I was just going through the change log for Topaz DeNoise and found a rather substantial sounding change to the licensing. The up side is the free trial is no longer time limited, but the trade-off is it will watermark your photos. The downside is it looks like this will potentially apply to paid users that let their yearly licence expire.
DeNoise 3.0.2 - DeNoise AI - Topaz Discussion Forum
Quote: Changed how trial flow works
– Trials are now gone, you can now use the app without being logged in
– While not logged in, or if your license is expired, your image will save with a watermark
– Users who own the product should be able to use it offline without a watermark given they’ve logged in once and don’t log out
When asked for clarification in the comments, this was posted by a Topaz representative.
Quote: If you have an upgrade license active right now then you own this release (3.0.0), and all subsequent releases for this minor version (e.g., 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.8, etc). If your license expires while 3.0.1 is out, but then we release 3.0.2 you will still own it since you owned 3.0.1. However, if your license expired while you owned 3.0.2 and after that we released 3.1.0, you would not own 3.1.0 because it is a minor version bump ahead. In this case you still can own and use 3.0.X versions like normal with no watermark, only 3.1.X and above would have a watermark.
So whatever minor version you are on, that's yours for good. My concern is how future upgrades would be handled if you don't have an active licence. If your licence expires and you get a notice that a newer minor version or full version is available, hopefully it'll be blatantly obvious that you'll start getting watermarked unless you buy in again. I can see this being easily overlooked by someone too eager to update and suddenly get watermarked. I don't use their other programs, but I suspect the same applies (or soon will apply) to them.