Hump Day: A Refresh Has Arrived!

[Hisashi]

[TDBF]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

I do care, but what can I say? I can't change people's minds. I hope they reconsider, but I can't make them.

You can make me reconsider, in fact, it would be quite easy for you to do so, just reduce the price increase to a 'reasonable' amount and still let me pay 6 monthly.

If you had increased your prices by 5-10%, then I would have grumbled a little, moved on, and would still be a loyal IPS customer. But this is a 48% price rise and you're removing Email support to boot. Sorry, that is a game changer for me, especially with all the other price rises I have from my hosting company and WHM/Cpanel recently.

So with that $220 saved, I can put that towards Xenforo, add another $50 and get access to Downloads and Gallery at the same time, and still pay less for my yearly subscription going forward.  Sure my users will probably miss some features, but they will get used to them eventually.

[Davyc]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

I do care, but what can I say? I can't change people's minds. I hope they reconsider, but I can't make them.

If you really do care @Matt (which I believe you do, but maybe your hands are tied) and the rest of the team @Lindy and @Charles then you should rethink your strategy and listen to your clients who are feeling like they have had their faces pushed into the mud.  What can you say?  Well, perhaps 'we were wrong to do this so we have decided to roll out these price increases incrementally' which will give people some breathing space and allow them to recover from the shock.  I'm sure that the right move now would be to roll back this mad decision and get onboard with your clients to retain their business and ensure that your business continues to flourish, impress and be known for great customer service, which it has been for the most part.  Caring means thoughtfulness, consideration and being supportive towards the people who contribute to your cash pot.  Listen to the cry of anguish that is felt throughout the whole of this topic and do something positive to reassure and re engage with your clients instead of looking for an ointment for every sore that doesn't exist and responding with meaningless soundbites that just do not justify what has occurred.

I really do not want to leave, but I am being forced out (whether you believe that or not) because of this price hike.  Had I known that this was coming I would not have bought a second license.  Heaven knows what some of my ex-clients will be thinking after my recommending your software and they have gone on to buy licenses.

This has been the mother of all cock-ups and it needn't have been that way if there was more warning, more transparency and a softer approach to upping prices with consideration given to whether it was something that your clients could digest more easily without all the horror that this topic has produced.

[RevengeFNF]

46 minutes ago, alistairgd66 said:

For those that wish to retain ticket support longer term, we will be unveiling a premium support option soon.

I didn't even noticed this one in the email.

So, for us to have the normal ticket system back, we just need to pay even more. Ok...

Edited September 15, 2021 by RevengeFNF

[Lewis P]

Long time no post! 👋

Just checking in, going a bit against the grain - absolutely no issues with the price increases or changes to the support structure.

Communication could have been a bit better handled (a bigger warning before things coming into effect), but none of us are perfect.

[Clover13]

My take so far reading through all of this...

1. Don't lose your marketplace developers.  They're a key to your success and help build your suite of products.  It's a win for customers in getting more robust features, it's a win for developers in earning revenue, it's a win for your company/product suite in both revenue and features that can be adopted.  It's a tough balance to be had, but I can certainly see a credit system whereas developers are credited back license costs once they contribute X (whatever X is deemed to be).  This incentivizes them, and should be coupled to a quality metric to ensure they aren't just throwing something out on marketplace to get the credit but that their offering provides verifiable value to the consumers.
2. There is a huge gap in affordability between hobby sites and business sites.  To have the same pricing model apply to both only serves to make it unaffordable for hobby sites entirely.  If IPS has an interest in being the forefront of online forums/CMS and gain correlating exposure, this approach is leaving hobby sites out of the equation and that is a net loss for IPS in gaining visibility which translates to future sales/adoption by new hobby/business sites (penny wise, dollar foolish).  Not to mention the immediate loss and future visibility from hobby sites that migrate to another solution and popularize it will negatively impact future IPS sales/adoption.  IPS needs to find a way to balance the affordability based on the target customer, but not at a reduction of features (as that inhibits marketplace incentive and adoption if that feature set can be found elsewhere)
3. Support.  You need to address the turnaround SLA for support and customers need an appropriate path to solving site critical issues within a reasonable SLA without it costing $1250 or waiting 3+ days for a resolution to take effect (note, not 3 days to respond, but 3 days to resolve it and have the site properly operational).
4. Unquestionably, the PR around this specific case needs (and is getting) review.  Moving forward IPS needs to do a far better job in broadcasting the roadmap of these changes and provide their customers the opportunity to assess them, which avoids customers being cornered ala "big bang" like we've seen here.

