When licenses MEAN nothing I PAY for nothing yarrrr
Do what you want cuz a pirate is free
You are a pirate! Yar har fiddle dee dee! Being a pirate is alright with me!
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
You are a pirate!
yo ho ho a pirate life for me!
Is there a way to pirate a service like Canva besides pirating someone’s credit card first?
I don’t funny know what canva is so… I don’t know
An easy WYSIWYG content creator for making flyers & posters. Question stands for any cloud-hosted, paywalled service.
Far as I know, you can’t pirate Google Maps or OpenAI services (API key required), for other examples. Or YouTube Premium or Spotify (albeit you can adblock the free versions).
As more programs move to the cloud, I’m imagining piracy getting much more difficult if not essentially impossible.
To the people in this thread saying “don’t buy lifetime”, how is that any different than a perpetual license? Your alternative is subscription based… I’d definitely prefer perpetual to subscription.
There is always another way
🏴☠️
Yeah but for software you want it to work and sometimes need help, when you steal that software you are often on your own. In open source, there is nearly always an open alternative that comes with community support!
I mean, the only time I’ve used official support for some software was when I was having a license issue with Windows. Everything else has been solvable using the open internet.
The reason why I don’t pirate software anymore is you have no idea if the people who cracked it added malware or not and it’s, IMO, a perfect way to deliver malware.
Fair point, that is my fear too. I run Ubuntu so nearly all my software is open source already and for the slim number of tools that aren’t in just pay for them because they are good enough to warrant it imo.
I abuse free trial and surprisingly it works really well
Most of the time, the tools I use to pirate are open source themselves so that isn’t really a problem for me.
I don’t mean the distribution tools like bittorrent etc have malware. If you pirate games or software, you run binaries provided by the people that cracked it, which don’t tend to be open source. At least they weren’t back when I was consuming them.
I mean I used tools like UltimMC to get around having to make a minecraft account. UltimMC doesn’t provide the games themselves, that is downloaded from mojang’s website, UltimMC simply provides a way to get around basic DRM.
But they were all decieved, for another license was made. Forged in secret.
The only time I ever fell for a “lifetime” software purchase was back when Trillian (the IM client) was popular. That lasted less than 5 years. Then they released “Astas”, which was just a UI refresh, but they treated it like it was a whole new company and product. “Lifetime” is always a scam.
I’m enjoying my Plex one and Nexus Mods. The latter one was in 2013 and cost me $40. Today the yearly subscription is $70.
Yep. I bought Plex pass lifetime for $60 a while back. It came with plexamp which allowed me stream music to my phone.
Which after Google play music was murdered I vowed never to do a streaming service again.
So that was worth it.
Say what you want about the direction Plex is going currently… But as of now it 100% meets my needs.
Plexamp is amazing.
Scooping up a lifetime sub to Nexus, back when they were still available, might have been one of my best online moves. If a game can be modded, I will be modding it - I get SO much value from that one-time investment.
Facts
Something about paying for mods seems so wrong to me
You’re not paying for mods though, you’re paying for faster downloads and no ads.
Also you’re supporting modders through Donation Points. Creators get real money proportional to mod download count. The mods are still free, to clarify.
$40 or these days $70 yearly for that?!? Jesus
Oh yeah I mean, it’s expensive. But if you’re very much into modding and like me don’t like your gbit download speed to be limited to 3mbit or whatever the free thing is… I get paying it.
I wouldn’t pay for what yearly costs now, but the 40eur lifetime price 10 years ago sure wasn’t a bad deal.
You can get Plex lifetime for around 80 USD during their occasional sales. I bought a lifetime sub for ≈80 USD on 2020-11-30
What do you mean? It was lifetime - lasted for the lifetime of the product.
Ohhh you thought they meant YOUR lifetime! Ooopsies
If you read the fine print, many “lifetime” warranties are like this too. They mean the “lifetime of the product” which is usually defined in the same fine print as like, 5 years or some other bullshit timespan.
Honestly the way I always look at it is just take the lifetime cost and divide it by the yearly cost and if I think the product/license deal will exist for that long (and I’ll use it for that long) it’s worth it otherwise not. Like, I have lifetime Plex and frankly I don’t expect the, to exist forever but I like the premium features and I’ve had lifetime for long enough that I’ve saved money.
Yeah, Plex lifetime was worth it.
Yup. Never ever buy lifetime licenses.
Even on software you love. Especially for software you love.
The alternative usually is subscription, is that better?
