Essentially, Piriform did a horrible job making sure everyone knew that the Pro+Plus bundle was a per-year, subscription-based product. It was so obscured in text that you specifically had to go digging in the EULA and legal terms to find subscription-related verbiage. It truly was up to you to re-new when you wanted to, IF you wanted to. Further, Cleverbridge didn't make note of this, because again, NO ONE CARED and it wasn't enforced. The CCleaner software just called it a 'License', expired or not. Because of that and the way their program was written, none of us customers had any reason to suspect (or care) that we were using a subscription-based product (even if it was expired) since the product functioned just the same as it always had. If you chose not to re-subscribe, then Piriform didn't care, and they didn't enforce the expiration following that first year. It could best be described as a 'single year, voluntary subscription model'. Piriform never offered a perpetual lifetime license - the small, hard-to-find print in 2012 verifies this. In a nut shell, the purchase of Piriform by Avast! has caused this confusion and they are directly responsible for what has recently transpired and the lack of communication behind those changes.

I received a reply from Piriform's support that I think explains what's happened here.

Ccleaner piriform cleverbridge