I can see MANY are quite upset by these changes for a variety of reasons, but I also see opportunities for IPS to revise their approach for their benefit and for their customers' benefit.  It's a complex situation, and there are fair arguments on both sides, however there is a big void in the balance in the current solution and it WILL unquestionably adversely affect BOTH IPS and its customers.

- "cannot see the forest for the trees"

Edited September 15, 2021 by Clover13

[ahc]

7 hours ago, Matt said:

Because we have to pay for things too? And those things are billed based on usage too. 🙂

Okay, I must be ignorant in this particular subject then, so I'll try to educate myself by asking a question. What exactly about your hosting costs more if our websites have more traffic?  I went and viewed 3 of the most popular website hosts on the market and I don't see anything about traffic/impression limits. Am I missing something?

7 hours ago, Matt said:

$54/month is not a lot when you consider a decent VPS is almost that on its own. But I accept that everyone has different needs and comfort levels. All we can offer is options.

Sorry, the clarification wasn't to insinuate that it was expensive, I was just pointing out that in reality for most of those upset in these comments about the new renewal schedule that it would actually cost them $9 more per month in actuality. 

[Feneroin]

2 hours ago, RevengeFNF said:

Till now i was paying 25$ per 6 months. With that i would pay more for only half the time.

Perfect... 

Till now yes. Now you'll pay 80$ per year...

Welcome...

[Dll]

1 hour ago, ahc said:

Okay, I must be ignorant in this particular subject then, so I'll try to educate myself by asking a question. What exactly about your hosting costs more if our websites have more traffic?  I went and viewed 3 of the most popular website hosts on the market and I don't see anything about traffic/impression limits. Am I missing something?

9 hours ago, Matt said:

Yes, to be honest, you are. The constraint in any hosting plan will be the resources available to it (cpu, memory etc). Whether that's shared amongst other sites on a shared server,  on a standalone vps or whatever else. So, even if the pricing for hosting doesn't mention page views, you can be sure that it'll be constrained by that - a $10 hosting plan is not likely to include the resources to cope with many millions of page views, whereas a $100 one is more likely to. 

Edited September 15, 2021 by Dll

[alistairgd66]

On 9/14/2021 at 6:22 PM, Dean_ said:

I've gone from $85.00, to $250.00 / year?

Sorry. I can't afford that. Again, like others I only run hobby websites in my spare time (for fun).

I really think, that's me done with Invision. 20 years later. I fear, we will just all drop like flies...

Same here. Original pricing was fine for my hobby sites, but this new pricing model with support as a premium add on no longer fits the bill.

[RevengeFNF]

What is the diference between the current support system, with the new community support system and the new Premium support system?

Is the new Premium support system the same thing as the current support system?

[ahc]

1 hour ago, Dll said:

 

No.

🤣

[abobader]

@Matt What the new premium support system? I am really interested in this, thanks.

[Ramsesx]

13 minutes ago, abobader said:

What the new premium support system? I am really interested in this, thanks.

 

[CoffeeCake]

6 hours ago, Matt said:

On our cloud infrastructure, we use CDN to serve a gzipped version of all JS and CSS which helps speed along with caching engines to reduce latency on requests.

Hold up.

It's still horrifically slow on your infrastructure.

6 hours ago, Matt said:

In terms of what the software can do, we need to break up the monolithic JS and CSS packages and consider relying on jQuery less and using native JS more. However, these are framework breaking changes that will likely take 6-12 months to really complete, so it's not something we can do on a development sprint.

We are aware of page speed and are discussing the best way to move forwards. Sometimes, the solution isn't simple and requires some time to implement.

There is a penalty to all of your customers from the latency, shifting, and time to paint. This needs to be a very high priority, and is an item which requires consideration and planning over a stretch of time. When did/will you start that 6-12 month epic?

Occam's razor and all would suggest that planning and consideration may not be organizational or leadership strong suits (as opposed to the notion that there exists meticulous planning practices behind the scenes and the screw it we'll do it live approach what could possibly go wrong on the public facing side of things). Investments in human capital with strengths in these areas may be a good idea.

[Pleeb]

I have been a big fan of IPB all growing up, I was an admin on many forums using it in the past, and when I was younger and wanted my own sites (without being able to afford enterprise software), I even opted for InvisionFree.  With that being said, when my community moved away from MyBB in 2019, Invision Community was the obvious choice for me; we're entirely ran on donations, but I was willing to save up and pay for the price out of pocket because I was looking forward to an enterprise solution.

