetuity model.
(Having said that, I bought a copy of Photoshop CS5 outright about 10 years ago, and I still use that version. Would have paid a lot more if I was on a subscription for 10 years, and I don't use it frequently or skillfully enough to need the latest+greatest version)
But we've got to a point now where the tiniest little utility wants a subscription rather than a one-off payment. And I'd blame it more on Apple than Adobe for creating the App Store model and then pushing subscriptions.
Apple have also created the requirement (and cost) for developers of having to constantly update their software (just to support new OS versions or new hardware), whereas Microsoft's focus on backwards-compatibility enables a lot of software a decade or two old to still run on the latest Windows and latest hardware.
But as you say it's a big nope for little utilities and/or other programs that I rarely use. Fortunately, it tends to at least be easier these days to export into a standard format for programs that have data locked into them.
Apple not only removed 32 bit compatibility in their OS’s. They also removed it from the actual hardware allowing them to improve their chipsets much faster than x86.
Not mention that they can use the core OS with everything from watches, phones, computers, tablets, speakers, set top boxes and monitors (yes the latest monitors run iOS).
It seems to have worked better for Apple.
For the most part, we need to keep software up to date anyway for security reasons. Paid version updates just means that we're essentially forced to pay a large cost at random intervals when the software company feels like it, whereas subscription is usually somewhat more predictable. Lots of software companies used the transition to a subscription model as a way to disguise a large increase in costs though.
What I don't like is how literally everything wants a subscription now, even things that don't provide any regular updates or online services.
Overall, I quite like the JetBrains model where if you pay for a year's subscription, you get a perpetual fallback license included. Best of both worlds.
With the perpetual + 20-40% maintenance/support model, you weren’t dead in the water when the term ended. When the subscription goes, you’re toast.
Subscriptions are like leasing a car. You pay an opaque premium to capitalize the software, a higher cost on the support and maintenance, and have no rights. Companies like Microsoft and VMWare also dumbed down the support, so you have to get another subscription to talk to competent people.
At a large enterprise level, subscription software is valued like life insurance. If you’re a big spender, you need to look at the IRR of the company and how your multi-year commitment impacts the company’s market cap (and executive bonuses). $500k spend with a 3-year commit may be $10M of accounting dollars towards the bonus for the SVP.
The strategy if you have the air cover is carrot/stick. You dangle some bullshit they really need to sell as the carrot and tell them to fuck off and walk if they won’t play. That gets attention, as the SVP who was looking at the fabric for his new boat is now scrambling to make his number.
The place i worked for at the time was tight on Adobe licensing and had very low variance. Adobe came in and offered discounts designed around whatever they assumed was piracy.
We ended up doing stunts and got the concessions we needed.
At least for software you can keep a copy of the installer. Unless it checks the license with the server, then you're screwed...
But without knowing what tomerv means by "Some time later I wanted to use it" it's hard to say if refusing is all that bad for business.
You don't want to upset regular customers or active members of the local climbing community - but regular customers don't take years to use up a 10-entry voucher.
If tomerv's voucher was 5-10 years old, the threat that someone who hadn't brought anything in years would start a boycott wouldn't exactly have them quaking in their boots.
If we look at the per-use cost to the climbing gym, then there is a definite cost.
The main contributor to that overhead is insurance. My understanding is that it is very difficult and very expensive to insure a climbing gym, hence the rather high rates.
Divided at the per-visit or per-customer level, you can see then that every single visitor incurs some cost.
If it were me I'd just have them sign a liability waiver (the legal effectiveness of which is already dubious) and climb, but I'm not them.
>> Divided at the per-visit or per-customer level, you can see then that every single visitor incurs some cost.
Your statement above is correct if you pay the insurance amount based on a per visit model. In other words if you report the number of visits to the insurance company every month, and your premium changes monthly. I've no idea if this is what's happening or not. If it is, then your post is fine, but if the insurance is a fixed amount then you've fallen into a common trap. Which is this;
You cannot average a fixed cost across variable use, when calculating marginal cost.
For example let's say I have a factory making various steel goods. Mostly I make fences to order. In my slack time (which all factories should have) I get otherwise-idle staff to make shopping trolleys. I supply those regularly, and so it never hurts to have stock of them.
Now, here's the question - should I add labour to the cost of those trolleys [1] or not? As labour is a fixed cost I'm paying the employees regardless. Whether they make trolleys or sit around drinking tea it costs me the same.
