I hope this isn't the case. The last time I purchased ReSharper it was a one off payment. IIRC you got a year of upgrades included but if you wanted the newer versions after that then you needed to keep paying a subscription renewal fee. However, it wouldn't stop working after that time. You still kept what you paid for.

I just had a quick glance at the ReSharper page [0] and it appears that they still use the same model. They also offer monthly subscriptions but say that "12 months of uninterrupted subscription payments qualify you for receiving a perpetual fallback license.". BTW the cookie law notice on that page is one of the best I've seen :).

I've used pretty much every version of Visual Studio and 2015 is the first to have issues with licensing. I originally signed in with my MSDN account to activate it (fair enough) and then signed out. Now it tells me that my license has "gone stale" and I can't use it until I sign in again. There is an option to enter a product key but MSDN tells me:

    A product key is not offered with this edition of Visual Studio. 
    To unlock the product, you must sign in using the login associated 
    with your active Visual Studio subscription. By signing in, your 
    IDE settings will sync across devices, and you can connect to 
    online developer services.

My old versions of VS are still licensed with a key and work fine. It makes me worry whether I will still be able to use VS 2015 when my subscription expires. Maybe it's worth exploring the free community versions. I believe that they no longer have the limitations on plugins that they use to have. I don't mind paying for things but the time and cognitive overhead dwarfs the financial cost.

[0] https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/buy