As someone with a reputation for catching onto things pretty late, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it took me a week to hear about the whole ordeal with Filmora 12 and lifetime licenses. For those of you even more out-of-touch than me, here’s a brief summary:

Until 2020, Filmora (a video editing software you probably know for their infinite amount of search engine optimization articles claiming that it’s the perfect software for everything and it’ll make your estranged relatives proud to be in your family again) offered a purchase plan called a lifetime license. This basically guaranteed free upgrades to every new version of Filmora, forever.

The lifetime license option was removed in 2020, however Filmora kept true to their promise and continued to provide free upgrades to people who had bought licenses back when they were available.

In December of 2022 Filmora 12 was released and lifetime license holders found that they were unable to continue using the license that they were told would last forever. Naturally, this made a lot of people furious.

First off, I was never a huge fan of Wondershare (the company behind Filmora) even before this. The SEO articles about how Filmora is the only way to play X file format! or how Dr. Phone by Wondershare can recover your files from that phone you dropped in the toilet! are just blatantly false; K-lite Codec Pack is a much better option to play rare video formats, especially because it makes any video playback software capable of playing them.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on the data recovery BS. Plugging a water-damaged phone in is just going to do even more damage, opening the door to data being lost forever when a phone repair shop could’ve recovered it for you.

But back to the main point: I think Wondershare is a company that markets their products almost entirely through lies and deception, with many people buying their software not knowing any better. Sure, this is far worse as they’ve now alienated their longtime users, but it’s not too different than anything they already do as far as I’m concerned.

And no, Filmora will not save your broken marriage, no matter how many of their articles claim it can.