@bemtele
You do not need to renew every year. You renew when you need or want update. You can renew after 5 years as well.
I suppose if you buy products for $400+, you prefer to have updates and active development for these products for at least 5+ years so you do not mind even pay for that update.
Alternative way is to pay $400+ and after 1 year realize author is gone, market is gone,... because of wrong business plan.
This helps also companies to predict their expense (no worries that in 1 year author will leave and you will pay another 400$ for same products from different person. History shown this may and will happen, if you do not have correct plan
).
On the other side, for authors it is not worth to even consider doing updates. What would be purpose of investing extra time? Existing customers will download it for free, new customers will get it automatically. Most of updates never bring higher sales, it does not work like that.
Take a look on list of updates we've delivered in last years:
https://osclasspoint.com/product-updates