No more single purchases, hello annual subscriptions. The launch of Antidote 12 on Wednesday, to which artificial intelligence (AI) features have been added, hides a less rosy reality for fans of careful grammar: new customers will have to renew their Antidote license every year to continue to access it.
A Reddit user, marclarpin, noticed this change on the site of Druide, the publisher of Antidote, based in Quebec.
I don’t want to pay for another subscription every year. […] This is another casualty of the subscription push, on the flip side of being able to own software forever.
His post on the r/Québec forum very early Friday attracted dozens of comments. User Dry-Newt278 believes that Druide does a mistake going in this direction
.
I’ve purchased a lot of their upgrades, but I’m not going to put an amount to eternal life without having anything in return other than a temporary right to use a dictionary and proofreader
insiste Dry-New278.
What do the licenses promise?
Licenses renewable every year, called Antidote+ (previously Access tout Antidote), have existed as an option since 2018, with version 10 of the software. In particular, they allow access to the corrector from a computer, tablet or phone, via an application, a web browser or the desktop.
What is different with the arrival of Antidote 12, launched on Wednesday, is that any new purchase requires an annual subscription to Antidote+, detailed at $60 for the personal plan, and $100 for the family plan which includes the installation on five computers.
Only if you have an earlier version of the software does Druide offer the possibility of upgrading it with a perpetual license of Antidote 12, for a one-time fee of $90 to $140, depending on the plan.
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Antidote 12 software offers an AI-powered sentence reformulation tool.
Photo: Computer Druid
This version, however, limits access to certain features. These include sentence rephrasing suggestions powered byIA and audio pronunciation of words and phrases.
Lose your license for life?
But be careful, two other upgrade plans exist, and these versions will cause you to lose your lifetime license if you already have it. These are Antidote+ Single (one language, either French or English) or Double (French and English) subscriptions, which cost $30 to $75 the first year
. Renewal is done at a lower cost, from $48 to $120.
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André d’Orsonnens, co-founder of Druide Informatique.
Photo : Virgolia Communications
Contacted by -, Druide acknowledges having put an end to perpetual licenses for new customers.
We want to ensure that people who use Antidote for the very first time can benefit from the best of generative artificial intelligence. When they buy a brand new edition, they will certainly expect it and we definitely don’t want to disappoint them.
These new products powered byIA generative require considerable computing resources that are not available on personal computers. It absolutely must run on the powerful Druide servers
he adds.
The company also maintains that the new subscription plan allows you to do more, starting with deploying updates and upgrades without requiring a new purchase.
Towards an Adobe 2.0?
This change of direction is reminiscent of that made by Adobe. Retail sales of its image editing software ended in 2013, as did its perpetual licenses. The company introduced Adobe Creative Cloud, a subscription model for cloud licensing.
Result: the rise in popularity of Adobe software… on piracy sites. According to the specialized site TorrentFreakPhotoshop CS6, the latest license-free version of the image editing tool, reigned atop the illegal piracy site’s list of most downloaded software The Pirate Bay in 2014.
Still according to this same source, in 2015 and 2016, four of the first eight places on this same list were occupied by Adobe products.
Is this the same fate that awaits Antidote? Already, on Reddit, Internet users are setting the tone. Welcome to the world of pirates. With a little search, you will find the “free” version on the web
writes a user.
There is a phrase that is coming out more and more in the field of dematerialized video games: if buying is not owning, pirating is not stealing. [traduction de l’anglais]
indicates another Internet user.
Druid, for his part, considers himself far from the case of Photoshop
: Adobe had discontinued the perpetual license for all its customers, apparently without the use of its servers being essential
underlined on - André d’Orsonnens, chairman of the board and CEO of Druide Informatique.