Seems fine to me. Guy bought Goodnotes 5, and can use Goodnotes 5. He wants Goodnotes 6 to be included for free, but it isn't. That's life. When I got Invasion of the Vorticons, I didn't expect to get Keen Dreams for free too. Nothing new about that
Well, no. If someone offers a "lifetime" license (which I assume wasn't cheap), I expect to get free updates as long as the app exists. There was probably a sentence in the terms & conditions that stated something different, but still, IMHO "lifetime" should mean lifetime, not "until we decide to change our pricing model".
That's an impossible model though - you're asking somebody to do unlimited work for you forever, for a fixed one-off price.
In that world nobody should ever ever sell a lifetime license, it's a huge responsibility with strictly limited upside. Imo "Use the current-ish version forever" is the only reasonable expectation, and that's a fair trade.
It's expectations like this that drive subscription models. People do (quite reasonably) want ongoing support and updates, but that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.
> that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.
Not really, perpetuities have existed for a long time in finance, even longer has the concept of ‘time value of money’ existed.
You can turn $3m in revenue today into a US treasury bond portfolio that delivers $120k a year. That’s enough to pay for maintenance and minor development of new features.
You can also say: I’ll just charge 120k a year in fees infinitely. But it has the same present value (see time value of money) as 3m today. These worlds are interchangeable, only in the upfront world there is no risk that some of your customers walk away at some point making further upkeep untenable for the remaining customers.
I bought a lifetime gold license to Mediamonkey 3, 15 years ago.
I have since gotten Mediamonkey 4 and Mediamonkey 2024.
Unfortunately I don't like the 2024 refresh, but I can use it if I want to. I would also be completely happy if they just did maintenance/bugfixes on the original version.
If my local ice cream parlor is bold (or foolish) enough to offer a "single payment lifetime ice cream subscription", and I would have got that, yeah, I would expect to never pay for ice cream there again...
Neither the hypothetical ice cream parlor nor Goodnotes is accused of doing that, though.
I don't know when the OP bought his app, but the pricing page from a year ago doesn't say anything about the lifetime purchase being a subscription at all, much less a subscription that includes every new feature in perpetuity.
If someone as a developer has made a naive mistake in lifetime pricing model, with these kind of unrealistic expectations there is no reasonable timeline to correct those mistakes. Instead its easy to just offer subscription and tune pricing later.
In this case I'd actually agree that the author got what they paid for: A lifetime license to Goodnotes version 5. I don't think Goodnotes should have worded it as "lifetime license", the "lifetime" has no real meaning.
Updates should be free, but upgrades don't have to. That's how it worked with software previously. Sometimes you could buy older version of e.g. Office used, and that part we lost with downloads and app stores.
The app store model just sucks for every one. Developers needs to resort to subscriptions, because upgrade pricing isn't supported. Consumers are confused, because why are there multiple versions of the same software?
One issue I do see in this case is that Goodnotes aren't offering a subscription free alternative. That might be due to the AI feature. If that isn't running on device, then that's a recurring cost they placed on themselves.
You're advocating for anti-consumer practices. In response to your strawman, one can easily say that they don't pay for updates to their operating system. So there is clearly a line where we, as consumers, draw a line, right? And this is without addressing the fact they sold a "lifetime" license.
I suppose it would've been fair if Goodnotes were selling their lifetime licenses with the clear remark that this license is for the current version only.
Besides what other replies have mentioned, I'd like to point out that this model of versioning has died a long time ago, especially in the mobile realm. For any app there's only two options, "newest available" or "keep the one I already have installed", assuming that auto-update is not forced down your throat in the latter scenario.
I don't think that's it. I imagine op would be willing to pay to upgrade to Goodnotes 6, at which point he would own that for ever, just like Goodnotes 5. But there is no option to do that.
