Perpetual licence

A perpetual licence is bought once and lets you use a particular version of the software indefinitely. It contrasts with a subscription, which grants access only while you keep paying.

Perpetual licences often carry a separate annual maintenance or support fee that does renew, so they are not entirely free of renewal dates even though the licence itself does not expire.

Both spellings mean the same thing. A perpetual license, with an s, is the American form and is how most vendor paperwork writes it; perpetual licence, with a c, is the British form used here. Neither describes a different product, and a contract that uses one spelling is not saying anything the other does not.

A design suite is bought outright for £30,000, with annual maintenance at 20 percent of the licence value. That is £6,000 a year for updates, security patches and vendor support, so the five-year cost is £60,000 rather than the £30,000 on the purchase order. The licence half of that never expires. The maintenance half renews every year and can be repriced, and it is the half with a deadline attached.

The failure this produces is specific: the licence gets registered because it was a capital purchase somebody had to approve, and the maintenance agreement does not, because it arrives as a recurring invoice nobody treats as a contract. The result is an asset the organisation believes it owns outright and a renewal it has no visibility of, until the year support lapses and the patches stop.

Licence type is a field on every record, so perpetual, subscription, usage-based and open-source tools sit in the same register and can be told apart. The perpetual licence itself has no renewal date, and the register does not pretend otherwise: a record with no date on it is shown in its own state rather than counted as healthy, because nothing can ever alert on it.

The maintenance or support agreement is what carries the dates. Give it its own renewal date and notice period and it gets a cancellation deadline and reminders like any other contract, with the purchase order and the support terms in the vault against the tool they belong to.