I've done something similar, it's worth noting Scaleway in the same space, for people looking for an AWS replacement more like managed services (equivalents to fargate/lambda/sqs/s3/etc) instead of just bare instance hosting.

The contrast between the steadily shrinking freedoms in Apple-land and the open computing approach underlying all today's the Valve announcements is fascinating.

That's an impossible model though - you're asking somebody to do unlimited work for you forever, for a fixed one-off price.

In that world nobody should ever ever sell a lifetime license, it's a huge responsibility with strictly limited upside. Imo "Use the current-ish version forever" is the only reasonable expectation, and that's a fair trade.

It's expectations like this that drive subscription models. People do (quite reasonably) want ongoing support and updates, but that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.

This typically means they agree you don't get double charged (so you can claim taxes paid in one back in the other) but they both still want you to complete the paperwork regardless. Saves money, not time.