I'm pretty sure that if the fallback license was to the most recent version you're entitled to during your subscription way more people would take leaps between the end of a subscription and the start of the next one (though Jetbrains offers you a further discount if you don't do so).
They're playing on loss aversion and the endowment effect. It feels worse to lose something than to never have it, so people are more willing to pay to keep it than they would be to pay to buy it if they were never given it in the first place.
In the end, though, when I discovered this was how it worked at the end of my PyCharm subscription, it left me quite a bitter taste in my mouth, and I just stopped purchasing any JetBrains products. These kind of details are akin to trying to trick people via putting stuff into EULAs nobody reads, and for me at least, it gives the distinct feeling that they're trying very hard to screw me over, so I try to not frequent nor support those kinds of businesses, IMHO.
I've been using them for awhile and I felt they were really up front about what they were doing, but I don't know if they've always been as transparent.
Initially JetBrains didn't even want to offer rollback licenses when they went to subscription only model a few years ago.
There was a big uproar among programmer communities (including here on HN) and after few weeks of deliberation a compromise of sorts was reached.
Despite offering a nice product line, JetBrains did lose a bunch of goodwill including mine. But goodwill does not pay the bills.
> The trick is that at the end of your yearly subscription you have already upgraded to a newer version, so falling back to the perpetual license means downgrading, which is both often a practical problem and (perhaps most importantly) something that I think many have an emotional aversion to.
Qualifies as
> a particularly hamfisted attempt to grab an almost negligible amount of money
OK, so maybe it's not as negligible an amount but it feels petty and I'd not pay money to a company that pulls stunts like that on its customers.
Also, how would you account for it? You can't retrospectively change the nature of purchase from subscription to a one-off sale! That would be audit hell for their accountant.
But that is denial of service that I legitimately paid for. Either they should provide the updates till end of subscription or refund the collected update fees pro-rata (viz. if I cancel after 9 months of purchase, 3 months of excess update fee collected should be refunded).
With that you get a trial of all updates for a year. If you don’t like the trial you don’t pay and revert to the version you paid for.
Your way also makes sense, but they both seem reasonable to me. And I don't really care much, in that I renew when I'm regularly using their product, as I want to support them. If I just had to open an old project for something, then I don't mind exactly which old version I'm using. (And if I somehow did, I could just put it in 30-day trial mode.)
Long to short, the "rebate" was paid ~60 days prior to the end of the 12 months. The remaining 60 days' purchased will only be rebated if they renew.
I presume this is in the small print somewhere. None the less, it's complete crap.
I received my rebate after I had let my membership lapse without any issue. You can use the rebate even without an active membership. You can even walk up to the customer service counter and get your rebate amount in cash if you want. I ended up getting pizza and took the rest as cash back.
You can even walk up to the customer service counter and get your rebate amount in cash if you want.
"The Reward is issued approximately 3 months prior to the member’s renewal date in a Renewal Statement and reflects rewards earned up until the issue date. A member must be an active, paid Executive Member when the Reward is earned and issued to receive the Reward. To receive a refund for the Executive upgrade fee the membership must be canceled or downgraded to a Gold Star or Business Membership and any 2% Reward issued or accrued will be forfeited. Any additional savings and services exclusively for Executive Members will be rescinded." https://www.costco.com/executive-rewards.html
Some lag from the latest version seems fair, e.g. 6 months before the latest major version is perpetual...
You are absolutely right! That's exactly how it should work but it's surprising that they don't do it that way. I can give you an explanation from accounting perspective: When the sale happens, the accountant would record the sale in their Books of Account as "Unearned/Prepaid Revenue" (as a liability). It makes sense as you have taken money "in advance" for a sale but haven't delivered the updates yet and hence you cannot claim it as Income. Every time you put out an update, you can claim a portion of the "Unearned/Prepaid Revenue" as "Revenue" and push it from liability to "Retained earnings" account as Income. When the year expires (note that the year is for the user not the financial year) the accountant would claim the remaining Unearned/Prepaid Revenue as Revenue/Income.
