The CBSubs license is a lifetime deal but does (optionally) have a yearly maintenance period fee (first year is included in license purchase) for software upgrades. The following statements will help clarify this:
- The CBSubs license you purchase is a lifetime license and you can use it forever
- Every new CBSubs license purchase includes a one year maintenance period. This means that any CBSubs versions released within that year will also work with your CBSubs license.
- If you let your maintenance period expire, then you cannot use your license with newer CBSubs versions. But the license will continue to work with older CBSubs versions (released before your maintenance period expired).
- So, your incentive to keep your maintenance period updated is to be able to use your already purchased license with future CBSubs releases. Otherwise the license will still work (forever) with older versions.
You can check your CBSubs license maintenance period by visiting your existing CBSubs installation Settings Icon area where you will see the maintenance period expiration date for your license or you can see it from your Joomlapolis profile (see next paragraph).
To see your CBSubs license maintenance period, just login to this website using the Joomlapolis username used to purchase the CBSubs license and navigate to the Membership tab.
Then find the CBSubs license and you should see a line:
Maintenance expires on: YYYY-MM-DD
To add year to maintenance period, just "Change Options" button and select the appropriate dropdown item in the Maintenance Pack field. Then continue with purchase buy clicking on the "Upgrade Options Now" button.
If you have an expired maintenance agreement you need to purchase as many years as necessary in order to bridge the expired gap. So if your maintenance agreement expired on 2009-01-10 and today is 2012-01-01, you need to purchase 3 years to bring this license up to date and use it with the latest CBSubs version.
During the time when you have not kept your maintenance up-to-date, we have continued developing CBSubs. So when you update your maintenance now to install a new version, that new version includes work done during the whole time since your last upgrade, and that wasn't there before. Thus, we believe it is fair for everybody to katchup on "yet unused maintenance period" since it elapsed, and this is a goodwill from our side. Usually software companies do not allow that, and if you let a maintenance period expire, you have to repurchase a new license.