The way I read it was the subscription kept the software useable or the actual software is online only, like Adobe acrobat, and you had to pay the subscription to use it.
You never got lifetime updates with the collectorz software when I bought it. You got 1 free year of updates. After that year you could continue to use the software version you bought, as long as you wanted to, or wait until a future version with additional features you wanted came out and buy that upgrade at a discount off new.