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Comment by ScottBurson | Hacker News Reader

> They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates.

I'm missing something. What's the difference between that and what they're doing now? You pay $X, you get a perpetual licence and updates for a limited period.

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Your perpetual license is for the oldest version available during your subscription period, not the newest.

Old model: Pay $X.XX and get one year of updates.

New model: Pay $X.XX (spread over 12 months) and you can use all new versions UNTIL the subscription ends. At which point, unless you renew, you have to DOWNGRADE to the one year old version.

Let's face it, downgrading such an import tool is not something developers will be comfortable with (especially since JB products occasionally have show-stopping bugs).

Having said that, I'll admit to liking their products (and support). But the model is not as generous as everyone seems to think.

So that was the original plan but I believe they changed to the “more reasonable” one after the backlash (so you get the current version + 1 year of updates)

The original plan was that you'd lose access completely. The "more reasonable" one was the 1yr downgrade.

IIRC, the price of 2 year subscription is still cheaper than the 1-year update of the old model. They even offered subscription discount when they were transitioning, so the out-of-pocket is still cheaper than the old model.

In addition to what michaf mentioned, what we have now is not what they originally proposed.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/18/final-update-on-t... - the perpetual license fallback did not exist under the original proposals and only happened due to backlash.

Why does this matter? Yes, their original plan was pure SaaS. But they listened to criticism and changed it once they realized that there was backlash from the community. If anything, that should be admired not criticized.

> Why does this matter? Yes, their original plan was pure SaaS. But they listened to criticism and changed it once they realized that there was backlash from the community. If anything, that should be admired not criticized.

It's useful context. Yes, it's good that they listened to their customer base - and I've not criticised the current subscription model.

But I still think it's relevant and on-topic to point out that the previous model was more generous and they tried to do full-SaaS when reading the parent comment in isolation sort of suggests they did this out of the goodness of their hearts (and entirely unprompted).

It's matter, because even in this thread you have people prizing jetbrains for beign better than Adobe SaaS, but in reality jetbrains would go even futher than any big predatory corporation out there to vendor lock you into their set of tools.

If you have an option, stick with open tools with strong community support. Just observation: with commercial tools you don't have full control of your own work, nuff said

Now the perpetual licensed version always lags 12 months behind in updates, i.e. you do not have a perpetual license for the past 12 months worth of updates at the time your subscription runs out.

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