Im afraid its goodbye from me
It’s one thing to pay for a plugin, at the sales price of $30-50 no doubt, it’s another thing to make sure it keeps working as new OSes and new DAW versions are released.
Sometimes there is no impact, so there’s no need to pay a thing. At other times the people at Waves have to spend countless hours fixing the code to make sure the plugin still works. It doesn’t happen for free, programmers need to get paid for their hard work. After all, you wouldn’t work for free.
How other developers handle this is they charge extra for their next shiny new plugin upgrade. Some of that money pays for the new features, the rest of it pays forth next year or two of maintaining the plugin. Waves doesn’t do this. They charge maintenance costs separately which is how they can manage to sell plugins for $30-50 often. You don’t even “need” to pay for it if your plugin is still working fine. Only when things break do you need to pay for it.
So it really isn’t as bad as many think and it’s certainly NOT "paying for the plugin again "