“Lifetime” sounds like a gift. On a product page, it is usually a forecast: that WordPress will stay cheap to support, that PHP bumps will be rare, that the next three years of email will fit inside today’s price.
Sometimes that forecast is honest. You ship a small plugin, you do not plan to babysit it forever, and the buyer gets a key that keeps working. Call that what it is.
Most of the time, “lifetime” means something else. Pay once. Get every future version. Stay compatible with every WordPress major. Keep a human on the other end of support. At the price you set to win the first hundred sales.
That is not a license. That is a subscription you forgot to bill.
Two products hiding under one word
The argument is not lifetime versus yearly. Plenty of companies sell both. The fight is two different offers using the same label.
Lifetime of this product can be clean. The buyer pays once. The key stays valid. Activation limits still apply. Updates and support last for a period you name, or they do not. When the product changes in a way that needs ongoing work, you sell that work separately.
Lifetime of you is the trap. Every future feature. Every compatibility fix. Support until you quit, sell, or burn out. Priced like a ZIP, staffed like a company.
Customers hear the second one even when you meant the first. If you do not write the boundary down, they will write it in for you.
The ZIP is not the expensive part
Shipping a plugin or a theme is cheap. Keeping it alive is not.
WordPress ships majors. PHP versions fall out of hosting panels. Stripe and PayPal change flows. A Gutenberg rewrite lands and your settings screen looks like 2017. Somebody opens a ticket because an agency bought a personal license and it will not activate on the eleventh site.
None of that cares that you called the purchase lifetime. The work still shows up.
If the buyer also gets updates and support for as long as they own the key, you priced an open-ended service contract. The conversion rate looks great in month one. Year three is when the math shows up: a pile of customers who never pay again, and a product that still has to move.
If you mean it, say what ends
Lifetime is fine. Vague lifetime is not.
Before you put the word on a button, answer this in one sentence: what does the customer stop getting?
Pick one and put it on the product page.
– The key never expires. Updates and support are included for twelve months, then they buy another year if they want them.
– The key never expires. This version of the plugin is theirs. New major versions are a separate product.
– The key never expires, and so do updates, because this is a finished tool you do not intend to grow. Support is community or paid, and you say so.
All three are honest. Pay once for every future version and support, forever, is honest only if you can fund that work from that one payment. Most people cannot. They offer it anyway because it converts.
Lifetime is about time. It is not about unlimited sites. A lifetime personal license for one site is still a one-site license. If an agency tier means five sites, say five. Do not let “forever” become a way to avoid naming a site count.
Yearly still has to say what stops
A lot of products land on yearly billing because the work never stops: WordPress majors, PHP bumps, support email. Recurring revenue matches recurring work. That part is boring, and it is why yearly exists.
What yearly buys is not one thing.
Updates and support renew. The plugin keeps running. They paid for a key. If the year lapses, they keep using what they already installed. They stop getting new versions and a human on email. Plenty of WordPress authors sell this, and buyers already understand it: the site does not vanish; the updates do.
Access renews. If they stop paying, the plugin stops working. License checks fail, features lock, downloads close. They are paying for a year of use, not a ZIP they own forever. That matches the work, because you are still shipping. It is a straightforward product as long as the page says it before the card is charged.
Either model is fine. Mixing them in the copy is not. If the sales page sounds like they own the plugin, and month thirteen turns it off, that is how you get chargebacks. Write which one you sell. Then make the software do that.
You can still sell a one-time license. Plenty of authors should. A focused plugin that you will not be rewriting for years is a bad fit for a subscription. Charge once, define the key, skip the renewal theater.
What you should not do is use “lifetime” as a discount on work you have not priced.
Yearly plus a more expensive lifetime
Some products list a yearly plan as the default, and a lifetime option next to it at a much higher price. That is a real model. People who hate renewals will pay to close the loop. Everyone else keeps the subscription, which is how you fund the work.
It only stays honest if lifetime is a buyout, not a sale.
If yearly is $79, lifetime at $159 is two years prepaid and an unlimited obligation. The customer who would have renewed for six years got a discount. You got the support load of someone who never churns.
A useful floor: charge at least as much as you would actually collect from a customer who stays. Three to five times yearly is a common starting point, not because it is magic, but because it stops you treating lifetime as a coupon. Some companies go higher on purpose. The point of the expensive button is that most people should stay on yearly.
Then still write the sentence. Lifetime at 5× yearly can still be a trap if it means every future version, every WordPress major, and support until you quit. It is cleaner if the buyout covers this plugin, with the same site limits as the yearly plan. If yearly turns the plugin off, lifetime has to leave it on. If yearly is only updates, say whether lifetime includes updates forever or only the key.
If you cannot raise the lifetime price until it stops looking like a bargain, do not put it on the page.
Write the offer like you will have to live with it
A useful test: would you still sell this to a stranger in five years, at this price, with this support load?
If the answer is no, you are using lifetime to close the first sale. The people who bought it will still be here when the novelty is gone. So will the ticket queue.
If the answer is yes, print the sentence. Key terms, site limits, what updates include, what support includes, what a new major version is. Then enforce it: activation limits that match the tier, update access that matches the term, an account page that does not contradict the product copy.
You can sell a one-time key, yearly billing, or both. That part is not the hard problem. The hard problem is meaning the word you put next to the price.
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