Comment by handsclean

Please don’t conflate limited updates with subscriptions. The problems with subscriptions are that the company can take away your own files, the company can take away your software, the lifetime cost is extremely high, and the company can unilaterally change the deal or stop offering one. None of this applies to limited updates offers like Sublime Text’s. You pay once and keep it forever. The three year limit is on the time into the future for which the company continues to add to what you’re keeping forever. Of course this isn’t unlimited, it’s pay once for the program, not pay once for the lifetime servitude of everybody who works on it.