I wonder how they manage their Books of Accounts if they have defined that the license falls back to the earlier version. What they are doing doesn't make sense from an accounting perspective as well!
I'm not a certified accountant either but I took the course just to understand workings of my business.
> they can change to allowing the user to keep the latest version they upgraded to without serious consequence
It'll be in their best interests if they did.
> you can just as easily sell "product version X with one year of updates" which is very common as well, and mark that as revenue right away
You definitely can. But you end up overstating your revenue and in turn your profits. The downside to that is you end up paying high taxes (unless you can minimize your profit by showing a ton of expenses as well). If it was instead treated as Unearned Revenue (which is a liability), you would be stating your true income and showing lower profits and thereby paying lower taxes.
Take for instance the case where your customer purchases a multi-year subscription. This causes a higher cash flow (assets go up) but you won't be overstating your income (as liability goes up by classifying it as Unearned Revenue instead of owner's equity). The liability can be reduced by claiming it as revenue over a multi-year period. If it was marked as revenue at the time of sale, the owner's equity (retained earnings) would go up. That would mean showing higher income which results in higher profits and you end up paying high taxes.
Remember that with unearned revenue you can carry it over to multiple financial years and spread your income between them. You lose out on this important tax saving component if you mark as revenue right away. This also has the advantage of portraying a true picture of your business in your books of accounts.
Don't upgrade until after renewing the subscription for next year.
I wasn’t aware that the perpetual fallback license only covered the latest version at the time of subscription/renewal. That’s less than ideal, but apart from that, I think they’ve pretty well nailed the subscription-based model. It’s actually the _only_ software I’ve used where I feel the subscription model terms were actually an improvement over what I had before.
I graduated from college and to see their lowest cost package was ~300 USD IIRC was infuriating.
I went full Netbeans for PHP. It does the job, the debugger works, and it doesnt cost me a yearly fee.
Android Studio is free.
Individual licenses can be used for commercial purposes just like a business license. AFAICT, the only difference is that a business license can be used by any single developer within an organization at a time, while the individual license can only be used by the named licensee.
There's also a 25% discount for new/recent graduates, which eases the sticker shock a little bit for new graduates.
Unfortunately, Office 2010 already has issues opening files made with 2013, 2016, etc. Most of my PCs are on 2013 as I was able to grab several HUP licenses at the time. I seriously doubt 2013 will be 100% compatible in another year or two, and 2016 will be the minimum version one needs in a work environment where you're collaborating on docs made with newer versions.
I have no doubt that Microsoft has employees on the payroll who have no other function than creating annoying incompatibilities to encourage users onto the 365 treadmill.
Again, the cynical part of me assumes that MS employs full-time staff to ensure that Libre Office, Google Docs, and other apps that work with MS Office will never be even 95% compatible.
And from my experience, even simple spreadsheets and formatted Word docs don't display properly when opened in Google Docs or Libre Office, and large, complex business docs with macros and esoteric formatting don't have a chance.
There are a few developers in every place I've worked who use Libre Office because they're on Linux or refuse to pay for Office. And you can tell when they collaborate on a doc with MS Office users because it renders poorly when they send it back. It doesn't bother me, but I've seen how folks in management, marketing, etc. consider it unprofessional and assume the developer is just lazy or can't use Office well.
The one silver lining is that Linux users can use Office 365 online for less complex docs; it's not a full replacement for offline versions, but it's a better alternative than Libre for those of us who believe it better to be compatible with others even at the cost of a 365 subscription.
E.g. I start paying month-to-month at 2016.2, after 12 months I have a license to 2016.2. But say after the first month, 2017.1 comes out. Then after 13 months I now have a license for 2017.1.
Why can't all subscriptions work like those old license schemes do?
That means I always will have access to my projects and to the level of functionality I start with. But I keep getting upgrades as long as I keep paying, and they get the steady revenue stream that means they don't have to play weird marketing games.