The Jetbrain licensing model caused a lot or confusion when it was introduced (as can be seen in posts on their forum and reddit), and when I check now it still seems to be the same.

> as soon as you pay for 12 consecutive months, you will receive this perpetual fallback license providing you with access to the exact product version for when your 12 consecutive months subscription started.

So if you do not renew then in practice you might need to _downgrade_ to an earlier version when your subscription expires. But some of their software doesn't even support downgrade, so you need to uninstall/reinstall it and hope you have some old backup of your settings.

Is this what you are referring to?