Hump Day: A Refresh Has Arrived!

[Daddy]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

We are seeing a steady number of self-hosting customers move over to cloud, which has been a trend over the past year or so as rising hardware costs mean higher hosting costs which reduces the savings gap by running your own hardware / VPS / large hosting account.

Sorry, but I find that very hard to believe. Then again, most of what has been said by IPS staff in this thread is pretty unrealistic. Moral of the story is, this is a tactical push to evolve completely into a SaaS service. Might even save you some time and money just to refund all of the self license purchases and get rid of it entirely.

I'm pretty disappointed you haven't realized this was a huge mistake, and haven't taken steps to accommodate anyone you've blatantly hurt by these, I'll say it, malicious changes.

It's clear this was not a "communication" issue, rather a stunt to prevent anyone from renewing prior to the price hike. It's also clear the changes to self hosting prices had nothing to do with betterment of the software, rather an excuse to push people to cloud hosting. It's also clear the reason for yearly renewals was to prevent customers from selectively renewing only when they actually need to. Not because "it would confuse customers."

Yeah, confuse customers with the same model you've had for the past 10 years... We aren't that gullible. I'll stick around, but I'm not going to renew until there's drastic changes, and I'll avoid using the marketplace from now on and work directly with 3rd party developers to make sure they're being taken care of.

I can't express enough how disappointed I am.

Edited September 16, 2021 by Deathicated

[Zapusto]

1 hour ago, RevengeFNF said:

Matt, but if im not mistaken, the reason for the community support was not because of money, but to create "a living knowledge base to search for answers before even needing to ask."

In this case, it would be better for the cloud customers to also post their problems in the Community Support instead of going directly to a ticket.

I've already canceled the self-hosted license because of the open forum support policy. The ONLY reason I have not canceled my Cloud license is proper ticket support is continuing.

For me it's basic principle. I pay for a product. I expect proper, private support for that product from the company with whom I have a business relationship. No one else. It is not my responsibility to create a living knowledge base, nor contribute to it. I have no interest in being part of a "community". I am a customer. That's it. That's the end of the relationship I want, and need, with IPB.

It's crazy that I've posted more times in this thread than I have in 17 years.

Suffice it to say, should ticket support end with Cloud, so will my license for it.

[Matt]

2 minutes ago, Deathicated said:

Sorry, but I find that very hard to believe. Then again, most of what has been said by IPS staff in this thread is pretty unrealistic. Moral of the story is, this is a tactical push to evolve completely into a SaaS service. Might even save you some time and money just to refund all of the self license purchases and get rid of it entirely.

I'm pretty disappointed you haven't realized this was a huge mistake, and haven't taken steps to accommodate anyone you've blatantly hurt by these, I'll say it, malicious changes.

It's clear this was not a "communication" issue, rather a stunt to prevent anyone from renewing prior to the price hike. It's also clear the changes to self hosting prices had nothing to do with betterment of the software, rather an excuse to push people to cloud hosting. It's also clear the reason for yearly renewals was to prevent customers from selectively renewing only when they actually need to. Not because "it would confuse customers."

Yeah, confuse customers with the same model you've had for the past 10 years... We aren't that gullible. I'll stick around, but I'm not going to renew until there's drastic changes, and I'll avoid using the marketplace from now on and work directly with 3rd party developers to make sure they're being taken care of.

I can't express enough how disappointed I am.

I find it hard to believe that the only reason we're stuck on the ground and don't float off into the sky is because the big ball of rock we're living on spins around really fast because a giant ball of fire is so heavy we have no choice. But it's still true. 🚀

I will own that I could have done better with the email for sure. This topic is 17 pages long at the time of writing and a lot of customers have come to tell me that they're unhappy either because of what we've done or how we've done it. I will own that too. It's why I spent pretty much all of yesterday making sure every single person got a reply.

I hear you and I'm sorry that I've disappointed you, truly. I do not enjoy upsetting people, even when it is necessary.

1 minute ago, Zapusto said:

I've already canceled the self-hosted license because of the open forum support policy. The ONLY reason I have not canceled my Cloud license is proper ticket support is continuing.

