The easy way to explain it is to have obviously versioned releases. These could infrequent Like yearly, through to fairly frequent like monthly. (Out of cycle h

The easy way to explain it is to have obviously versioned releases. These could infrequent Like yearly, through to fairly frequent like monthly. (Out of cycle hotfix releases should probably just be treated as free for anybody with a license to the relevant base release.) Then you are selling Lifetime licenses to a specific version (like 2023.04), which incudes free cost licenses to any versions released in the next X months. Advertised as "Lifetime license to 2023.04, and free updates for X months" (or X years, etc as applicable). You can also choose to sell paid upgrade licenses which are identical to the main offering, except less expensive, and require the purchaser to own a license to some older version. The discount could potentially even scale depending on how old the old version is, but that usually makes more sense when no new releases were provided for free.