Support

Hello Claudio,

We do not offer lifetime subscriptions and we will never offer any. I have explained it many times in the past. It all comes down to the fact that running a business incurs recurring expenses. If there is no positive cash flow the business struggles and shuts down. Companies offering a lifetime subscription are either naive or doing a money grab. In both cases they will shut down or get sold out. In both cases the people who paid for a lifetime subscription will soon realise that the lifetime of a company is not the same as the lifetime of the client and that had they paid for a yearly subscription they'd have paid less for more years of service.

This was proven beyond any shred of doubt when GavickPro collapsed a few years ago, selling out to JoomlArt. They explicitly said the same thing I've been saying for more than ten years. They sold too many lifetime subscriptions. While that was good in the short term, in the long term they were strapped for cash. They had to do development and support while the company was making a loss. So they had to sell out or shut down because nobody wants to pay out of their own pocket to work long hours. 

Before starting the business I was a business consultant. The consultancy company I worked for was called in  when a business was teetering on the edge of extinction. Our job was to optimise productivity which is a nice way to say that we had our client's employees produce more while our client fired some of them. Having seen failing companies up close and personal I knew not to repeat their mistakes. Lifetime subscriptions are one such mistake because they strangle cash flow.

So, here's what. If someone has been a client of ours since 2010 and only having an AKEEBABACKUP subscription they have paid a maximum of 284 Euros until now. They have been using our software for ten years. If there was a lifetime subscription it would have been 250 Euros and we'd have mathematically gone out of business by 2015 OR we'd have to say that "lifetime" referred to Akeeba Backup 3 which we stopped developing in 2015. The former would suck for you and us both. The latter would have lost us a lot of clients, tarnished our reputation and would have caused if not shuttering the company a couple years later then at least a contraction of its size with everything that entails about software and support quality.

Therefore we will never do lifetime subscriptions. It's business suicide.

Thank you!