Hump Day: A Refresh Has Arrived!

[The Old Man]

Hello,

I haven't dared go look at my Client Centre yet! The few groats I've earned from the Marketplace are all I've had as income since 2017 since being made redundant due to UK austerity cuts. So it's a scary prospect.

Honestly... Nobody likes change. It's rarely good. Someone always gets the pointy end of the stick. It's usually me or the little guy, but rarely the enterprise corporations who can afford the change.

However I appreciate that prices haven't increased for a decade, and a reasonable increase would be understandable, we know this, it's overdue but it needs to be said these significant changes are sadly once again being poorly implemented and probably compounded by an almost total lack of notice, no dialogue, a lack of communication, causing major headaches and increasing uncertainty.

Yes, of course you don't have to consult or engage, but in my experience, just like change between employers, managers and employees, if you do, you'll often find it makes change a lot more smooth and easier to swallow. Both company and customer may come to appreciate things they were unaware of, and/or offer suggestions or alternatives.

A few points of feedback for what they may be worth...

Re the price changes...

• I think there has been an obvious failure to give fair and reasonable notice of the financial changes, in particular to those needing to renew in the real short term (meaning days, weeks) but especially to everyone who needs to renew in the next few months. Hopefully Lindy and Charles will realise this oversight, take ownership of the situation from a customer service perspective and immediately ensure no financial impacting changes until the next 6 month renewal period for all non-enterprise clients has expired. After all IPS says it's all about supporting communities. So do the right thing. 
• This is a decision that will strike at the heart of IPS communities that were already struggling even before COVID impacted, and those under significant financial pressure. For many, having to find more than double the funds up front for a year in advance, is not an easy sell, but for many is not easy to accommodate either especially with short notice.
• The lack of a small discount for multiple license holders is disappointing.
• Don't compound things, please space them out and easier to swallow!

 

Re the Support changes:

• Removing Support Ticket facility is a seriously poor and frankly ridiculous decision. Increasing the license costs at the same time is pretty terrible and almost ridiculous.
• IPS Support should make better use of the Support Forums, absolutely, but in addition to Support Tickets, not instead of them.
• Many I suspect are fed up already with being to create a ticket for most Support Topics they create reporting problems. You tell us it's because you need site access to investigate or fix things, so how will this help?
• I don't want to name my website communities that be having problems in a public forum, my clients wouldn't appreciate it but also I like many are reluctant to post links and references to specific communities mainly because those topics appear on search results, it's unprofessional and gives a poor impression aside from anything else. Others may not appreciate doing so because of privacy or sensitivity considerations.
• If you don't use your own ticket system, I can see a time coming when you drop it entirely from Commerce. Maybe even move it to a separate app or module for Commerce. "Our enterprise clients use dedicated solutions like Zendesk, so we're dropping it" sort of thing.

[Ryan Ashbrook]

39 minutes ago, marklcfc said:

I’ve been asking about that for about five years 😆 @Ryan Ashbrook has a fix but I have to keep reuploading it as it’s never in the official releases for some reason 

I’m going to double check this for you. I distinctly remember this but it’s possible it somehow got lost in the mix.

[AlexWebsites]

8 hours ago, Davyc said:

WOW! Definitely NOT impressed with the new pricing structure

Me neither. Everything less blogs per year...

 

Just forums

On another note, for developers I would offer free licenses, we need these folks and can't always rely on what makes it onto the IPS roadmap.

42 minutes ago, The Old Man said:

The lack of a small discount for multiple license holders is disappointing.

Yeah, I agree. 1-5 discount, 5-10 discount, 10+, etc., would be nice. 

45 minutes ago, The Old Man said:

If you don't use your own ticket system, I can see a time coming when you drop it entirely from Commerce.

They haven't used it in a while, they use a 3rd party

[WP V0RT3X]

2 minutes ago, AlexWebsites said:

On another note, for developers I would offer free licenses, we need these folks and can't always rely on what makes it onto the IPS roadmap.

Sounds good, but if customers leave and addon sales drop, free licenses won't keep devs here.

[AlexWebsites]

1 minute ago, Darth Vortex said:

Sounds good, but if customers leave and addon sales drop, free licenses won't keep devs here.

I agree and when looking at different platforms for whatever, I always look at third party apps and integrations for expansion. A healthy 3rd party marketplace tells a story of a healthy platform in my opinion. 

[Noble~]

I just renewed two out of my 5 licenses yesterday, can i get a refund on both and just shut them down? And it would be nice if we could sell them as all five of mine would be listed.

[sudo]

I am not sure where to start with all this. I cant believe you guys did all this along with a site redesign at the same time and no notice period, I am speechless!

