Hello, and welcome to IO Ninja forums! Good questions, that's why I asked you to post them here.
Why not let old users keep their license at the price they purchased it at instead of revoking it and offering them credits and ask them to purchase a new one at the new price? I get where you are coming from but won't this alienate them?
Well, we can't keep old licenses simply because we are moving away from this all-in-one lifetime license model in the new version. But I believe we are doing the best we can for the old users -- we essentially return the full amount spent on the old license and allow to reuse it the way a user deems appropriate -- either for an all-in-one subscription or for lifetime purchases of capabilities on a per-demand basis.
I feel like this way there is not much incentive to buy it right now.
Of course, you can wait for the new release, but by getting a license now you lose absolutely nothing. As a matter of fact, it's the opposite. You get this user-name/product key which you can forever use with the current generation of IO Ninja (v3.15.1 and below) -- of course, we going to stop issuing licenses for old versions of IO Ninja as soon as we release the new one.
Additionally, maybe, we can offer a free subscription for a few months to old users? Would that work?
Perhaps announce something like an year/until next year this month, where users can purchase licenses and get to keep them when the price increases, without having to re-buy them a gain.
To avoid confusion -- licenses do not expire! All purchased licenses will work forever with the version they were purchased for! The release archive remains open, so if some old users don't want to switch to the new model, they don't have to upgrade and can instead keep using what they were using before (a.k.a. perpetual fallback to an old version).
I am a bit confused. I am guessing it works but if you want the new features you need to re-purchase, but I feel like that's confusing and not ideal, as if there's a lifetime option, it needs to be lifetime, not lifetime with conditions
I mean like, you purchase once and that's all for a lifetime and you get updates and new major versions and features.
I fully understand that you as many others would prefer the all-in-one-for-lifetime model. But from the publisher's point of view, this model has quite a few problems, one of which is that we essentially sell a product once and then keep releasing new features and updates for free forever -- needless to say, the development of new features is not free.
One approach to solving this problem would be to make major updates paid. On the other hand, it's really difficult to ask users to pay for new versions -- attempting to make an upgrade paid results in many users simply disabling upgrades (or hating the product if that's not possible). I believe this is the main reason for more and more software publishers switching to the subscription model.
However, we DO want to keep the lifetime-purchase model in some form! And this form is cutting the "all-in-one" license into "capabilities" (i.e. some functional modules), and selling those on a per-demand basis. This way, we reach a compromise:
- People can still buy lifetime access to the functional blocks they need;
- When we release a new big feature we can do it in form of a new paid capability and thus fund its development;
- Users/companies who don't want to bother with choosing/buying capabilities one-by-one, can instead get an all-in-one subscription.
This way, we keep upgrades and many capabilities free; we also can run promotional campaigns by allowing time-limited free access to certain paid capabilities. At the same time, subscriptions will be cheap and cancellable at any time, so I expect that yet another (not initally intended, but completely legal nevertheless) way of using IO Ninja will be getting a monthly subscription and immediately unsubscribing so that users enable everything for a month (exactly when they need it).
As for companies/corporations -- they can purchase subscriptions or capabilities in bulk and then "share" them between empolyees (i.e. an employee can "borrow" a subscription/capability after joining a corporate account).
Hope this makes our reasoning and the whole system a bit more clear.