Ok for context:
You got st3 with a license, and maybe plugins.
St3 got regular updates to new minor versions.
They brought the st4 update like the other minor version updates.
Destroyed the whole st ide setup (plugins didn't work for st4)
And st3 licence can't be used for st4 (you get the st4 licence if you bought st3 some months before)
If I use st for private stuff that would be annoying, but as I use it for my work that was money.
Sorry that happened to you. We've since improved our updater to avoid this happening again, but your loss of trust is understandable. Hopefully downgrading back to ST3 was not too big of a hassle.
ST4 has full backwards compatibility for plugins, keeping the same python 3.3 ST3 shipped with, so I'm surprised your setup broke. ST3 licenses were also fully transitioned to ST4, so any license less than 3 years old covered the initial ST4 release.
Thank you for making such good software and being decent people. Sublime Text is my go-to example of a small team making quality software that puts people first. I'm very grateful.
(I'm working from memory, so I may bungle details)
Speaking personally, I enjoyed Sublime Text, so I was happy to pay for a license back in the day ($70 if I recall?). When v2 came out, I paid to upgrade, and again with v3. When v4 was released, I paid yet again, but after a period of normal use (a year if I recall), I got a popup informing me I'd need to pay again to keep using ST4. I felt like I'd been hoodwinked--they had sneakily switched the license from perpetual to subscription.
I assume that the switch to subscription licensing was disclosed somewhere in the small print that nobody reads. I feel that the concealment was deliberate (I suspect they'll disagree, but you know the old chestnut about the relative volume of actions and words). At that point I'd been using v4 for a year, and rolling back to v3 with my previously perpetual license would be a big hassle, and obviously I'd lose functionality.
I would have happily kept paying for upgrades, but now I doubt I'll ever spend money with those folks again.
We only have subscriptions for businesses (there's a whole separate purchase process), regular licenses cover 3 years worth of updates and are perpetual. That's a similar time period between license purchases to before ST4. We announced this change at the top of our ST4 release post and describe it when you purchase a license.
If your regular license only covered a year of updates that's certainly a bug and I suggest contacting sales@sublimetext.com so we can sort that out.
No we don't have automatic updates. The issue was that our updater did not warn customers that their license would not cover the newer version before updating, so those with more than 3 year old licenses were met with a "LICENSE UPGRADE REQUIRED" in the title bar. Sorry to those who were affected by this, the loss of trust is understandable.
We've since added that functionality to the updater. We also don't nag paying customers regardless of whether their license applies.