One-time purchase or subscription?

01 / Terms

What the three words mean

Purchase pages use the same words for different things. Before you compare, it pays to see what each one actually means on the page in question. Every detail comes from the vendors' own pages, accessed on 21 September 2026.

• Subscription: the licence covers a period and renews unless you cancel. Disk Drill calls its yearly option "One-Year Subscription — renews yearly, cancel anytime"; Recoverit for Mac says of its monthly and quarterly plans "Automatically renew. Cancel any time." Whoever signs up in the moment of rescue has to remember to cancel.
• Time-limited one-time purchase: pay once, but with an expiry date. EaseUS sells "One-Month" and "One-Year" explicitly with "no renewal fees" — the licence simply ends after that time without renewing. DMDE calls its Express edition "1-Year … One-time purchase, Time limited license".
• Lifetime or perpetual: pay once, no expiry date — but of what? Disk Drill writes: "'Lifetime' refers to the lifetime of the Disk Drill product." Recoverit says of its Perpetual Plan that you can use "the purchased major version … permanently", and that upgrades to future major versions are not included. EaseUS ties its "Lifetime Upgrade" to free upgrades, DMDE its perpetual editions to "Lifetime updates … no annual renewal required". Stellar offers each edition as "1 Year License" or "LifeTime License" without defining the term on its purchase page.
• Free and open source: PhotoRec is, according to its project page, "free — distributed under GNU General Public License (GPLv2+)". That is not a licence model in the sense of this page, but it is the honest yardstick: no interface, no verification of the result, and no term to think about at all.

02 / Market

How vendors handle it — according to their own purchase pages

The table lists only what stood on each purchase page on 21 September 2026. Prices are deliberately left out because they change with every promotion and would make the comparison stale within weeks. Where a page does not define something, the table says so.

03 / Our model

Why we state a number and not a word

We could call our licence "lifetime" — ten years is longer than most memory cards stay in service. We do not, because on the pages above the word means four different things and you only learn which one in the small print. A number can be checked: payment confirmed, ten calendar years, done.

What applies during those ten years is on the pricing page and is repeated here without deviation: updates within the major version you bought are included, a later new major version is not automatic. The licence covers two of your own devices in total, and you may combine macOS and Windows. There is no automatic renewal because there is nothing to renew.

And because a licence does not buy a rescue: the scan is free. You see the results list and the previews before you pay. Only exporting recovered files needs the key. If the card has nothing left to give, you have paid nothing.

04 / Decision

Four questions before you click Buy

The licence question ranks below the question of whether the tool reads your card at all. But when two tools do, these four points decide.

1. 1

   Read what applies after payment: expiry, renewal, version binding. A word like "lifetime" only becomes a statement once the page defines it.

2. 2

   Count your devices. A desktop at home and a laptop on the road are two — with "1 licence per computer" you need two licences.

3. 3

   Check whether you may scan before buying. A model that only shows what it finds after payment is selling hope.

4. 4

   Weigh the moment of rescue against the years of use. Whoever rescues one card tends to rescue the next one eventually; whoever is certain to rescue only once should cancel a subscription the same day.