I cant believe I will be losing email support while you increase the price at the same time. I paid for priority support and now that's an insane price per year for what is email support. It takes serious cahoonas to both increase the price and cripple email support at the same time. Email support pricing should be far far more reasonable, I honestly thought $1250 was a mistake when I saw the screenshot above, I could understand having an email support pricing tier and then a $1250 priority support tier but also renewals shouldnt be going up while we lose proper email support.

Then if we dont pay for support we cant use the market place and cant even save our prior purchases so if we need to reinstall an addon we are out of luck.

We are lucky, we can afford the support increase price wise but one of the HUGE reasons I liked IPB was the email support, it can be very curt at times but I valued it and if you had only increased the price and not removed email support I would have dealt with it as it has been a decade.
I am strongly considering renewing our Xenforo license to have a play and test viability after this.

Initial feedback:

Build the knowledge base publicly first before removing support
I understand the desire to have self support with a knowledge base, its a good thing for everyone if it gets populated but you should have been doing this months ago building the knowledge base publicly before doing any changes, that way you can point to the option and say its there and useful. Get a common ticket theme in, create a KB article then have the subject field for support request do a search as you type pointing you to articles that sounds similar before submitting the email request.

We need a reported/acknowledged bugs area
This needs to be along with the knowledge base really, a bug tracker would have cut your support requests because people would be able to see if it has been reported before, I know the support forum kinda does that but its not a bug tracker and its not clear if its an active bug with a fix pending or release or even workaround.
When I hit an issue on other software I always check to see if it has been reported first on bug trackers but because of the strange mantra of open a ticket you guys have we are blind to upcoming fixes usually until release, Jordon has at least been mentioning them but its still not a proper solution.

Both things above should have been done before these policy changes with support
That way your customers would have become familiar with them and you could have iterated through any issues with them before removing email support and you could actually see if this type of support works well before causing big issues for your customers, it seems so rushed.
You guys made the whole "tickets are similar" problem yourselves with the submit a ticket mantra that is here, you should have been correcting that before making sweeping changes to support. You have entered self support mantra with none of the real tools used by others to help aid people do this. You may have plans for these tools but you literally have not shown them to us which is crazy if they exist. Right now we have a sole forum for support, I have no idea why you have rushed this through.

I have more to say but I thought I would shoot out first.

Please get the knowledge base live and a bug tracker live asap to at least help and to be honest delay the email support changes past the renewal/January deadline until this mess is sorted and people are comfortable, this should be a much much slower transition.

 

Also contributors/devs need a discount/special license to prevent the massive bleed that will happen.
Its crazy you dont have a way of reducing their burden and its a major issue to the viability of the market place and IPB. Their are fewer addons here than other competitors and it will only get worse with dev's having to pay large amounts to renew AND customers of devs having to pay to even buy their addons or even install them. This is crazy crazy crazy and so hostile to developers. Its one of the main reasons no one wants a certain v5 of software out there, regularly people complain about the lack of addons.
You could get them to apply with the proviso the license isnt used to sell addons not on the marketplace and not run a full site on. Aka they can have a public site showcasing with the options etc and even getting support there but it cant be a way for a serious site that has nothing to do with the developer to get a cheap license. Hell they could apply after they have published an addon and the large discount applies to the renewals side of it.

I am really disappointed some of the best developers here are now looking at possibly removing addons to reduce their burden rather than developing for those addons and being able to test on those addons, its so opposite and harmful because of the increased costs.

 

And there was me thinking things had improved a lot when @Jordan Miller with communications and community activity, I actually could see things improving a lot with better engagement with end customers then this whole chaos happens.

Edited September 15, 2021 by sudo

[Ocean West]

If we have lost ability to have private communications and have to thus submit details screens shots and urls or even logs in a pubic forum then you must have an Eyes Only custom editor section in addition to public editor so that only IPS Staff can see the content we post. Which also allows authors to see Eyes Only threads.

 

[riko]

"Don’t worry, it’s not bad news".

Going from $190.- a year to $280 a year is not bad news?

Cutting email support while hiking up the price like this is not bad news?

Cutting email support while having a terribly lacking documentation (since day 1) is not bad news?

Keeping innovations away from those who self host then when that dust settles, hiking up the price is not bad  news?

 

I dread the day you do come with what you consider "bad news".
Going to have think this over. Might going to cut this chord.

 

Looking at your pricing structure I get the feeling you are in the process of driving those who self host away. I can be wrong but it would make sense to just have medium to large businesses as your clients. 

