Beware : Tabbles is sold on a yearly subscription model, so if the description is correct, “one year licence” means it will stop working one year hence unless you start paying yearly. Since the whole point of Tabbles is the user must discipline himself to tag systematically his files and folders, in order to benefit from the program’s search power, you might feel cheated one year from now having contributed all that work, if you finally decide the program does not fit your needs, or you don’t like the subscription model.

Alternatively, Shareware on Sale still has a free promotion going on (as of today, March 2nd, 2018) for the Basic edition of Tabbles which is a lifetime license, although the normal selling price is on a yearly subscription model as well. Its main limitations are 20 000 files or folders tagged, which might be quite enough for many people, and 25 auto-tagging rules, which in practice provides this very useful feature as a demo only.

I have actually installed this Basic Tabbles offer. It’s the third time I’ve installed a free promotional offer of Tabbles. The last two were so unsatisfactory that I uninstalled them after a short while. This version seems to have been significantly enhanced, just from the way it installed and my first exploratory steps. However, I haven’t yet put the program through its paces, so you’d have to judge for yourself.

That being said, the subscription model remains a problem. Starting from this Basic SoS lifetime offer, it might be quite easy to hit the 20 000 items tagged some time from now, and then you’d be faced with the conundrum : either lose all the indexing work you’ve put into it, or upgrade to the Pro edition and submit to the subscription model.

Even if the latter is acceptable to you, there’s no guarantee that the publisher won’t double the price, say, two years later, or otherwise change the subscription conditions in a way that will make it unacceptable for you. The catch being that, unless I’ve missed something, you need Tabbles to use all your indexing work. There’s no possibility to transfer that to some compatible software.

It’s not only the time you’ll spend to tag your files, it’s also the effort you’ll put into changing your work habits to use that Tabbles interface, which is different, and separate, from Windows Explorer. Although I understand it’s now possible to use some of Tabbles features from the right-click menu under Windows Explorer.

That’s why (unless, again, I’ve missed something), I think the subscription model is not adapted to this type of program, which is quite a pity : for the concept is absolutely brilliant, and the implementation, although faulty in many respects at first, is making great strides ahead. Of course, Tabbles would really be a killer application if it were completely integrated into the Windows Explorer interface (or even into alternative file explorers suchs as Free Commander XE or Directory Opus), instead of forcing the user to switch between two different tools for what is, basically, the same task.