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You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay

Not for everything. When I can do that I do, but it’s getting harder and harder to avoid subscription fees for everything these days.

Yeah. I mean, technically if you walk into Adobe’s office with $1M in cash, they might make an exception, but that isn’t exactly practical.

I mean effectively you could. Do something like the following:

Take a subscription product that costs $10/mo right now as an example.

Let's say you want a license that lasts your whole life.

Estimate the time you have remaining in your life. Let's call it 50 years.

Now you can use an interest calculator to see how much it would cost to effectively buy a license until the end of your life.

Plug in $10/mo contribution, plus 4% annual interest to cover inflation and price increases, for an investment length of 50 years.

So you can effectively buy an "eternal" license for $18,714.61

You are right about the financial calculations, but the terms of the license might change, or it might no longer be available at all.