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CCleaner Pro "Lifetime" Licence - why has it expired?


psychopomp1

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1 hour ago, wazzyl said:

To be honest guys,

I had a license for Malwarebytes and Ccleaner and it said about the expiration date: Never 
And now both are not working anymore, explain this to me and the whole community who started with ccleaner and malware since day 1, you guys from Piriform just tell LIES! I'm done with this crap... And then also something else about the price it's not fair!

I'm done with this....

Piriform don't publish Malwarebytes. It's a different company, so there's not much point complaining about it here................ unless you know something I don't.

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I do know something about the situation with Malwarebytes licences, they have tightened up on their checking of licences and this has had 2 effects.

Just to note that Malwarebytes no longer issue new lifetime licences - but do still honour existing lifetime licences.
So if you see a Malwarebytes 'Lifetime Licence' for sale or a licence for multiple installations then it's almost certainly a fake or scam.
(I say 'almost certainly' because there are a very, very, few genuine lifetime licences still held by authorised resellers who bought a large block and still have a few left).

The first issue that has arisen is that there are/were a lot of counterfeit/cracked licences out there, bought off e-bay and the like.
These have always been blocked where identified, MB have just recently got better at identifying and blocking them.

The second issue is that although genuine lifetime licences were only ever for one (lifetime) installation on one machine, the MB licence server would allow leeway of up to 3 installations to make transfering your valid licence to a new machine easier.
So some people have been using this leeway to use one licence on more than one machine, and some have even been buying one licence and then selling it 3 times. (e-bay again).

MB changed the process of moving a valid licence from one machine to another and so are more strictly enforcing the one licence one machine rule.
If you want it on more than one machine then you need more than one licence, or a multiple or business licence.

You can see Malwarebytes official statement about lifetime licences and those issues here: https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/249277-lifetime-license-issue/
If you are having issues with your Malwarebytes licence then see this: https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/249141-having-licensing-issues-after-a-malwarebytes-upgrade/

*** Out of Beer Error ->->-> Recovering Memory ***

Worried about 'Tracking Files'? Worried about why some files come back after cleaning? See this link:
https://community.ccleaner.com/topic/52668-tracking-files/?tab=comments#comment-300043

 

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Greetings everyone, I hope everyone is doing well.  I hope the moderators are dealing with the stress okay.

Never in my life would I thought I would ever have to create an account just to post to the piriform forums.  I'm here to correct some inaccurate data from the moderators and posters of piriform and I hope to reveal some practices that most of you have already seen.

I reinstalled CCleaner recently (due to something I can't remember) and it already had my license info onboard and I got a popup message saying that it had expired.  I decided to pull my license from my email and put it in CCleaner.  I get the same message popup stating that it was still expired, which was odd because I've gone how many years without it expired?  Why now?  How odd, how strange.  Strange indeed.  It says it expired over 5 years ago, yet I'm just now getting the message.  Maybe I shouldn't have updated to the latest version.  o.O

So I went and checked my email again and verified a few things.  One, I purchased it over 5 years ago, check.  Two, the invoice didn't mention anything about a one year subscription, check.  Three, the invoice didn't mention anything about an expiration date, check.  So being the confused person I am, I went online and found this thread and read just the first page and found some serious discrepancies.

Nergal mentioned that he's been here since dinosaurs roamed the earth, so he should know what people are going through, yet there's conflict between what he's saying and a lot of what others are saying.  Ben the CC guy, who only just joined a couple months before the thread started, is a company man, or so I believe.  He should know exactly what's going on.  He tells everybody what's what, yet, there's conflict between what he's saying and a lot of what others are saying.  There's a lot more that happened on page 1.  I highly recommend grabbing some popcorn and your favorite scroller and enjoy page 1.

With that said, I'm here because I'm with the masses, I'm with the snotty goo that's in your living room taking up your space, getting in-between your seat cushions that's hard to get out.  That's right, I too had a life-time membership thing-whatever it's called that turned into a yearly subscription, or so I thought.

After reading page 1 I decided to do my own research.  Thank you Ben for helping us all out with the Way-Back Machine.  You made my life that much easier in helping me find what I was looking for.  I has a clickster for you:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150210075835/http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

https://web.archive.org/web/20150208080809/http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/features

https://web.archive.org/web/20150315065342/https://secure.piriform.com/502/uurl-mgxgn8eqih

https://web.archive.org/web/20150208090628/http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/faq

Nowhere, ANYWHERE does it say.... yearly subscription.  But also, nowhere anywhere does it say lifetime.  Neither are presented/listed.  But because it doesn't say yearly subscription, you can't charge a yearly subscription, but you could put a time limit on it.  However, depending on the EULA/terms and conditions, if they are allowed to change on a purchase, they could allow an expiration to allow.  If not, then federal FTC false advertising laws are possibly broken if you're US based and a potential class-action lawsuit could follow, but hey, I'm getting ahead of myself.  My apologies, I'm certain this is all just an honest mistake.

