Permanent license with one year of upgrades is - for serious users - a yearly subscription. With a price tag of $25 that sounds quite reasonable and also viable.
By contrast, I thought it's really well presented. It is a permanent license, only the patches are stopping after a year. I was even hoping by myself they have the good sense to offer optional auto-renewal.
The larger picture is, selling software somehow is always awkward. Given that, these folks have hit a near optimum, imo. And it's better to pay for a good tool than to find a good tool only to see the vendor go out of business. And that has happened plenty of times.