A costomers walks in, and wants to buy the trolleys at a discount, which covers all the materials, and half the nominal labour rate - should I sell them? The right answer is yes (better to recoup half the labour cost than none of it) the wrong answer is to say no, the labour cost was x so selling at half x is losing money. [2]
So if your insurance is say 1000,thats a fixed cost and is not part of any specific gym visit. Adding "free" visits has no impact on the insurance. The marginal cost is very much only the actual costs of that visit - which are likely close to zero (some water in the bathroom maybe?)
[1] I am assuming staff are paid hourly, not per job, are are not "sent home" during idle time.
[2] I get this is simplistic, and other factors can come into play. Like if I have limited supply and am prepared to wait for a higher offer. But presuming I have the ability to create (in idle time) more than demand, the question holds.
If it was a transfer of business ownership, I would expect that you had a contract with the business, the business still existed, and that if you filed in small claims court you could recover at least the cost of the unused entry card due to contract non-performance by the business.
Unfortunately, a lot of business transfers are shady and aren't really transfers at all. The old business winds down or renders itself bankrupt, and a new one is started in its place. Everyone with contracts with the old business loses out. The new business is not supposed to be able to mislead everyone into thinking it's the same business, though.
I worked for a games company in the 90s which did that to its office landlord.
One week I interviewed there for a job, and got an offer. In between that and me starting 2 weeks later, they declared the company bankrupt and started a new company with almost the same name, and the same directors and owners, and I was employed by the new company under its new name instead. This allowed them to ditch their commercial lease giving 0 days notice in contravention of the terms. They moved out in secret over a weekend so the landlord would not know until the old company had disappeared.
Depends on whether the purchaser bought the shares or the assets, and whether the legal entity that you entered a contract with still exists. I suspect you’d be left in small claims court with a defunct corporation.
There’s got to be more to this story. If you declare bankruptcy, the lenders, including trade contracts like a landlord, have the right to go after the corporation’s assets. If the directors declared bankruptcy in the bad faith manner you are saying, the courts would allow the creditors to go after the directors, personally.
What I bet actually happened is their lawyers said, "you can, but you might be sued" and the owners took it as an OK. Lawyers generally aren't stupid enough to just say something sketchy is OK; They will include caveats that the clients have to consider.
LL: Don't buy, and don't offer LT — It's just a poison pill for both parties.
The "already used" message sounds to me like maybe the app has an online license check that's still registered to your old Mac.
If you still have the old Mac, it might be possible to unregister the app on there.
Otherwise, it sounds like support might be confused about your situation. Any app that has a license check like this ought to have a way to migrate to a new Mac.
You can also just search with Finder (specially in the ~/Library folder as it doesn't search there by default) for the app name and see all the related files. Copy that stuff over.
I got a copy of OmniOutliner pre-installed on a new Mac (back when Apple did stuff like that). I found that file and copied it to my next several Macs.
There are some cases where companies have activation servers and once they shut those down, it's all over. How their app is checking to see that your license is already used is a bit unknown. Moving the license might work, it might not... but it's worth a shot.
The complaint I do buy here is that the OP can't transfer their old piece of software and license to a new system. Which they should be able to do--at least so long as an operating system upgrade doesn't break it. (i.e. I wouldn't expect old versions of software to be upgraded to run on new hardware and software except for some cases like OS security patches.)
Also, the software distributors are not obliged to _distribute_ the old software versions, just like car manufacturers don't distribute or support an old car models, even though owner have "lifetime license" to use the car.
>car manufacturers don't distribute or support an old car models
Car manufacturers do support old models up to a point. (Parts, recalls, etc.) But analogies to software are imperfect anyway.
It pretty much only works though if you assume your customer is honest, and don't spend too much time fighting it. Which means yes, some dishonest customers will buy once and use on multiple machines.
If you go the other way - assume the customer is dishonest - then you need "transfer checking" which in turn means external servers (at best) or staff (at worst). But a model where you get one-time revenue, but monthly-reoccurring cost (for life no less) is not sustainable.
Reoccurring revenue to match reoccurring cost is sustainable - hence subscriptions are popular with products that have reoccurring cost (development, support etc.)
Version upgrades were popular, but that is an "optional subscription" which works only as long as you keep adding things existing customers actually want. This was masked behind new sales, but once there's some market saturation this becomes a bigger problem.
Lifetime licenses should only apply to software that will be completely abandoned when sales dry up. Which means no online infrastructure etc.
I've seen other "lifetime" products "change name" to side-step the lifetime free upgrades license, and it leaves a very sour taste with customers.
But overall I avoid them since I don't trust the company to be around long enough to get the value or I don't trust the company not to pull something like what happened to OP.