For me it's basic principle. I pay for a product. I expect proper, private support for that product from the company with whom I have a business relationship. No one else. It is not my responsibility to create a living knowledge base, nor contribute to it. I have no interest in being part of a "community". I am a customer. That's it. That's the end of the relationship I want, and need, with IPB.

It's crazy that I've posted more times in this thread than I have in 17 years.

Suffice it to say, should ticket support end with Cloud, so will my license for it.

We're all part of communities, whether we realise it or not. 🙂

Even going into your favourite coffee shop and chatting with the barista and nodding to the laptop user who always sits in the corner is a community.

Everything we do either gives or takes from communities. But I respect your point that you are not interested in helping others, and you have no obligation to do so.

[Matt]

46 minutes ago, Summit360 said:

I've slept on the email and on the first 14pages of this topic.  WOW!

12 month billing industry standard? Almost all of the services I use are per hour, per month, most offer an annual discount. Those that only have annual, TBH, they have something to fear to lock you in. Even microsoft do monthly 😉  who/what is a standard?  Be better by differentiating and offering your customers what they need.

Silver linings: I'm assuming search will be getting a really good overhaul, elastic 7? If we're to search for issues first. TBH I still just use `site:domain.tld` in google here and on my own sites. 

I can actually stand the price increases. But I'm not impressed at all, at how it's been done. Trust was a word used before, I'll reiterate that and add reputation. Now I don't want to renew on the principal of it, and to support those who had this foisted upon them. 

I understand the support changes too. As a developer of 25+years and engineering manager for many, I see my peers on support, their productivity is far lower. £ for £ I get more from my non-support folk. However, they tear through bugs, keep paying customers happy with super quick response times & prompt fixes. Sure we have the odd customer who is a 'burden' but we see it, if we can make it work for them, then 80% of the others won't bother us. Now if I could offload support to customers... win. #fail If multiple similar questions asked, add it to a knowledgebase, dev or customer led, #win.

Could also get rid of the annoying config/server queries by bumping the price up to a bearable, but mostly prohibitive figure? ...win. #fail Ultimately at $1250, that's an hour work a month I'd expect in return. Or one serious forum offline help me get it back. If I was raising that level of support queries, IPS isn't the best. I'd pay $100 per serious issue escalation or guaranteed resolution, not a sort it yourself as your not cloud hosted...

I didn't have premium support before, didn't feel I needed it, support was great; ok, mostly ok, a little difficult as self hosted, no sftp, 2fa etc for the dozen tickets or so over a decade. Had one bad upgrade, 4.5 to 4.6.6 yesterday ironically.

Community support no sla? That in essence, and at worst is, no support, a suggestion that breaks more than it fixes, an escalation to a ticket at some point/trigger?, or premium support! Well let's try it for a quarter, nowt to lose now.

I'd save a big chunk of my monthly going to your cloud offering, except I'd rather eat my own notebook. I choose to self host, I enjoy it and I can optimise it, tune it, debug it. Ican upgrade when it's not a buggy .0/.1 release.  I pay for an sla with service providers and pay for more with many companies whom I trust... who are open, transparent and fair. Who reward their evangelists and support the 3rd party community. 

not bad news... just wow.

Thanks for taking the time to give me your thoughts. I appreciate this a lot.

[Zapusto]

7 minutes ago, Matt said:

Everything we do either gives or takes from communities. But I respect your point that you are not interested in helping others, and you have no obligation to do so.

That's putting words in my mouth and cherrypicking at its finest Matt, and is beneath you to do so.

I am your customer. I pay for your product. I have a business relationship with you, no one else. If you want to extrapolate non-identifying information and use it as part of your knowledgebase, then fine.

I have an expectation of support from IPB, and ONLY IPB, to support the product I am paying for, and to do so properly. No one else.

I think an expectation of proper ticket support is hardly outrageous.

[simonle]

21 minutes ago, Matt said:

But I respect your point that you are not interested in helping others

Huh! It does kinda sound like you're saying to your customers that they are too selfish to help in the support forums. I'm sure you didn't intend to do that. But maybe not the best response IMHO.