But let's be real here, a company took over piriform and they want to turn CCleaner into a money making machine.  What's the best way to do that?  Change the EULA and terms and conditions.  If it's even in the documents to allow said documents to be changed in the first place, then they are fine.  But that's for fancy-pants lawyers to figure out.

I hope this helps everyone.  Questions, comments, concerns?  Let me know.

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Despite this thread going on for around a year, it's only recently been clarified that the product was indeed sold by version in the past but has changed over the years into a subscription product. The problem is that people were able to keep updating to the latest version without realising they were updating into a different kind of product. Because Piriform didn't actively enforce the subscription requirement on people who had originally bought a version based product most customers weren't aware of this until Avast took over and did enforce it.

However, you should be able to continue to use your original version without having to start paying an annual subscription and indeed by my experience, all the way up to version 5.58.7209 which was published on June 6th this year. You do need to turn off automatic updates though or you will find yourself updated into a subscription version.

Since the recent discussion regarding the Filehippo archives, I can confirm they are working again so you should be able to download the version you need via this page:

https://filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/history/

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15 hours ago, Derek_S said:

Despite this thread going on for around a year, it's only recently been clarified that the product was indeed sold by version in the past but has changed over the years into a subscription product. The problem is that people were able to keep updating to the latest version without realising they were updating into a different kind of product. Because Piriform didn't actively enforce the subscription requirement on people who had originally bought a version based product most customers weren't aware of this until Avast took over and did enforce it.

However, you should be able to continue to use your original version without having to start paying an annual subscription and indeed by my experience, all the way up to version 5.58.7209 which was published on June 6th this year. You do need to turn off automatic updates though or you will find yourself updated into a subscription version.

Since the recent discussion regarding the Filehippo archives, I can confirm they are working again so you should be able to download the version you need via this page:

https://filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/history/

Worked wonderfully, thank you.

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  • 1 month later...

The Pro version was sold as non-expiring, it had a lifetime license. The company is now trying to get out of that CONTRACT. Here is the Bottom Line. They may control the downloads of the Product, but I control my money. I Will NOT UPGRADE UNLESS IT IS FREE AND HONORS THE CONTRACT. You all just shot yourself in the foot. I've had this product since 2015 and it has upgraded every year with NO ADDITIONAL COST. That alone proves what I said earlier.  My invoice has no expiration date on the product. Again proof as to how it was sold. So you all can do what you want  but you are not getting any of my money.  Plus you bought a whole bunch of negative comments on social media........

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You can continue using the original version you bought in 2015 for as long as you like, so you might consider that to be a lifetime license but Piriform don't refer to it as such. They call it a version license. I've found I can use all versions up to 5.58.7209 on my original purchase license. If I update beyond that, it gets converted to an annual subscription version, which like you, I'm not willing to pay. So I've turned off auto updates and decline any offers of upgrading. Everything is working to my satisfaction including including prompts to clean my hard drive whenever CCleaner can save more than 1 GB of wasted space. If you need to reinstall the product, you can get all the older versions from Filehippo.com. Just don't install anything newer than 5.58.7209 and it should work OK.

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Derek that's fine but they are done in my book. You can't have all these people who were under the impression that if they bought the Pro Version it was a lifetime License without something that caused them to believe so, with updates. I specifically remember their advertising and it was specifically why I bought the Pro Version. So what started out as a Marketing Approach to acquire more revenue from the Product will most like kill the Product. There are plenty of products on the market that work as well and maybe even better. At least if you replace it with another product you may just get the straight forward info on what you are buying. I don't use the product that often as I have found where it does not always do what you expect of it. It still leaves garbage behind in the Registry. So the Marketing People may have increased revenue from a product such as this one, just not theirs. Bang, that was their foot they just shot.  They must have had a conversation with some Coke Marketing people. Who had 60% of the Cola Market, then decided they'd make their product taste like their competitors who had a far smaller share of the market. A real rocket science move was that one.  This one is in the same ball park just on a smaller scale. Have a great day.   