Nope. I’m here to tell you from 20 years of IT experience, you should definitely get perpetual licenses, whether they call them “lifetime” or not. Fuck all subscriptions.
🏴☠️🦜
If it’s for software you like, yes. Lemmy apps are a great example of this.
A lifetime license isn’t going to sustain the dev long term. If you like the app, buy a monthly subscription that gives them predictable income every month. Do a year if you feel confident about it. But honestly monthly is probably best.
For shitty corporate apps like Adobe, pirate that shit.
No. It is not the consumer’s job to support the software developers. It is the software developers’ job to develop a product that they can make a living on.
Lifetime is only as good as the contract terms.
I have paid for lifetime licenses a couple times and haven’t had an issue
this is why we need FOSS
GIMP or Krita might not be up to the standard as Affinity and Photoshop are, but at least while perfecting my skills in GIMP, I don’t have to worry about having to find a different software because a random company purchases it.
I really wish I liked gimp but I hate it so much. It’s so unintuitive it actually hurts every time I use it
That’s what I used to think as well actually. I opened it, saw the airplane control center, and closed it. But then I volunteered for editing a photo for my school, and I had to learn how to effectively create borders around the text, as I would have to makes a lot of changes to them. So I searched and came across this video. And then I understood that GIMP is actually a really powerful tool, you just have to learn how the developers intended you to work with it. Admittedly, having to use the drop shadow feature for text borders is pretty retarded, but it lets you fine tune the how the end result will look.
We’re not using that word are we!
I’ll give the video a watch but yeah I’ve used it countless times at this point. Doing extremely basic things like adding text to a document is painful for me due to the extremely weird way layers and selection works. Not to mention basic stuff like zoom shortcut keys standard everywhere else do not work.
Iphone has always been pitched as intuitive and “it just works”, and it seems like it is that way for iphone users.
But when I try using one I’m lost as hell. It seems God awful. In other words, intuitive is whatever you’re used to.
It’s not just what you are used to, but yes that can play a role. I think apple gets a pass because of the image they have. My mom has an iphone and struggles with anything new or changed on it. But people told her it’s the easiest phone so she’ll never switch…
I say it’s “easy” because you have so little say in what you can do with it.
I feel the same about Krita. I used it for about a year of hobbyist drawing, and I just never could get comfortable using it.
Clip Studio Paint came out with 3.0, and after some deliberation I decided to pay for the update. Felt like coming home. I’ve done more art in two weeks than I’ve done in nearly a year of using Krita.
Even more so, you don’t have to worry about hardware support, since they can be compiled from source code, as long as you have pc with enough power to run it, you can run it, no matter which architecture
People who claim GIMP isn’t up to Photoshop inevitably reveal the only actual issue is that they learned photoshop first.
Canva’s UI is somehow more fiddly than Word for making edits, but they’ve always seemed like a pretty decent company to me.
…of course that only holds true until it doesn’t - I’m looking at you, Google.
I bought a lifetime license for Malwarebytes back in 2012 and I’m shocked that they still honor it to this day. I feel like it’s only a matter of time before I lose it.
Hell, I bought a hex editor with lifetime lic back in 1996. The fucking guy answered my email and sent me an upgrade almost 30 years later. Hats off to you.
I see so many ads for malware bytes that it almost looks like malware itself lol. I’m pretty sure they have a lot of money.
I’m pretty sure they have a lot of money.
Yes but not all of the monies. - Every single MBA ever to curse the earth with their presence.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
It’s my old go-to whenever I accidentally downloaded something nasty that AVG (back when it was actually okay) couldn’t find. Are they actually still good?
Gold standard free antivirus these days (and by that I mean the only one that isn’t useless)
I learned my lesson about ‘lifetime’ updates with a Tom Tom GPS unit, from the late '90s, maybe early 2000s. After about 4 or 5 years I couldn’t install the latest map updates, so I contacted CS. They said, “Oh yeah, lifetime means the time of the expected life of the unit, which is 4.5 years. We don’t support that model anymore. Any other questions?”
That’s why open source rules
I use a lot of open source apps which aren’t as polished, the UIs need work, they’re clunky, and they won’t enshittify.
Yeah and there’s just as many paid for programs with the same issues… What’s your point? Want me to show you some open source programs that are polished? Heard of blender before? That’s not the point I was making anyway… The issue with non foss software is that you have ZERO control over it. Big corporations can decide to drop support at any moment or make a free tier paid.
Allow me to reiterate:
I use a lot of open source apps…and they won’t enshittify.
What amazes me are the number of companies selling “lifetime” VPN service or “lifetime” cloud storage service with a straight face.