:/
The issue here is that the license is tied to the computer not the user and isn't necessarily transferable (within the ToS at least). I did take a quick look at the site and it does say "1 Mac" not "1 user". Is that not 100% clear? Maybe. But it's not a lie.
Also, there is no non-lifetime option on that website so it's not like you went for a more premium license FWIW.
Pretty much any version licenses (lifetime or otherwise) create a financial incentive to create a new version. This is kind of what Adobe did with Photoshop (pre-subscription). This was particularly noticeable with the RAW plugin. Whenever a new camera is added they just bumped the minimum version to force you to upgrade.
I'm actually not fundamentally opposed to subscription models for software as there's no disincentive for bug-fixing and constant improvement. I mean how Adobe does it is terrible (eg dark patterns around resubscription, only annual pricing). But compare that to Jetbrains who has an outstanding subscription model.
I've bought quite a few lifetime licences from AppSumo etc. over the years the vast majority have been above board, and some have even given extra bonuses years down the line as a thank you for supporting them in the early days. Some get bought by bigger companies and you can flip a coin what happens - shout out to MooSend and Archbee as they're remained great after being bought out/got investment.
Some companies also respond to bad PR when they bait and switch; Miro killed my LT licence until I complained and referenced contracts, BotStar is persisting after AppSumo kicked up a fuss and another whose name escaped me backed out of bait and switch after PR threats.
Some do just sadly die though.
Was awesome for Warcraft 2. Back before battle.net
1. Licenser is typically not obliged to _support_ the software for eternity. It may require a lot of work to support the old software versions (security patches / new OS compatibility updates). All the software requirements should have been covered in its requirements section. They clearly sold you the right to use the software forever, but if you want to get updates or support -- that's what support contracts are for.
2. Also, the software distributors are not obliged to _distribute_ the old software versions.
Let's make analogy with bicycle manufacturers -- they don't distribute or support an old bike models, even though you have a "lifetime license" to _use_ the bike.
PS: Personal story: I've dealt with a good amount of software and support licenses from the seller side, and savvy buyers know to add a provision in our Agreement that if we agree on a longer-term contract, we (seller) cannot rename the product in order to push price increases. But our case is different than yours -- we specifically sell the updates and support, not just the right to use.
Yes, software is fundamentally different. On the other hand, selling perpetual licenses for software that cannot be used perpetually (e.g. because it requires activation servers) should be considered misleading advertising.
This case is just so blatant though. I don't need support, I can find the right files etc, but if you're gonna kill the old version, allow the license key to be used on a new machine..
If the old "Mumu" doesn't work on new machine, and that new machine is listed in its requirements, then it's a breach of the sale agreement from their side. But if it's not, well, sorry, but there's no breach.
If not, you’re still not much better off by using open source software.
If we were talking about software created a quarter century ago, there would not be much of a difference. You had the distribution media. You had a license key. You could continue to use that software with a perpetual license indefinitely. It may mean keeping old hardware around, isolating the software from the network, or dealing with bugs indefinitely, but at least you had that option. (For the most part.)
Contrast that to today. Consumers have virtually no control over the software they licensed. In the worse case scenario, the vendor can prevent its use at any time. A more typical situation involves the user losing access sometime after the vendor dropping support (even if it is unintentional, say due to them going out of business). That is far worse than the original scenario, the scenario of dealing with unsupported software, since access is lost altogether.
As for having access to the source, it can help in some situations. I have certainly made (very minor) tweaks to programs to get it running. But another scenario would relate to the question, "how important is it to keep the software running?" With open source software, you could hire someone to maintain it if it was important enough. With restrictive licensing, the best case scenario is dealing with extortion. (And yes, I would call it extortion if a company changes the terms of the license to extract revenue.) The worse case scenario is losing access altogether, either due to a product being dropped or a company going under.
[0] https://matthewpalmer.net/rocket/
It was a hundred bucks, one time only fee, so even with low resources and minimum reliability it was worth it to me because of the one time only fee.
2 years in, they sent me a bill for $90, saying that if I didn't pay it they would cancel the service. I showed them my receipt for unlimited lifetime access, and they came back with "well, you still have to pay".
I said "I paid for lifetime access" and they gave me the, "we have altered the deal, pray we don't alter it any further" line so I canceled the service and smack talk them every chance I get. If you sell something under a specific license you shouldn't be allowed to change your mind after the fact. If I wanted to pay $90 a year for a cheap VPS I would have gone with a reputable company.
2. Customers pirate your software
3. surprisedpikachu.gif