Hi Michael,
Thanks for your questions.
We are fully passionate about this plugin, which has been worked on for over 4 years by a number of developers, but we are at a stage where we need to start focusing a lot more efforts and resources on the premium version and for this to happen, we need funding. So to answer your question, the real difference is to provide a courtesy alert to our existing CJT Free user-base about the upcoming changes and to recommend some options.
As for the one-time payment, you only have to pay once, so there is no automatic payments. I have updated the pricing table on the CSS & JavaScript Toolbox PLUS page to reflect this. We will provide a reminder when it gets close to the expiry and it is entirely optional to renew.
Kind Regards,
Damian Baker