[Matt]

Quote

It is not my responsibility to create a living knowledge base, nor contribute to it. I have no interest in being part of a "community". I am a customer.

My apologies, I took this as being literal.

[The Old Man]

Hi Matt,

Please could advise on the status of the Theme Customisation forum? There are unanswered questions in there going back to July. I thought it was a sub-area of the development forum but looking at it just now, there are no blue team badges displayed unlike the dev forum itself.

Is it just peer to peer support? If so, should I repost my questions from to the Support Forum?

Many thanks.

[Matt]

1 minute ago, The Old Man said:

Hi Matt,

Please could advise on the status of the Theme Customisation forum? There are unanswered questions in there going back to July. I thought it was a sub-area of the development forum but looking at it just now, there are no blue team badges displayed unlike the dev forum itself.

Is it just peer to peer support? If so, should I repost my questions from to the Support Forum?

Many thanks.

Themes customisation have never been supported, so you would still need to use the peer-to-peer community forums for those. Our team do look through occasionally but it's not part of their daily workflow.

[Chris Anderson]

There are a finite amount of technical support staff and hours in the day.  If a community member happens to drop by the forums and sees a particular topic posting and provides some form of value-add then that will potentially lessen the burden on the support staff.  This might mean a site that is currently down and isn't paying for expedited support gets their site up and running that much sooner.

It's kind of like "paying it forward"...  A few moments of your time here and there just might pay dividends later. 

[GazzaGarratt]

On 9/15/2021 at 7:42 AM, InvisionHQ said:

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

I think many, like me, who haven't responded yet are still really taking this all in. My overriding concern is the line above that was partially acknowledged by Matt later on somewhere advising they are a dying breed.

As i'm still trying to make my mind up on how I feel about all of this, I've always felt its better to focus on action and what we can do together, rather than dwell and moan about stuff (even if I really want to).

Queries in no particular order:

Hobby (Non-Income) Communities - Are these categorically out of your operating model and vision now or in the next 5 years? I'm starting to feel like they are not in the vision based on responses so far.

Hobby (Non-Income) vs Business - Following on, I would love to know the proportionate split between how many hobby sites and business take your product if you have that data? Gut feel again is you have a substantial amount of sites here that don't generate income like a business.

Future Prices - With acknowledgement that prices will be more steadily rising over time rather than none in 10 years, will you link this external factors going forward, such as the price of living, etc?

Future Prices 2 - Would it be something you can commit to, to say that any future price changes will be effectively in 3-6 months from an email confirmation? Gut feel seems everyone was expecting them to rise at some point, but I think most/all would agree a gradual increase over the next few years rather than an immediate hike is not consumer friendly.

3rd Party Developer Prices - You may not be able to answer this Matt, but is there an expectation of 3rd party  developers to hold their prices?

I've dramatically reduce them over the years but as many essential functions aren't in the core, then I still pay for 5-7 additional items. Gut feel based on what @Adriano Faria (who is top notch btw) said earlier that these most likely will all have a potential small increase too. Therefore, if this is the case:

Adopting Marketplace into core - Have you and/or will you consider significantly more marketplace functionality into the core product? Do they need to be paid for annually moving forward too? Demand feels like it should be more for core changes rather than being asked to request plug-ins, in my honest opinion.

 

I think overall price increases are accepted in general walk of life if they are reasonable and fairly done over time. My concern starting to shape is more about the knock-on impact of prices to everything else that you need as part of your website/home, etc and if the vision of IC still caters to a large base of consumers.

Thanks in advance.

[Zapusto]

42 minutes ago, Matt said:

My apologies, I took this as being literal.

Matt, let me clarify as I can see how this was, and could be, misinterpreted.

• I agree that a peer-to-peer forum would, could, and will be helpful.
• I disagree that paid license product support should include peer-to-peer assistance.

Note, tone does not often convey in text. But understand I am not the least bit angry. Disappointed, but not angry. And I hope the following is received in the manner I intended. My own personal thoughts.