Like… that is TRANSPARENTLY a scam. You’re literally gonna sell lifetime licenses to people with more money than common sense, until the entire system is overloaded, then just go out of business.
at least with standalone software it’s going to work forever as long as the OS supports it. cant say the same for live service software that you can’t run at home
How much software is standalone these days, though? It seems like most companies are shifting to SaaS.
as long as you can host the “SaaS” elements yourself (nextcloud, for example) there’s a lot more software than you’d initially think. There will always be a market for self-hosted options for cloud software imo: loads of businesses are reluctant to move their internal infrastructure to the cloud
Nextcloud isn’t SaaS, unless you’re paying someone else to manage your server. Self-hosting is never SaaS.
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For Context here is one Email I got from Affinity yesterday:
To our amazing Affinity community,
Today marks a momentous new chapter in our journey together.
I am thrilled to announce that Affinity is joining the Canva family.
This is a moment of great excitement, anticipation, and profound gratitude for all of you who have been part of our story so far.
We know that those of you who’ve put your faith in Affinity, some since we launched our very first Mac app, will have questions about what this means for the future of our products. Since the inception of Affinity, our mission has been to empower creatives with tools that unleash their full potential, fostering a community where innovation and artistry flourish. We’ve worked tirelessly to challenge the status quo, delivering professional-grade creative software that is both accessible and affordable.
None of that changes today.
In Canva, we’ve found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels. Their extra resources will mean we can deliver much more, much faster. Beyond that, we can forge new horizons for Affinity products, opening up a world of possibilities that would never previously have been achievable.
Canva’s revolutionary approach to design democratisation and commitment to empowering everyone to create aligns perfectly with our core values and vision. This union is a testament to what can be achieved when two companies that share a common goal of making design accessible and enjoyable for everyone come together.
I want to express my deepest gratitude to our incredible Affinity team. Your passion, dedication, and relentless pursuit of excellence have been the driving force behind our success so far, and I can’t wait to continue this journey with you all.
To our loyal users and the creative community, your support and feedback have been invaluable, we hope this this FAQ will answer many of your questions.
You’ve inspired us to push boundaries and continuously improve, and we’re excited to embark on this new chapter together.
You helped us start a movement.
Today, that movement becomes a revolution.
With heartfelt thanks, Ash Hewson - Affinity CEO
Ashley Hewson
CEO
Another Email I got today:
The Affinity and Canva Pledge
By the Affinity and Canva Teams
As we step into our shared future, we are committing to four pledges that we’re excited to share with the current and future Affinity community.
Earlier this week we shared the news that Affinity had been acquired by Canva. As the dust settles on the announcement, we wanted to say more about our future and our commitment to the Affinity community.
Since our inception, both of our companies have shared the same mission and vision. We were both founded with the belief that design shouldn’t be limited to those who can afford complex software. Our goal has been to make the highest quality design tools available to the largest number of people with fair, transparent and affordable pricing at our core. By joining forces, we’re looking forward to accelerating this shared vision.
Above all, together, we’re committed to continuing and amplifying Affinity’s position as the highest-quality professional-grade design suite on the market, while continuing to empower millions of designers to unlock their creativity and achieve their goals.
1. We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special.
We share a commitment to making design fairer and more accessible. For Canva, this has meant making our core product available for free to millions of people across the globe, and for Affinity, this has meant a fairly priced perpetual license model. We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future.
If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it. This fits with enabling Canva users to start adopting Affinity. It could also allow us to offer Affinity users a way to scale their workflows using Canva as a platform to share and collaborate on their Affinity assets, if they choose to.
2. We will double down on expanding Affinity’s products through continued investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite.
We believe Affinity is the highest-quality professional-grade design suite on the market. It’s non-destructive, super fast, and easy to use. As such, we want to reassure you that it isn’t going anywhere.
In fact, we’re committed to using our shared resources to continue expanding Affinity’s products through further investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite. We’re looking forward to accelerating the rollout of highly requested features such as variable font support, blend and width tools, auto object selection, multi-page spreads, ePub export and much more.
These additions will further cement Affinity as the best advanced design suite on the market and will be released over the coming year as free updates to V2.
3. We will provide Affinity free for schools & NFPs.
Canva, which has pledged 30% of its value as a company towards doing good in the world through its two-step plan, offers premium plans at no cost to schools and NFPs all over the world. More than 60 million students and teachers, plus 600,000 charities and registered nonprofits, benefit from this each month.
