Sheesh. This does make for interesting reading. I’m a bit torn on this stuff since there are so few companies not indulging in it. I tried the UA freebie last year and the self-launching app put me off buying their bundle. Same for Roland Cloud. ILok is far from ideal but also tolerable, I’ve only had one issue that seemingly cleared itself. And I prefer Softube to UA in general for a boutique software developer, and they use iLok. I also have God Particle which does require you to connect once a month. Not great, but a quick open of the app sorts it. However, it’s not great to know that a lack of internet could kill a session if your broadband goes down. I find the “software centre” style apps a mild inconvenience, but not the end of the world, since they are generally used to install and serve updates only. With these I’d recommend looking through settings and asking it to not track activity/share data.
Couldn’t agree more.
I’m voting with my wallet, not spending a single € on either UAD, or Waves and the likes.
I don’t even install their ”free” stuff because I don’t want to have crappy software on my machine, that will come back to haunt me if I use it in my projects, enshittifying my creative process
On top of this, I really don’t want a demo of every single plug-in they sell. It makes finding the ones that I actually own a chore and as a result I rarely ever use them. I deleted all the demos once, but it took ages and then the next update put them all back again.
UADs marketing tactics suck 
, nice interfaces though…
This was the trap I fell in. To be fair, that ua la2a plug is not crappy, it sounds great. But not worth it for the hassle. I won’t ever have anything on my machine again which won’t work without an internet connection.
It probably does, but there are other devs that make great sounding compressors as well, that isn’t a PITA to manage. For example Softube 
Are we the product?