Good evening Herman and welcome to the Events Calendar forum!
Thank you for your interest in our products.
We’ll be glad to answer your questions.
The short answer is that this is up to you. Renewing after 1 year will provide you another year of updates and premium support.
With that in mind, after one year, when your license expires, the plugins will still work if you do not choose to renew. But, you will need to “freeze” your the Events Calendar related plugins to their current version (all of them) to make sure nothing “breaks”. That might also be true of the WordPress version you are using.
Let me know if that helps.
Have a great day!
Geoff B.