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Buying software outright used to mean something. You paid once, you owned it, and the vendor left you alone. That compact is quietly eroding, and a dispute over a niche but widely used disk analysis tool called TreeSize illustrates exactly how the shift plays out in practice.
JAM Software, the German company behind TreeSize, has drawn complaints from long-time customers after making clear that perpetual licence holders will no longer receive support or updates once their maintenance period expires, unless they move to a subscription. Making things worse for affected users, JAM Software has a standing policy of not providing licence keys or installers to perpetual licence holders after that support window closes, meaning customers who lose access to their download history could find themselves locked out of software they legally purchased.
What Perpetual Actually Means Now
The word perpetual in software licensing has always carried a caveat: you own the right to run the version you bought, but the vendor owes you nothing beyond that. What has changed is the leverage vendors now exercise over the maintenance layer sitting on top of that right.
Since 2025, JAM Software has been moving most TreeSize editions toward subscription pricing. At present, the company still sells perpetual licences for personal use, and those licences include 12 months of updates, support, and access to older versions and licence documentation, with an option to extend the support period. TreeSize product manager Hendrik Christ confirmed to Ars Technica that the company has “no plans to discontinue the sale of perpetual licenses for TreeSize Personal.”
That reassurance, however, does not address the core grievance. When a maintenance period ends, the path to continued support now runs through a subscription to software the customer already owns the right to use. The perpetual licence remains technically valid. The practical utility of that licence, stripped of support and update access, is a different question.
The Installer Problem Makes It Worse
The support question would be irritating but manageable if customers could at least reliably access what they paid for. The installer and licence key policy sharpens the frustration considerably. If a perpetual licence holder reinstalls their operating system, migrates to new hardware, or simply loses a local copy of the installer, JAM Software’s policy means they may have no straightforward way to recover the software through official channels once the maintenance window has closed.
This is not unique to JAM Software. Across the industry, vendors have quietly shifted download portals, sunset legacy account systems, and restructured licence management in ways that make older perpetual purchases harder to exercise. The practical effect is that the permanence implied by “perpetual” depends entirely on the vendor continuing to honour it, and on the customer never losing their local copy.
For businesses running TreeSize in IT environments, which is a common use case given the tool’s function in auditing disk usage across networks, this creates a genuine operational risk. A tool embedded in maintenance workflows carries real switching costs, and vendors know that.
Why This Pattern Is Spreading
JAM Software’s approach reflects a broader recalculation happening across the software industry. Subscription revenue is predictable and compounds over time. Perpetual licence revenue is lumpy and eventually exhausts the addressable market. For publicly listed companies, the pressure to shift is enormous. For smaller independent software vendors like JAM Software, the logic is similar even without shareholder pressure: support costs are real, and a customer who paid once a decade ago generates no revenue while potentially consuming support resources.
The result is a gradual tightening of what perpetual ownership actually delivers, not through a single dramatic policy change but through incremental adjustments to maintenance terms, download access, and support availability. Each individual step is defensible. The cumulative effect is that perpetual licences increasingly resemble subscriptions with a large upfront payment and degrading benefits over time.
For users and IT buyers in Malaysia and Singapore, where software procurement often involves multi-year budget cycles and cautious approaches to recurring costs, this trend deserves attention. Perpetual licences have historically appealed to organisations that want cost certainty and do not want to be exposed to annual price increases. If the support and access conditions attached to those licences continue to erode, the calculus changes. A subscription at least makes the ongoing cost explicit and the vendor’s obligations clear.
The TreeSize situation is a small example of a large structural shift. As more vendors follow this path, buyers who treat “perpetual” as a guarantee of long-term independence from vendor decisions will increasingly find that independence is narrower than the word implies.
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