Hello Paul,
The reason why we have turned to the paid update subscription is the additional costs we invest in the improvement of our products to make them stand out and be up to date.
Our developers works on the new useful features and release them in a pack once in a month approximately. You can find a brief overview of the latest updates and features added to MotoCMS 3 and MotoCMS 3 Ecommerce templates on the Release Notes page.
Full MotoCMS update subscription costs $39/ year for one account regardless of the number of licenses. It means that if you are using more than one template - you will pay only once to get a yearly update subscription for all of them.
Thank you for understanding
Best regards,
Sam Clayton