In this article, I’ll explain what “lifetime” offers are, and I’ll list those that I use and think are worth buying (I think there’s no more honest recommendation than personally buying and using).
Table Of Contents (T.O.C.):
- What is a “lifetime” offer?
1.1. The company can go out of business (bancrupt)
1.2. Fine print – catches and gotchas
1.3. Playing dumb
1.4. Obsolescence - Realistic expectations
- Lifetime offers I use and recommend
3.1. MXroute mail service
3.2. GeneratePress Premium WordPress theme
3.3. Advanced Database Cleaner Pro WordPress plugin
3.4. Divi WordPress theme and page builder
3.5. All In One WP Migration Unlimited Extension WordPress plugin - Conclusion
1. What is a “lifetime” offer?
You pay for a service, or a (usually software) product once, and you get to use it for as long as the company selling it is in business. So, as long as you, but as long as the “seller” of the service/product is “alive.”
Lifetime offers usually cost a lot more than the regular offers – like, you pay five times the yearly subscription rate, or similar. But they can be profitable in the mid, and long-term.
However, these offers are most often quite risky. That’s important to note and thoroughly explain, so let’s start with the lifetime offer risks:
1.1. The company can go out of business (bancrupt)
Lifetime offers can be a great way to gather some capital, without taking any expensive bank loans. But, after selling each lifetime offer, the company is obliged to keep offering the service for as long as it is in business. And each lifetime client is not likely to later switch to paying any annual, or monthly subscriptions – they’ve already paid for a lifetime.
So, if a company sells too many lifetime deals, it will carry the burden of servicing many customers for free, for as long as it’s in business – by offering services and technical support to those clients, who aren’t paying anything anymore.
It’s even worse if a company depends on selling lifetime offers in order to cover their regular running costs (pays, bills etc.). Sooner or later, they’ll run out of people who need the service and haven’t bought it already, so bankruptcy is inevitable.
That’s why you should beware of the companies who don’t really have any other competitive services except their lifetime offers.
1.2. Fine print – catches and gotchas
Some companies wish to make money on lifetime sales, but without really being obliged in the long term. They “cover” themselves by putting fine print in the contracts, like:
- You can use the software you bought for as long as you like, but any updates, including the security-critical ones, are charged extra (not covered by the lifetime purchase).
- You only get one year of technical support for the lifetime product/service you bought. You can still use it, but will have to pay the regular monthly/yearly fee in order to be provided with any support.
There are a lot more creative variants of the above-noted catches. Read the fine print very carefully.
1.3. Playing dumb
I can’t find a nicer term for the companies who cheat the customers. Here are some “shiny” examples:
- You pay for a lifetime web hosting service, but after one year, your hosting server runs as if it’s from the last century (because it’s been overloaded). You can switch to a newer, faster server, but you must pay the regular monthly/yearly subscription. Sometimes, they are shameless enough to offer you another lifetime package – for the new server.
- A company stops updating the software you had paid a lifetime for, then issues what practically is a new version of the same software under a slightly altered name.
There are numerous variations on these themes, but you get the point? It’s difficult to tell if a company will do this – unless you personally know the owner(s).
1.4. Obsolescence
A product/service can stop being competitive – they can be overrun by a superior offer from the competition.
Or you can stop needing the product/service.
Technically, it is forbidden to re-sell a lifetime product/service to other people. In practice? Well, in my country people will happily pay for a high-quality product/service that is no longer sold as a lifetime offer, or if it is, they’ll happily buy it at say half the regular price. This is a grey area, and if the company figures out what you did, they could cancel your service or support.
2. Realistic expectations
For reasons given in chapter 1, you understand that lifetimes aren’t always safe, long-lasting, or profitable.
For me, if I pay say 5 yearly subscription prices for a lifetime, I consider it profitable after the 6th year – if the product/service have remained solid. Everything after that is a welcome extra.
An additional benefit of lifetime offers is there are no worries about monthly/yearly payments, did they clear or was there a problem with the bank, no worries about extra monthly costs etc. Good lifetimes are basically like really good discounts – that require you to pay a relatively high sum upfront in order to get them. And yes, as I’ve already explained, they carry quite some risk.
3. Lifetime offers I use and recommend
I’ll now list the lifetime offers which I bought, use, and for which I expect to be profitable. From all I could find out, the companies offering them should remain in the business for some time, quality should remain good, and I don’t expect any “catches.”
3.1. MXroute mail service
I wrote about hosted email service pros and cons. For me, it’s a brilliant concept and I love it. I dedicated a whole article to the MXroute email service (note to self – update the article, they’ve switched to DirectAdmin interface).
The company owner, Jarland Donell (his github link), seems like an honest, trustworthy man. As far as I know, they don’t have a huge number of lifetime clients, and the company doesn’t depend on them to stay afloat.
Their relatively low prices are achieved by having a zero-spam tolerance (spammers get kicked out instantly), good automation, and not offering technical support for the basic stuff (if you can’t configure your DNS for the email, you’ll have to Google, use their knowledge base, or my tutorial for DNS configuration 🙂 ).
So MXroute may not be ideal for everyone, but such policy is fair, realistic and long-term sustainable.
They don’t always offer lifetime deals, but at this moment the lifetime promo is offered on the MXroute website. You get an unlimited number of emails and domains, with 10 GB of storage space (which isn’t a problem if you download emails to Thunderbird, or to a Gmail account). If the offer is not available at the time you’re reading this, check from time to time on their website.
