Software You Can Still Buy Once Instead of Renting: A 2026 List, With the Small Print

Most of the software price rises I wrote about this year were subscription price rises, and they landed the same way: an email, a new monthly figure, and no real choice because the work is inside the tool. A licence you paid for once does not do that. It cannot. Whatever the vendor decides next January, the copy on your machine keeps running at the price you already paid.

That has made the one-off purchase worth more than it was, and it is also why the list of software sold that way keeps shrinking. So I went through the categories most people pay for — office, design, writing, developer tools, audio, video — and wrote down what you can still buy outright, what it costs, and the sentence in each vendor's terms that tells you what "buy" actually means. Prices are as shown on the vendor's or a UK retailer's page on the date in my sources; treat them as a snapshot.

Four kinds of "buy once"

The phrase covers four different deals, and vendors do not always say which one they are offering.

• Pay once, every update forever. The rarest and the best. DaVinci Resolve Studio is the well-known example.
• Pay once, updates for a window, keep the last version after. The most common honest model. Sublime Text, DEVONthink, Reaper and Alfred all work this way with different window lengths.
• Pay once for this major version. Office 2024, Things 3, Pixelmator Pro. The next big release is a new purchase.
• Free, forever, with an account. Not a purchase at all, but it belongs here because it has replaced one. Affinity.

The right sum for each is the same: price divided by the years you expect to run that version, compared with the subscription for the same period. What changes is the honest number of years.

The list

Application	Category	Price	What you get for it	Platforms
Office Home 2024	Office suite	UK street price roughly £90–£125	Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote for one PC or Mac; security updates to October 2029	Windows, Mac
Office Home & Business 2024	Office suite	From about £170 at UK retailers	The above plus Outlook and commercial use rights	Windows, Mac
Affinity	Design	Free	Vector, photo and layout in one app; free Canva account required	Windows, Mac; iPad planned
Pixelmator Pro	Image editing	$49.99	Perpetual for the current major version; also in Apple's Creator Studio subscription	Mac; iPad coming
DaVinci Resolve Studio	Video editing	$295	Perpetual, all future versions included; free edition also available	Windows, Mac, Linux
Sublime Text	Code editor	$99	Three years of updates; licence never expires	Windows, Mac, Linux
Reaper	Audio workstation	$60 personal / $225 commercial	Covers the current version and the next major version	Windows, Mac, Linux
DEVONthink 4	Documents and research	See vendor page	One year of updates included, extendable at a discount; licence never expires	Mac
Things 3	Task manager	$49.99 Mac, $19.99 iPad, $9.99 iPhone	Perpetual per platform for the current version	Apple only
Alfred Powerpack	Launcher	From £34; Mega Supporter tier covers all future versions	Per major version, or once for good	Mac

Office: the one-off Microsoft still sells

Microsoft would prefer you did not know that Office Home 2024 exists, and its store page duly buries it beneath Microsoft 365. It is a real product: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, licensed for one PC or Mac, for a single payment. The Home & Business edition adds Outlook and the right to use it for work. UK retailers routinely sell both below Microsoft's own price; I have seen the Home edition listed between about £90 and £125, and Home & Business from around £170.

What you do not get is anything that arrived after the 2024 feature set: no Copilot, no cloud storage beyond the free 5 GB, and no new features until you buy the next release. Security fixes continue until October 2029 under Microsoft's fixed lifecycle policy. For a single computer used by a single person who wants the desktop applications and nothing else, that is a straightforward saving over Microsoft 365. For a household with three laptops it is not, and I worked through both cases in my piece on office suites after this year's price rises.

Design: the answer changed in October

For years the reply to "what do I buy instead of renting Adobe" was Affinity: Designer, Photo and Publisher, each a one-off purchase, together a fraction of a year of Creative Cloud. That is no longer available. On 29 October 2025 Canva, which bought Serif in 2024, relaunched the three applications as a single program called Affinity and made it free for everyone, with no time limit. The only requirement is a free Canva account to download and activate it. Existing owners of the V2 applications keep their licences and can still download them; nobody new can buy them.

For most people this is simply better than the old deal. The catch, if there is one, is that "free with an account" is a different relationship from "paid for and done": it is worth reading what Canva's terms say about the account, and noticing that the paid features Canva does sell sit alongside the free app. If you are choosing design tools more broadly, my look at Figma alternatives covers where Affinity fits.

Pixelmator Pro is the other one to know. Apple bought the company and, as of January 2026, the Mac application remains a $49.99 one-off on the App Store — while also appearing inside Apple's new Creator Studio subscription. Both routes exist; the one-off is still the better value if it is the only Apple creative app you want.

Video and audio: the categories where buying once never went away

Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve is the exception to almost every trend in this article. The free edition is a complete professional editor. The Studio edition is $295, once, and every subsequent major version has been included at no charge — a policy the company has kept through more than a decade of releases. If you edit video and are paying monthly for the privilege, this is the first thing to look at.

In audio, Reaper's licence is $60 for personal use or for a business earning under $20,000 a year, and $225 otherwise. Either licence covers the current version and continues through the next major version, after which you may buy again or keep running what you have. There is a fully functional evaluation period and the company has been selling it this way for twenty years.

Writing, research and developer tools

Sublime Text costs $99 and includes three years of updates; when the three years end the licence keeps working on the last build you received, and a renewal is optional. DEVONthink 4, the Mac document and research manager, moved to a similar shape this year: the licence never expires, a year of updates is included, and extending updates is a discounted optional purchase rather than a subscription. Both are examples of a vendor being precise about what "perpetual" covers, which I would take over a vaguer promise every time.

Things 3 is the last of the well-known task managers with no subscription at all: $49.99 on the Mac, $19.99 on iPad, $9.99 on iPhone, paid once per platform for the current version. It has been at version 3 since 2017. If you live in Apple's ecosystem and want a task manager that will not bill you, it is the one I point to; my task manager comparison explains what you give up against the subscription tools. Alfred, the Mac launcher, prices its Powerpack in pounds because the developer is British: a single licence from £34 covers one major version, and the Mega Supporter tier covers every future version for one higher payment.

What I would do

• One PC, one person, Word and Excel: Office Home 2024 from a UK retailer. Divide the price by five years and compare it with Microsoft 365 Personal; it is not close.
• Occasional design work: Affinity, free. Read the account terms once.
• Video: Resolve. Start with the free edition and pay $295 only when it tells you why.
• Anything else on this list: find the sentence about updates before you pay, and set a calendar reminder for when the window closes so the renewal is a decision rather than a surprise.

Finally, the sum cuts both ways. I went through my own subscriptions this year and kept several, because a tool that improves every month and syncs across four devices can be worth renting. The point of a one-off licence is not that it is always cheaper. It is that the price you agreed to is the price you pay, and after the year the software industry has just had, that is a feature.