We’re excited to extend this programme to include free access for schools and nonprofits to Designer, Photo and Publisher. These professional-grade tools will add enormous value to this free offering, helping millions of students to master the craft of design, and empowering mission driven organisations to amplify their voices and maximize their impact.
We’ll share more details on this in the coming months, including what it means for our education and NFP customers that already use Affinity.
4. We are committed to listening and being led by the design community at every step in this journey.
Affinity and Canva were both founded on the basis that their respective communities – of expert and non-expert designers – deserved better. The tools available were overly complex, overly priced, or both. We know designers deserve better. They deserve the highest quality tools to serve their needs and they deserve to be treated fairly.
We also believe the design community also knows best what it needs. As such, we are committed to shaping our products based on your ideas, your feedback and your needs. To kick things off, we’d love to learn more about what you’d like to see as we embark on this next chapter of our journey. What would you like to see in Affinity? What features have you been dreaming of? What would you love to achieve? We’d love to hear from you here.
Thank you to everyone who has been an integral part of the journey so far. We’re excited for the future and can’t wait to see what we can build together.
With gratitude and excitement, The Affinity and Canva Teams
All links and images are from the email and not mine. I also replicated their email formatting in Markdown to make it easier to read on Lemmy.
Whelp… the Affinity Suite was pretty awesome and robust. Too bad they never did a proper linux port.
I remember Pocket Casts tried to take away lifetime purchases until people complained about it and they went ‘fuck it’ and gave people memberships that lasted 100 years or something. They did it before they had time to rebrand it as a ‘Lifetime Member’ in the GUI so good on them for fixing it so fast I guess.
I love it as an app but I’m not sure what it’s like for new users that can’t get lifetime memberships.
I bought pocket casts for like $4 a very long time ago. I’m not sure what you’re talking about, and the app says I have a free account. What is the difference in buying the app and subscribing to it?
I only came along after Google podcasts announced that it was sunsetting, so I don’t know what the lifetime membership entailed. But I have no need for any of the paid features they offer, so I’m happy to remain a free member. I don’t really understand why I would need cloud storage… from my podcast app… and on pc, I just run the Pocket Cast app in an Android emulator since for some reason you can’t use a web browser without a subscription. Completely mystifying decision, but I’m not paying $4 a month for it.
I use cloud storage for audiobooks. It syncs my progress across devices. That’s the reason I bought the app (and got lifetime subscription later).
Oh very cool - that’s a very good use case that I hadn’t considered!
What Android emulator are you using?
I remember I tried one for macOS before but I wasn’t happy with the performance, I did try it for the Tivimate I think, but it was choppy and not worth to use, I was gonna go back to experiment about this it would be because of Pocket Casts for sure.
I just loaded up Android Studio, which has it’s own emulation layer. I’ve tried Bluestacks in the past and had trouble with it - figured that Google’s own environment would be the best option.
Hmm, I see, I’m gonna look into this surely!
Hmm, I guess the app is free now but the “plus” features cost money
even if they keep lifetime licenses for now, it’s blatantly obvious how Canva plans to use Embrace, Extend, Extinguish to move people to a subscription service for newer releases.
If adobe can do it with Photoshop et al. without losing its brand reputation, then Affinity will follow suit in due course.
Yep, they’ll probably stop updating the Affinity product and launch a new product line with annual subscriptions. Probably cloud-based.
I was more expecting Affinity to integrate and replace features with Canva until a subscription is all but required for basic functionality.
I’ve bought VPN lifetime several times, 2 of them have disappeared, 2 are still running. On the other hand, just think about it from the company point of view, lifetime support is not a sustainable business model, so it necessarily must be a scam.
Nah not necessarily. It can be a great way to get money early on without venture capital.
Yeah, you will have to provide the service to them forever but they are usually a small bunch so they aren’t a big deal if you manage to get big later on.
I suspect most companies that offer lifetime even when they are big have statistics showing that they lose little money or none because the high price means that the average consumer won’t use the service for the required amount of years to break even.
Yeah, it’s kind of like crowd-funding. The early customers get a great deal, but also have the risk of the company going out of business.
I bought one on sale for 20 bucks like 9 years ago. It’s still running, though it’s not a particularly great VPN. Performance is meh, the clients are really basic. I still use it because after this long it’s basically free
If my Windscribe Lifetime VPN eventually disappears, I’ll of course be pretty upset. However, for the 35 bucks I paid for it in 2016 I feel like I’ve received an amazing value.
Buying a lifetime license, also known as… buying.
Products aren’t services.