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The new owners can babble away, the reality is I had been on a lifetime licence for years, received updates and support. That changed on the new ownership. I get why they would do that, its a potent income stream not vested into the Purchase price. I dont get why they lied, and still do, I know what I received, it was lifetime licence with no fees.

I was prepared to suck that up and go for an annual fee, I like the software, and prepared to give the new owners space, I then hit the mother of all support issues .... complete inability to issue a simple thing like a password reset. I just received canned email response after canned email response after canned email response for TEN DAYS. They then lied, again, after a week of me yelling, and claimed their system had broken down..... oh please .....

After 10 years with a fabulous product - 6 years annual fee, 4 years lifetime licence - I'm done with this. The Market for support software has grown and matured in the last decade, so the new owners will have increasing difficulty mining revenue from the bought in software.

It was crazy ..... how to hack off a loyal customer of many years standing. I cant log in to post this as the issue I had was password reset !!!

Good luck guys, you are going to need it.

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My 2 cents - when I purchased CCleaner Pro on 03/08/2018, I fully understood and it was presented to me as a subscription. I bought a 2 year subscription at that point.

 

I'm just wondering why I received a "subscription expired" 20 months later...... (Yes, I've emailed support).

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1 hour ago, Biscuit1001 said:

My 2 cents - when I purchased CCleaner Pro on 03/08/2018, I fully understood and it was presented to me as a subscription. I bought a 2 year subscription at that point.

 

I'm just wondering why I received a "subscription expired" 20 months later...... (Yes, I've emailed support).

There seems to be something up with the licensing server, many have posted with the same problem today. We've flagged it for the higher ups to do something and inform us.

 

ADVICE FOR USING CCleaner'S REGISTRY INTEGRITY SECTION

DON'T JUST CLEAN EVERYTHING THAT'S CHECKED OFF.

Do your Registry Cleaning in small bits (at the very least Check-mark by Check-mark)

ALWAYS BACKUP THE ENTRY, YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU'LL BREAK IF YOU DON'T.

Support at https://support.ccleaner.com/s/?language=en_US

Pro users file a PRIORITY SUPPORT via email support@ccleaner.com

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I've had this program for what  seems like forever and up until recently never got any renewal notice? I was under the impression this was a lifetime key purchase? If it is true that it was only a one year purchase then why wasn't I getting these popup renewal notices all along?

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As Nergal said above it is an error with the licencing server.

We have now been told that a new server is being installed this weekend, and that until that is up and running these (incorrect) renewal notifications have now been turned off so you shouldn't get any more.

*** Out of Beer Error ->->-> Recovering Memory ***

Worried about 'Tracking Files'? Worried about why some files come back after cleaning? See this link:
https://community.ccleaner.com/topic/52668-tracking-files/?tab=comments#comment-300043

 

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I bought the pro version sometime ago under the understanding as well and by doing so I would not be billed again for it, anyone who say this was never offered is just wrong. In the early days of the software it was not without it's problems and I would remove it to avoid such conflicts. Anyhow I have a friend who a couple of years later told me of the improvements to the software and I might give it another shot. I lost my original receipt for the product and had to write the company with the email address I used to purchase it, it had changed since but I told them what it was and they sent me my key to unlock the pro functions which it did and which proves what I say that it was free once paid for or they would not have done so after a couple of years not using it. Just the other day I have been getting pop ups telling me my product has expired and I need to repay to get the full functions to work once more. Not only is this wrong but beyond most misleading and the software can be seen as a possible security risk to use. If they want their customers to pay yearly by all means do so, but honor your agreements made prior and make notice when purchasing the product or face the consequences for not doing so!

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11 minutes ago, Dannosaurus said:

I bought the pro version sometime ago under the understanding as well and by doing so I would not be billed again for it, anyone who say this was never offered is just wrong.

The key unlocks pro features not tied to the expiring license (multiuser, better smart clean etc).  The license that expired from the beginning of ccleaner pro, which I and most of the other moderators were here for, was priority support and automatic updates. That's all that expired that is why they gave you the key.

  As far as the subscription expired pop-ups, this is due to a server which is being retired this weekend

 

ADVICE FOR USING CCleaner'S REGISTRY INTEGRITY SECTION

DON'T JUST CLEAN EVERYTHING THAT'S CHECKED OFF.

Do your Registry Cleaning in small bits (at the very least Check-mark by Check-mark)

ALWAYS BACKUP THE ENTRY, YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU'LL BREAK IF YOU DON'T.

