In the past few days, there’s been some confusion around our lifetime licenses (those with no expiration date and only sold between 2008-2014) and our choice to start enforcing their original terms. First of all, we’re sorry. We should have done a better job letting you know this change was coming, and we understand why some of you are upset.
In an effort to be more transparent and clear up confusion, we wanted to take some time to explain what’s going on.
What changed? What happened?
The first thing you need to know is that there have been zero changes to the original terms of your lifetime license. We haven’t stopped honoring lifetime licenses and we aren’t discontinuing support.
Legitimate lifetime licenses from Malwarebytes or our authorized resellers were always sold for use on one Windows PC.
However, you could actually use it on three PCs before any sort of limit was enforced. The idea was to give users some leeway and make it easier to transfer your license over when you got a new computer. Unfortunately, unauthorized resellers found out about the loophole and starting taking advantage of it by advertising that lifetime licenses were valid for up to three computers.
Over time, these unauthorized resellers have become a growing issue. We’ve continued to deal with rampant piracy and abuse of lifetime keys. It got to a point where our leniency was simply untenable. When we started transitioning to a new account and subscription management system, we decided the time had come to start enforcing the original lifetime license terms.
The enforcement started in April and is not new with the recent Malwarebytes 3.8.3 release. When we tested the waters, few seemed to mind. Of those who did reach out, most just needed help deactivating their license on old devices. We didn’t think we needed to make any sort of official announcement. We were wrong.
We forgot to account for the fact that most people don’t update right away. As the update cycle continued, what was once a trickle of issues became a flash flood.
We want to make it clear that the decision to enforce device limits was strictly about cracking down on unauthorized resellers, some of which were using and reselling keys that didn’t belong to them. We did not start enforcing the device limit on lifetime licenses in order to profit or somehow punish our customers. We value each and every one of our customers, and we apologize if our lack of communication has caused you any frustration.
What happens now?
If you saw a “usage level” error message while upgrading, you need to deactivate Premium on an old device. To manage the devices that are attached to your license, log in to your
Malwarebytes account. From there, you can deactivate old devices and free up space. If you’re getting an error that says you have Premium activated on too many devices, follow the
instructions in this FAQ. If you need more help, reach out to our
support staff directly.
We appreciate your patience as we work through this, and we apologize for our lack of communication.
Thank you,
The Malwarebytes team