You already know this, but Smile changed their minds about the whole TextExpander as a service thing. I can only assume it was in response to my brilliant thoughts on the subject. You're welcome.
So anyway. It's all fixed now. Sort of.
TextExpander 5 for Mac and TextExpander 3 + Custom Keyboard, the most recent standalone releases of TextExpander, will continue to be supported, and available for sale.
Sounds great. Except it's probably not super reasonable to expect Smile to maintain two different versions of their apps forever. One of them will provide more income than the other, and one will get priority. Welcome to business.
In addition, Smile fixed their subscription pricing for current customers. Sort of.
You, and other current TextExpander customers, receive a 50% lifetime discount on the new TextExpander. This brings the yearly cost of the Life Hacker plan to $20, which is comparable to previous upgrade costs ($19.95).
Ok great. Now it's $20 per year. That doesn't sound unreasonable. But it still stops working the minute you stop paying. It's still a forever bill.
One last thing, and this is something I didn't even pay attention to earlier:
For TextExpander.com, snippet data is stored plain at rest with our database provider, Compose.io, an IBM company.
That's right - say you decide to add the forever bill and sign up with the fancy new TextExpander.com sync service. Your snippets live on TextExpander's servers in plain text. Let's hope you don't have any snippets with personal information, like addresses or phone numbers.
I don't want another forever bill. I don't want to trust Smile to keep my snippets in plain text on their servers. I don't want any of this, even if the price sounds perfectly reasonable on it's face. I'll keep using Old TextExpander until a future unnamed OS update breaks it, and then I'll decide if New TextExpander is worth the trade-offs.