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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

intellij is functionally the same.

Buying a subscription gets you one year updates, and then whatever that last version is remains functional forever.

As I understand it, the IntelliJ version you can keep using forever is the one from the beginning of the subscription.

So while the subscription was valid, you got upgrades, and then if you don't renew, you have to downgrade. It's their way of nudging customers to keep paying. It's working for me.

Every 12 months you pay it bumps forward by 12 months. This is true whether you pay monthly or annually or every 3 years.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

Slightly different, you get a fallback license for every version you've paid 12 months for [0]

[0] https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

This is a bit misleading; you only get a perpetual license for the version you had at the beginning of the 12 months, as you can see with the second graphic[0] on that page.

[0]: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/article_attachments/203511589...

The version is refreshed on an annual basis of payments. So your fallback version will always lag, but it won't be significantly out of date if you have a 4 year old account, for instance.

There was some confusion, and I'm not sure if they changed policy, but IntelliJ gave you a perpetual license for the version on the day you purchased it, not the last version at the end of the support contract

Why is this being downvoted? He’s right.

> When purchasing an annual subscription, you will immediately get a perpetual fallback license for the exact version available at the time.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

Though it is made slightly (?) better for the fact that if you for 12 month consecutively, then your fallback license is upgraded to the version 12 months ahead.

(That is, the next sentence in the bit you quoted is:)

> You will receive perpetual fallback licenses for every version you’ve paid 12 consecutive months for.

I never bothered to understand what "perpetual fallback" actually meant until you explained it here. It seems like a fair arrangement except that some releases of IntelliJ have a notable quality dip while new features stabilize - it's a bummer if the 12 month period you pay into happens to be in one of those dips.

Sketch too. I recently re-downloaded it and they said "You can download anything up to version [x]"

Sketch has been like that for a while.

The app now has a special licensing setup that restricts your installs to two machines.

Sketch made a thing about leaving the App Store.

But the App Store licensing and update process was way better than what it has evolved to.

> The app now has a special licensing setup that restricts your installs to two machines.

That's the one thing that pushed me to Figma.

It was bad enough that it's MacOS only. Now I can only have it on 2 machines?

Sketch customer service recently described it to me:

"Your [sketch] license can accommodate up to 2 devices — one for each seat you've purchased, plus an extra one we offer as a special perk."

I had to reply specifically calling out that this was not a special perk. I've paid the full license price at least three times. It should be available to install on as many machines as I want if I'm the only one using it.

It is Sketch's job to catch when someone is abusing this and create tech to handle that.

I think that this is actually not about preventing privacy, it is to try and get people to move to their cloud product.

It's not that simple or as simple as the other replies.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

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