Support at https://support.ccleaner.com/s/?language=en_US

Pro users file a PRIORITY SUPPORT via email support@ccleaner.com

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Thank you all for this thread, I am not even done reading it all, but I did what one other poster mentioned, when I purchased my gaming PC in 2015, I bought malwarebytes and CCleaner, both mentioned it was for life and could be removed and placed on another PC. Well when I recently updated that old gaming pc to windows 10, my paid version of CCleaner was no more...so I am now in the same boat, arguing with them about this issue.

My personal feeling is, neither of these companies could see far enough ahead to know subscription services would become the best way to make more $ with their products, decided to screw over there long time loyal consumers and now have revisionist history...Was there ever a  resolution? I don't even mind having to update it myself...I just don't like not having the advanced features that I paid for. I say we make a concerted effort to flame these people on social media every chance we can...

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On 15/11/2019 at 13:49, Nergal said:

As far as the subscription expired pop-ups, this is due to a server which is being retired this weekend

Can anybody confirm that this has indeed been fixed? I will try to enter my product code again tonight when I get home from work

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46 minutes ago, moonman14 said:

Can anybody confirm that this has indeed been fixed? I will try to enter my product code again tonight when I get home from work

 

The last news we had from a staff member was on the 14th, which said the new server was being brought online over last weekend.
In the meantime the incorrect pop-ups had been stopped, and we have stopped seeing complaints about them. You should no longer see these incorrect messages.

I've asked the staff for an update on progress with the new server installation.

*** Out of Beer Error ->->-> Recovering Memory ***

Worried about 'Tracking Files'? Worried about why some files come back after cleaning? See this link:
https://community.ccleaner.com/topic/52668-tracking-files/?tab=comments#comment-300043

 

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As a non-buyer, this doesn't give a lot of confidence in Piriform. We all know about the story about ccleaner got hit by hackers and spread malware. Here the company totally goes against customers which obviously bought a license without expire date.  It's not good for your wallet nor the public face of the company what you are doing here. Make the lifetime licence for a single pc, lifetime and all new purchases are for 1 year. Like plex did it, I was lucky to get on board soon enough to still buy a lifetime, others have to pay what i paid every year. But at least they don't change their model and say "But we never said lifetime". This is just hiding behind not saying one thing, which doesn't disprove the fact that you didn't say yearly either.  Thanks for at least having the decency to leave this thread alive, now I know not to spend money on a company as you (I was willing to buy a yearly one till this thread popped up ;)) 

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I too bought CCleaner years ago as a lifetime license version, but I'm now being told I have to buy it again!

Before that I was using it from 2008 and made two donations. One in 2008 for £10 and one in 2010 for £20. In 2013 I bought CCleaner Pro, which was advertised as a lifetime license. 
So even though I helped with beta testing, made two donations and bought the product (twice, another license for my sister), I'm being slapped in the face. 

Annotation 2019-11-23 154416.png

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As I've posted several times in this thread: You can get all the old versions from Filehippo.com here: https://filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/history/

The original version you bought should last forever but also much newer ones too. I found I can use all versions up to 5.58.7209. Anything later than that becomes a susbscription version. I bought mine a couple of years after you so you might have to experiment and settle for an earlier one, I don't know. Whichever version you can register though, just make sure to turn off automatic updfates and also decline any you are offered. That should make sure you are not "upgraded" to a version that requires a subscription.

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  • 2 weeks later...

This is definitely not above board.

My license purchase in 2015 has a dash next to expiry.  My app shows Nov, 2015 as it's expiry date now yet the app started showing this expired license BS in the last couple of weeks.

This is wrong beyond words.  Fix it,  or wear a rep for screwing your customers

piriform license.jpg

Edited by KI11AK
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1 hour ago, KI11AK said:

the app started showing this expired license BS in the last couple of weeks.

Fix it,  or wear a rep for screwing your customers

You have obviouly not read the recent posts above.

There was a fault on the licencing server that was causing incorrect renewal notices to be sent out.

Firstly, in mid November Piriform put a block on the incorrect notices being sent out, - in fact they  blocked all 'expires today' notices being sent out whether they were correct or incorrect.

Last week the faulty server was replaced with a brand new server,  - The issue has already been fixed.

*** Out of Beer Error ->->-> Recovering Memory ***

Worried about 'Tracking Files'? Worried about why some files come back after cleaning? See this link:
https://community.ccleaner.com/topic/52668-tracking-files/?tab=comments#comment-300043

 

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