I talked up Invision Community on my forums, and while we were a bit bitter over losing BBCode (we're still dealing with posts with formatting issues in my community after all this time), we sucked up and made the migration (which unfortunately didn't go smoothly due to a bug with the MyBB conversion system, but a support ticket pulled through!).

I'm not upset about the price increase, though I think it could have been dealt with better tact (read on), but I'm pretty upset about the loss of opening support tickets.  Most of my tickets that I opened were legitimate bugs that had to be escalated to the devs, and some of them involved bugs that could have been security issues (e.g. seeing topics and posts in feeds under specific circumstances that were meant for only staff).  One of my biggest talking points to the community, and one of the biggest brags that I've done post IC was "The benefit of enterprise level software is enterprise level support!"  I could tell my community when something went wrong "I opened a ticket".  I can't do that now, and raising the price while removing that feels less premium.  Less enterprise level support.

Regarding Devs....  I'm presently terrified that this is going to lose people like @Adriano Faria.  @Matt I hope you're listening, because Andriano Faria is the reason we choose Invision Community.  Due to some specific nature of my community, being able to post between multiple accounts was vital, and without their Linked Accounts plugin, we would not have chosen this platform.  If it breaks, we won't be able to continue using it, as it was one of two mandatory requirements for a community platform (even Youtube allows me to switch between pre-selected linked accounts from a user interface, many people support this out of the box):

 

 I would pay for this 20 times over if it stayed (just not all at once!)

@Matt, earlier you listed a fair bit of features that were pushed in the last couple years; however, there's so many missing features that should be de-facto (and they are in other free solutions, e.g. MyBB, SMF, etc.) but have either been removed or haven't been included and require a plugin and some of these plugins are holding the software up.  People have been asking for night mode since 2019 for the main site (ACP is appreciated but only admins can see that), profile-specific permissions prevent 1-post spambots from joining and putting things in the website field (again, we needed Adriano Faria's plugin), searching reported content is pretty important for larger communities (plugin), bookmarks (plugin...still can't use it in the latest version), post number in thread ( @All Astronauts's Kitchen Sink took up that mantle when Tom Irons' left).  You cannot lose any more of these individuals; hire them to implement these things into the main suite if you have too, because it feels like these common sense features are simply not there when they should be.

As for the marketplace, it has burned me a couple times now, specifically with themes.  After upgrading my site's main third party, purchased, theme (which I only needed because Invision Community doesn't support dark theme natively), I shortly realized that there was a critical bug in it.  The author was prompt in giving me an updated xml with the fix, but since I already had linked the theme to Invision Community, I couldn't just upload the XML, and waiting for the theme to be approved was not immediate; my only choice was to create a brand new theme from that XML, which sucked because the theme in question was heavily customized 😞

The second time is still ongoing, since y'all rejected @Fosters' recent bookmark update (I understand that you're aiming for quality control here, but from what I've heard it can take weeks for the plugin to be in review).

As for as how this all could have been handled, it's unreasonable to never increase the price for existing users, and only introduce it for those coming.  However, it is also unreasonable to drop it on us with no prior report.  I remember when Flickr changed their pricing structure, and while it got some pushback, they not only provided a warning, but also allowed current customers to prepay another 1-3 years at the current rate before they did.  The result?  I bought 3 years worth at the old rate, and I think a lot of people did.

I think a better approach to this would be to give existing customers an additional year of the old pricing (or even just 2 more billing cycles), while bringing new ones in, but in this case even the controversial way that Flickr handled their increase I feel was more graceful than Invision Community's.

As others have said, there's still time to make this right; find a way to remedy this to show the community that you're still acting in good faith.  Let us open tickets if something is broken, but perhaps still allow "how do I do xyz" to be topics.

And please, I don't want to tell my members that we need to switch to yet another platform after arguing for this software for the past 2 years because you pushed away the developers... find a way to lesson the blow to them, or just hire them outright so they can bring these much-needed features to Invision Community (see above).

 

P.S. Also please don't make this software become another Discourse-like platform, another reason I love IPB is because it's always had the forums feel; I don't want to lose the bulletin board look.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Pleeb
clarification

[Arcade King]

Several observations as a new customer.

Since moving to IPS there seems to be a lack or foresight on major issue like the one that's being discussed. No support for Zapier for self hosted comes straight to mind. It also feels to me that self hosted customers are being treated second rate which is sad. I've noticed many questions regarding self hosting being skipped over and ignored.

I've got zero issue with a price hike as long as I'm getting value for money. Compared to its competitors IPS is by far the best and I've tried them all (Troll as some might). I'm sorry but trying to blame IPS for your lack of traffic or ability to sustain your site is wrong. Social media is the real enemy to the traditional forum.

