A piece of news hit the motion design and visual effects community like a bombshell last Thursday, June 5, 2025. Left Angle, the developer of the promising composition software Autograph, ceased its operations overnight. The company’s official website now redirects to a statement on the site of creative software giant Maxon, announcing the “transition” and welcoming the Left Angle team.
For users, however, the word “transition” sounded more like “desertion.” Without any prior notice, Autograph’s authentication servers were shut down, rendering the software instantly inoperable. Even those with perpetual licenses found themselves unable to access the program, and consequently, their ongoing projects.
The direct impact: A perspective from Cine Linux
We at Cine Linux not only reported this loss to the community but felt it firsthand. Our associate production company, Movy Audiovisual, had migrated its entire motion design workflow from Adobe After Effects to Autograph about a year ago. The decision was motivated by superior stability, faster performance, and significantly lower resource consumption compared to Adobe’s solutions. Autograph proved to be a robust and reliable tool.
On the fateful day of June 5th, we were surprised by the inability to open the software. Five client projects, all in progress, became hostages of a corporate decision about which we had no warning. Work was abruptly halted, and we now face the arduous and costly task of readjusting our entire pipeline, hastily migrating to DaVinci Resolve and Blender to try and reconstruct what was lost.
In search of answers, we sent an email to Maxon support, explaining the situation:
“Our team enthusiastically adopted Left Angle’s Autograph, making it our primary motion design tool over the past year. […] However, we were recently confronted with a critical issue: Autograph is no longer operational, which we understand is due to the server shutdown following the acquisition by Maxon. Unfortunately, this has resulted in the loss of all our active projects, a total of five, which has abruptly halted our work for our clients. […] We are reaching out to inquire about the future of Autograph. Will the project be continued in any form?”
UPDATE (06/09/2025): We have received a response from Maxon
After the publication of this article, we received a response from Maxon support regarding our inquiry about the discontinuation of Autograph and the loss of access to our projects. The response, signed by a support manager, unfortunately confirms our community’s worst fears: a complete disregard for Autograph users.
Instead of addressing any of our points, Maxon sent us the following marketing message:
The Maxon team hopes to meet you in person at some upcoming events, such as OFFF Barcelona and Motion North. If you aren’t local to an in-person event, catch up with us at a livestream hosted by a Maxon trainer.
Maxon Support
Cinema 4D | Redshift | Red Giant | Forger | ZBrush
The response is a bucket of cold water. It not only ignores our losses but also implicitly suggests that the solution is to migrate to their product ecosystem.
The “official statement” and the community’s fury
Maxon’s statement adopts an optimistic tone, celebrating the arrival of the Left Angle team to “build something new together” and “drive the future of creative tools.” Left Angle’s message, in turn, thanks the community for its support and states that “a new chapter begins,” but fails to address the most urgent problem: the complete abandonment of its user base.
The absence of a transition plan for customers has left the community outraged. On the subreddit dedicated to Left Angle, the feeling is one of shock and betrayal. Users report their frustrations:
“If you are going to drop all support can you at least bother to unlock our use of the app? I can’t even launch it anymore, I’ve sunk over 400 dollars on this over two years!!!”
Inside-Razzmatazz606
“This is the most unprofessional shit I’ve ever seen. Imagine being in the middle of a big client project and the software just dissolves into digital limbo with no warning.”
aashe_
The discussion quickly evolved into legal questions. One user pointed out a potential breach of contract:
“According to their EULA you can use the software offline for 45 days. After that you need to re-activate your license through the client, which is impossible because they turned off the servers. They probably broke contract as they were supposed to give at least a three month heads up — which they didn’t. So technically everyone with at least the perpetual license should/could sue them.”
fairfaxed101
A cautionary tale about modern licensing
The Autograph case is a stark reminder of the dangers of software licensing that relies on online verification. Even a “perpetual” license, for which users paid a substantial amount, proved useless the moment the company decided to shut down the servers.
This “software as a service” (SaaS) practice, even when disguised as a one-time purchase, creates a dangerous dependency and leaves all power in the hands of the developer. For the Linux community, which has historically valued control, ownership, and transparency, this event serves as a strong argument in favor of open-source software and open file formats.
While Maxon promises to “share more in the future,” the Autograph community has been left behind, with their investments lost and their projects paralyzed. It is a stain on the reputation of both companies and a bitter lesson for all creative professionals who depend on proprietary software tools.
Preservation and the uncertain future
For the purpose of historically preserving what was once promising software, we are making the download links for the official Autograph installers for Windows (Studio version) and Linux (basic .deb version) available below. We emphasize, however, that due to the shutdown of the authentication servers, the software is no longer functional.
Even so, if you have installers for any version of Autograph, I encourage you to send them to us by email ([email protected]) so we can include them in the list. This isn’t about piracy—it’s about archiving a discontinued tool that pushed the boundaries of modern compositing. Without community efforts like this, important creative tools can disappear completely.
Let’s ensure that Autograph remains accessible to future motion designers, VFX artists, and software historians.
Autograph (Free Version)
Autograph (Studio Version)
Thanks to the Left Angle team for building something truly different—and good luck to them in their new chapter with Maxon.
Cine Linux will continue to follow the case and will update the community if there is any response from Maxon or the former Left Angle team. For now, we can only lament the loss of a great tool and warn the community about the fragilities of the current commercial software ecosystem.