I won't disagree with you Jelson. Whatever you have said perfectly makes sense and i also support this view. I was actually amazed of the fact that after completion of 1 year you have to downgrade to the free version or renew the license. I personally never faced such a situation before this.

On a second thought i can understand the strategy behind this type of license scheme. Actually the secret lies in the fact that sandboxie comes in 3 flavors- Free, 1 year and lifetime. I must say very well thought out marketing scheme. Unless sandboxie was available in these 3 flavors it would have been tough to implement such a licensing scheme.

If we take a look at the other day to day software which we use, mostly either have license scheme of

1. FREE and PRO
2. One year and Lifetime.

In case 1 if you buy the PRO, that means you have spent the maximum money you can spent on a license so downgrading after 1 year would be injustice.
In case 2 if you buy one year then after one year you can buy lifetime for much less price or renew it or use the version which you are currently using. But in no circumstances they can downgrade your license, because they don't have a free version.

So downgrading to the free version, to force you buy/renew the license is only possible if you have a 3 layer license scheme.

Mind it i am not saying its a bad tactics but i just wanted to decode it