 

 

[shahed]

I'm really glad with all new features, but this new renewal pricing give me a serious pause here. sure there were discussions and decisions about this, but I really hoped Invision at least take developers to account on this. in a few month I have to renew my license with almost empty marketplace credit. no heads up no nothing, just pay renewal by year with this kind of price ups. I may decide not to renew for awhile, or remove some apps from my license and discontinue many of my resources in marketplace. my plan was to expand, create more resources, themes ... and not this. can IPS come up with better solutions for this?

[Rizenmusic]

These news are nonsense. From what they are to the way they are being communicated.

"It's not bad news" - yeah, that's right. It's not bad news, it's terrible news. You can't call a 50% price increase "modest" while removing e-mail support and pricing it 1250$ annually. 

By doing that you effectively cut hobby sites like mine. Paying 215$ for software that isn't making money in a country where median salary is 400$ is not a good idea at all.

But what's even worse is that you lack honesty in this. Instead of communicating this like "guys, there's a huge change in our business model, we now want medium and large businesses as our clients" you say something about "modest" price increasing and "strong community" that will help with bugs how? Why would I want to pay 215$ annually for not being able to deal with bugs at all? And I've found many before, which I was able to resolve thanks to your now gone support.

I won't be supporting this.

[Daddy]

So, we're just going to increase the cost of licenses without notice so no one has the chance to renew before the price hike? That is very scummy, and seems pretty intentional. We're losing features, getting slapped in the face with useful features that's cloud only, and now we're paying MORE for the same thing... What is going on?

Edited September 15, 2021 by Deathicated

[Rizenmusic]

2 minutes ago, Deathicated said:

We're losing features, getting slapped in the face with useful features that's cloud only

What are you talking about?

[Daddy]

24 minutes ago, Rizenmusic said:

What are you talking about?

Well, I could name a few, but most recently, we lost the chat/shoutbox feature, and they launched Zapier integration, but only if you do cloud hosting through them. You can't use it if you're self hosted.

Not only did they increase their prices, but they also removed support. You have to pay over $1,000 a year for support now.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Deathicated

[tsdevelopment]

They should have given us one last chance to renew the license at the old price. Without notification of a price increase, many developers will think about stopping development. I will also think about whether it makes sense to continue working on (free) extensions.

[sudo]

1 hour ago, sudo said:

Also contributors/devs need a discount/special license to prevent the massive bleed that will happen.
Its crazy you dont have a way of reducing their burden and its a major issue to the viability of the market place and IPB. Their are fewer addons here than other competitors and it will only get worse with dev's having to pay large amounts to renew AND customers of devs having to pay to even buy their addons or even install them. This is crazy crazy crazy and so hostile to developers. Its one of the main reasons no one wants a certain v5 of software out there, regularly people complain about the lack of addons.
You could get them to apply with the proviso the license isnt used to sell addons not on the marketplace and not run a full site on. Aka they can have a public site showcasing with the options etc and even getting support there but it cant be a way for a serious site that has nothing to do with the developer to get a cheap license. Hell they could apply after they have published an addon and the large discount applies to the renewals side of it.

I am really disappointed some of the best developers here are now looking at possibly removing addons to reduce their burden rather than developing for those addons and being able to test on those addons, its so opposite and harmful because of the increased costs.

Just spit balling ideas for helping with devs but another option would be to tier commissions for addons potentially.

I dont know what IPB charges right now as a % but say a dev gets a X% discount on renewal when the commission is higher for sales which would get the interest of smaller devs and help with free dev's. Then when they grow and sell more they can do the math and pay the full renewal cost to reduce the % because they have peaked over that. I know free addons have a staff cost but they really really help the ecosystem of IPB.
This is a premium product but without dev's it becomes a niche product just like many many other tech examples out there.

Also email support really really should be kept for the foreseeable, hell you could even do a discount for renew for no option to email support like inverse priority support although I know that may be a lesser option but it would help out smaller sites.

I am not sure how much this was all dogfooded with 3rd party devs or smaller customers before these decisions were made but I am surprised this fallout was not better prepared for or handled.

[Daddy]

I can only imagine these price changes will be reverted soon. Otherwise, whoever is in charge of this should consider retiring soon before it's too late.

Went from $80 every 6 months, to $250 every year. $110 increase AND I no longer get basic support? I don't see the logic in that. Seems the very few who will stick around will just not renew that often anymore. So in the end you aren't really gaining anything, just losing the respect of your entire customer base.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Deathicated

[abobader]

Strange, after more than 21 years now using IPB forums, now I have to consider switching to another forum platform.

[Noble~]

I understand every business needs to make money and pay their employees however the way this was rolled out to the community today was just insanity, some notice should have been given for the increase to give people a chance to renew or do what they needed to do, even the support system i somewhat get but again no details.

For months the marketplace change has really bothered me and i'm sure others here but no change was made it's still the same.

