Making these available for download indefinitely and without restriction is something we consider a risk to our customers, particularly in business environments. There’s also the technical and organizational overhead of maintaining and supporting old versions and their associated keys indefinitely.

Although TreeSize says this is a long-standing policy, the backlash highlights the disconnect between what many people expect when buying a perpetual license and what they get when a software vendor shifts its business model toward subscriptions.

“To make sure customers aren’t caught off guard, we proactively notify them by email, well before their maintenance ends, to back up their installation file and license key themselves. This is meant to ensure no one loses access to software they’ve already purchased,” Christ said.

Should this be a subscription?

There’s also the question of whether it makes sense to subscribe to a disk space analyzer, especially when there are free alternatives like WinDirStat.

Christ admitted that the change has been “frustrating for some customers.” When asked about online requests for refunds, Christ said, “since our customers do receive what was agreed, namely indefinite use of the software version they purchased, we don’t consider a refund to be warranted…”

A free version of TreeSize exists, but it lacks some features, including the ability to search for duplicate files, deduplicate redundant files, and compare disk space usage over time. It is not for business use.

TreeSize’s evolution illustrates the growing subscription economy, particularly the software industry’s fixation on recurring revenue. Over the past decade, software vendors have increasingly shifted to subscriptions in pursuit of more predictable revenue streams.

In TreeSize’s case, JAM Software wanted to “continue offering our customers a relevant, well-maintained product over the long term,” Christ said.

“The broader economic environment is more challenging today than it was a few years ago, and we feel that too as a software vendor,” he added. “To continue meeting our own standards and our responsibility to business customers who rely on high-quality software, we are placing greater emphasis on predictability in development and support. A subscription model gives us that predictability in a way one-time purchases do not.”