Your essentially paying for the product at the time of your payment and a 12 month subscription to updates. From that point of view it makes some sense that once your subscription is finished you revert back to the original product you bought you when subscribed. It does seem unnecessarily punitive though.

I prefer the model with Matlab, where you pay once, get a year of updates, and keep the last version.

> So if you subscribe for 12 months, and then cancel, you actually have to revert back to a version 1 year old. It's pretty messed up.

It would be, but that's not how it works.

I believe you just get to keep using whatever you were using when you stopped payments. You have access to minors updates to that version, but not to major updates from version to version.

I think it's a smart balance.

You are correct! Sorry for the bad info.