Hopefully the IPS team sit down and think hard before making announcements like this in the future. I can understand peoples anger having this dumped on them with little to no warning.

 

 

[LiquidFractal]

On 9/15/2021 at 2:19 AM, Adriano Faria said:

I think it’s time to abandon abandoned apps such as Blogs and  Gallery.

Except that there are those of us who rely on this functionality as part of our business structure, and not necessarily standalone blogs or galleries but as part of other modules such as Clubs.

Edited September 15, 2021 by liquidfractal

[LiquidFractal]

On 9/15/2021 at 2:52 AM, Nathan Explosion said:

You really do get the wrong end of the stick a lot, don't you? And then others pick up on that, and things get lost.

Heh...yeah, I think Jordan's job is much more difficult than it appears.  He has to deal with complainers (including me, who really knows how to complain about select things when he feels it's warranted! 😄), and I bet has to repeat the same things over and over again in different ways so that people understand.  The wonderful world of PR!

Edited September 16, 2021 by liquidfractal

[LiquidFractal]

On 9/15/2021 at 3:45 AM, Davyc said:

I've done it - removed my payment method and exploring other options. No one likes price rises, but when people are still recovering from the pandemic this is like a sledgehammer blow.  It's also going to affect devs who supply much needed apps in the marketplace; if people start leaving then their revenue is going to slip and then they may leave too.  It's a slippery slope IPS has ventured into and may be something to regret later. I just bought another license this year for another project, now that's on the bonfire until I find another solution.  Talk about being hit between the eyes!

I'm certainly not trying to tell you what to do; I don't like price increases either, but taken in context it has been the first price increase for some time now.  It's an old story; prices rise across the board while income typically doesn't.  But this also tells me that Invision probably won't be increasing their prices for another long(ish?) while.  Don't get me wrong - if there's another price increase in a year or three I will be having serious second thoughts, but that's not the impression I'm getting.

You make a very good point re: devs, though.  Leaving aside the fact that it's a decision every dev must make on their own: if they shed apps from their own websites, that will also limit the sorts of apps they can develop in the future.

I do, also, take issue with the fact that this really was sprung on everybody without giving them time to adjust their finances - especially during a pandemic, and let's remember: many of us might have our businesses online, but that doesn't make them COVID-proof.  And, like many others, I wonder about what the reality on the ground will be re: having a forum for first-response troubleshooting (I know several other sites do it, but how it actually plays out remains to be seen).

I'm not planning to go anywhere anytime soon, and I'm still dedicated to the Invision platform (even if I can no longer afford the second license I was considering).  But what worries me is how this price increase will reverberate through the Marketplace and influence the frequency and quality of developer projects.  Over time one learns who the reliable developers are, and I for one see some legitimate grievances.  And while Invision's software never personally struck me as much of a "hobbyist" platform, that market is there and obviously stands to be worst hit by such a sudden increase.

As for the skyrocketing premium Support price....whoa.  It seems like a very radical all-or-standard solution; what about a more tiered selection of Support options?

Edited September 16, 2021 by liquidfractal

[abobader]

2 hours ago, Ramsesx said:

 

I know about this already, thanks tho.

I thought they are new one coming up.

[sudo]

56 minutes ago, Arcade King said:

It also feels to me that self hosted customers are being treated second rate which is sad. I've noticed many questions regarding self hosting being skipped over and ignored.

Sadly I bet cloud customers get email support......

[abobader]

@Adriano Faria Is leaving? If it true then it total lost indeed. He is one of the well trusted few dev's here, he help even not related to his work, good friend indeed.

[Adriano Faria]

Just now, abobader said:

@Adriano Faria Is leaving? If it true then it total lost indeed. He is one of the well trusted few dev's here, he help even not related to his work, good friend indeed.

No, at least not yet. For now I removed Blogs and Gallery from my license, which means I won’t support these apps anymore. Next is Pages, which I only use for a Tracker but I’m developing my own, so it’ll be the end of the road for it too… soon.

So I’ll support Core, Forums, Downloads and Commerce from now on.

[LiquidFractal]

1 minute ago, Adriano Faria said:

No, at least not yet. For now I removed Blogs and Gallery from my license, which means I won’t support these apps anymore. Next is Pages, which I only use for a Tracker but I’m developing my own, so it’ll be the end of the road for it too… soon.

So I’ll support Core, Forums, Downloads and Commerce from now on.

So is that it for the LMS project?