3.2. GeneratePress Premium WordPress theme
In the article “The Best WordPress Theme,” I recommended GeneratePress as a phenomenal theme, and as my favourite.
This company offers affiliate links so I’ll be using them.
The company founder, Tom Usborne, is a great WordPress expert, willing to help. I got tons of his help and tips even as a user of the free version of GeneratePress.
GeneratePress Premium is very well written (and well-optimized), exceptionally well documented – so it’s secure, fast, stable, you can easily customize it either using options or some custom code. Their technical support quality is unmatched. I’ve been using it for years and am very happy.
In addition to the theme, they offer GenerateBlocks Pro, which, combined with GeneratePress Premium, practically gives you the power of a page builder, without the website running slowly for poor code optimization. GenerateBlocks Pro isn’t offered as lifetime, which guarantees the company will remain profitable in the long run.
Here’s my affiliate link to GeneratePress Premium lifetime offer.
The license is limited to 500 websites. I think that’s as close as it gets to unlimited (it will take me years to build and sell so many), without enabling the whole of Serbia/India to work using only one license. 🙂
3.3. Advanced Database Cleaner Pro WordPress plugin
I still haven’t written a dedicated article about this plugin, but I’ve been happily using it for some time now. It’s stable, fast, but what does it do?
It scans the database for leftovers of old themes and plugins (no longer used) and deletes them. With an option for database optimization and repair.
After having a website for several years, there’s been quite some garbage pilled up in the database. I always thoroughly test themes and plugins before installing and using them on a production website, but over the years, I have switched to some better options after they’ve emerged (like my switching from Yoast to The SEO Framework for example).
Themes and plugins seldom clean everything after being uninstalled, so the database gets full of garbage that slows the website down and increases the database size. Of all the tested options, Advanced Database Cleaner Pro does the best job of database cleaning and maintenance.
It’s very easy to use, with an intuitive user interface, so you don’t have to be an expert to use it.
Here’s my affiliate link for the Advanced Database Cleaner Pro lifetime.
3.4. Divi WordPress theme and page builder
The Elegant Themes company is behind this product. They’ve been in the business since around 2010. Being probably the first page builder on the market for some time, they did sleep on their laurels and got smacked badly by Elementor. However, they didn’t stay asleep and got to work – seriously.
Today, Divi is completely compatible with Gutenberg, and the output code is better optimized compared to Elementor.
Along with the Divi theme, you also get their page builder, which is cool for when I wish to build a website using GeneratePress Premium, with just a few pages that have a very “exotic design” done using a page builder (instead of a lot of coding).
I’ve been using GeneratePress and Elementor (affiliate link) for a long time. Still learning the ropes with Divi. For now, it seems to me that, when used as a page builder with GeneratePress, it offers a bit fewer design options compared to Elementor, but with a cleaner code.
When using the Divi theme, then all the page builder options are available and it is head to head with Elementor, while still producing a cleaner code.
With a lifetime license for an unlimited number of websites, and a company that’s been at the top for over a decade, I think it’s good to have this tool in my toolbox. The package also includes Bloom (plugin for designing nice mailing list subscription calls to action), Monarch (plugin for designing nice social networks share and follow buttons), and Extra (newspapers and magazines centred theme).
I must note that I’m still learning and testing Divi – unlike the other offers recommended in this article which I’ve used with numerous projects. Divi technical support is exceptional and super fast – it needs to be praised. Almost as good as GeneratePress. 🙂
A word of caution:
Divi still relies on shortcodes. When you build a page with Elementor, and then deinstall Elementor (for whatever reason), you still get the basic page elements still existing – more, or less. But if you build a page with Divi and then deinstall it, the page will look like this: [divi-shortcode-xyz sdljflsjflksdfklfsjsdf] and so on, over the entire page. This is worth knowing up front, especially if you plan to build a lot of pages using Divi.
Here’s my Divi affiliate link which gives you a 20% discount.
3.5. All In One WP Migration Unlimited Extension WordPress plugin
I already wrote about the free version of the All In One WP Migration plugin. The Pro version lets you clone, and migrate websites with less hassle.
This plugin makes sense if you need to clone several websites. For migrations, it doesn’t make much sense if you know how to do it. Still, for the less tech-savvy people who prefer to just click using a plugin, it will help.
I’m not very sure about this product’s, or its company’s stability. But – so far so good. It has saved me some time and trouble, so everything on top of that is a bonus (thanks to the lifetime purchase).
The bottom line is I’m not certain this is a good investment, but if you need it and want it, here’s a link for the All In One WP Migration Unlimited Extension lifetime.
4. Conclusion
With enough caution and research, lifetime promotions can be a good investment.
All the here listed options have served me well and paid off already, with the exception of Divi, which is still in the test phase. I’ll be updating this article over the years, whenever something changes.
As far as misses go, for now, I’ve made a mistake only with the WHMEasyBackup tool (link to their website) for backups, where I’ve practically wasted two times $15. They decided to make a new software version (7.x) and leave all the lifetime owners with the 6.x version “because that’s what they bought – and can use it for as long as they like.” Version 6.x works according to them and they promise to update if it’s needed, but in my experience, that stuff doesn’t work and I’m using the free WHM Backup Solutions.
My reasoning was that backups are very important, so I should get a paid-for solution that would guarantee stability and good support. I was naive to distrust the free, open-source alternative.