One last thing that i find off is the sale or trade of a licence, I know IPS was burned in the past with charge backs however if the customer pays the fees and terms are final whats the issue? papal would read the terms of the charge back and deny payment, maybe consider customers that have been with you for some time.

As for the few remaining Dev,s you have here try and support them and give them a license with every app you have,they are making you dollars and bringing customer in here to spend even more cash.

Takes money to make money.

[kims79]

Hello,

I just got up, read this email and I am absolutely furious.
I am told that I will get a "small" increase of 90$ every 6 months, that is 180$ per year, which is more than a 30% increase, but it is a small increase! 

Also, no more support by ticket, but by the forum, a good way to tell your customers to take care of themselves, but on the other hand, they can pay to open a ticket.

But frankly, are you kidding us? Is this a joke? And you justify this with "We feel that Invision Community offers exceptional value for money with its rich functionality and power at your fingertips." ? No, we use Ipboard out of habit, nowadays there are other solutions.
Moreover, I'm still waiting for a proper integration of Webp with conversation, an update of elasticsearch, a real mobile application, a real mobile optimization (IPB is completely lacking in this area), an evolution of the api, and that for years! 

Oh and I forgot, the ponpon, features that are not present on our self-hosted versions but on your versions that we don't want!

We are users and contributors of mediawiki and they have a real update tracker, yet it is an open-source solution (like Discourse, Phpbb, SMF, etc...) and we almost get a faster response from them than by opening a "ticket".

Frankly, what advantage do you think you have today? I tell you, none, we pay a licence (and other users too I think) for the convenience, but we will clearly review our strategy, especially as we are informed at the last moment.

 

 

[Duken]

I have the same feeling  . Don’t worry, it’s not bad news, but there is a price increase. 😞

It is just like the IPB Android / iPhone application... Do i need to say more? https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/462640-invision-community-mobile-apps-iosandroid-update/

This time i like to choose as a customer. Ill renew if the new features or security patch is needed on my community. Is that a possibility? Can i download my applications and plugins i bought from the marketplace when i stop renewing the IPB licence?

Don't forget, happy hump day....

Edited September 15, 2021 by Duken

[kims79]

6 minutes ago, Duken said:

J'ai le même sentiment  . Ne vous inquiétez pas, ce n'est pas une mauvaise nouvelle, mais il y a une augmentation des prix. ??

C'est comme l'application IPB Android / iPhone... Dois-je en dire plus ? https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/462640-invision-community-mobile-apps-iosandroid-update/

Cette fois, j'aime choisir en tant que client. Je renouvellerai si les nouvelles fonctionnalités ou le correctif de sécurité sont nécessaires sur ma communauté. Est-ce une possibilité ? Puis-je télécharger mes applications et plugins achetés sur la place de marché lorsque j'arrête de renouveler la licence IPB ?

N'oubliez pas, bonne journée de bosse....

"Don't worry, you won't be hurt, just bend over and cough!"

[InvisionHQ]

Generally speaking, after so many years I feel I can say that invision is a company that thinks well about the choices it makes. But this time, as others have already written, I am very concerned about the collapse of the Marketplace. It is quite clear to me that the new pricing policy and the type of support offered for a fee is aimed exclusively at the business sector. This means that hundreds of hobby forums will be looking for alternative software solutions and this also means less appeal for me and many other developers to develop app and plugins.

Although I don't know the reasons for a series of "blows" thrown at the customer at the same time, I find some of the choices made by Invision risky.

Even if I accept the price increase, which is something I can live with, I think it was a mistake to remove the possibility to pay every 6 months. This has disoriented customers even more, even giving a perception of a heavier increase than it really is.

Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that one of invision's greatest assets has always been its ticket support. 

In short, I'm a bit worried, I'm sure I'll be one of the last to abandon ship... I've been here for 20 years... but I confess that I've been looking for alternatives for the first time in many years.

The problem is not the price, I am more concerned about the choice to let the hobby communities go.

Unfortunately I don't think the the fresh new green buttons can turn this into good news.

Let's see, I understand that even the pandemic period is not the best but let's try to give confidence to Invision as Jordan asks. Instead I would ask invision to review at least the possibility of returning to payment every six months, not for me, but I think it would help many.

[WP V0RT3X]

27 minutes ago, InvisionHQ said:

every six months, not for me, but I think it would help many.

Exactly that's the point that breaks most users neck.

[Dexter_X]

I think for little communities like ours that price rise of nearly 50% (47% in our case) may be a kill factor.

I just have something to say : if you go ask your boss for a 47% rise, how do you think he/she'll react ?

Edited September 15, 2021 by Dexter_X