In your example with the barista, my responsibility to a barista (or any company) is to be cordial and pay for my order, product, goods or service. Their responsibility is to be cordial and deliver it as ordered. And if my order is not correct, they support it by correcting it. They don't expect me to to turn to another customer on a laptop and ask for assistance as that would be unreasonable. Certainly, the price I pay for their coffee doesn't come with the expectation of creating/contributing to a customer handbook.

I understand entirely what you are trying to do, but I feel it is personally really misguided. To illustrate, already it has been pointed out that this new plan effectively segregates, and places a support value, between one type of customer and another (self-hosted versus cloud -- which admittedly I appreciate and benefit from).

Further, customers incur higher fees that not only eliminates proper, direct IPB ticket support, but now comes with the added expectation of crowdsourcing a live knowledgebase just to get any level of support.

Respectfully, if we're being honest, I think this entire concept is quite arrogant.

Truth be told, I think a much better use of hiring all of those new tech support staff would be to provide better, more efficient ticket service for all paying customers, regardless of how trivial the request may be. And then IPB themselves should extrapolate and collate non-identifying information to create an official Self-Help Guide. And then this would be used as a live search in people's admin areas when they click support and type their request out. And still have the ability to file a ticket if still needed.

But my assumption, and fear, is that these "triage" personnel will be more like junior entry level techs who will do little more than add one extra step in the process before finally getting actual support.

So, to summarize the above misunderstanding, it it simply that I expect support from ONLY the company with whom I have I have a business relationship. Nothing more, nothing less.

Edited September 16, 2021 by Zapusto
Changed hosted to self-hosted for clarity

[The Old Man]

4 minutes ago, Matt said:

Themes customisation have never been supported, so you would still need to use the peer-to-peer community forums for those. Our team do look through occasionally but it's not part of their daily workflow.

Ah, thanks, I didn't realise.

Edited September 16, 2021 by The Old Man

[The Old Man]

@Matt, please could you move these 2 topics I created into the correct forum?

One is an issue about non-edited default theme templates being blank after importing a theme which may be a bug...

the other is for advice on the best way to export a theme, from Designers's Mode or not...

Thank you!

[Matt]

Done and done!

[jesuralem]

38 minutes ago, GazzaGarratt said:

Hobby (Non-Income) vs Business - Following on, I would love to know the proportionate split between how many hobby sites and business take your product if you have that data? Gut feel again is you have a substantial amount of sites here that don't generate income like a business.

I think this distinction is very hard to make.

My site is a hobby in the sense that i don't exepct to live or even earn money from it. Yet it has advertsiement revenue that i use to pay for hosting, licenses and web developpement (and accounting...).

Where would you put it ? my accountant costs 10 times what IPS is costing, the price increase is around what a corporate credit card costs, it is definitely not a problem per se.

[Dll]

I really feel like there are four issues at play in all of this. 

The price rise
Personally, this is the one which, although I can understand the issues it's causing for some, is in my opinion, the least controversial of all that's gone on over the last few days. Things get more expensive, the product is very different to what it was since the last increase in price, and so personally I have no problem with it. As long it goes hand in hand with a discernible and ongoing improvement in the quality of the product. There's work to be doing, rough edges to smooth and features which need adding. I do see why this may cause people to move away from Invision though - everything has its price and there are (and always have been) cheaper (and even free) alternatives. 

The support change
On the face of it, this looks terrible. But in a way it's all in the telling as it's not really a big change, assuming it works as Invision are saying - eg things that need a ticket will end up in one. For me it's one of those that needs to be given a chance to see if it works as advertised or not - if it ends up being poor then it'll need addressing/reverting to tickets urgently. 

Communication
This leans into everything else really. Had the price rise been communicated in advance, then that may have mitigated a lot of the upset it's caused. If the support changes had been communicated more clearly, that would also have stopped so many people assuming various different versions of what it is that Invision are apparently planning to do. It's an ongoing weak point with Invision in my view. There's no doubt that Invision make us feel less valued as paying customers than anyone else we spend our money with, sadly.

Does Invision care?
This is often about communication and the perception that it gives. I mean how many times can you screw it up so royally that you leave your customers confused or angry or both? With Invision it's frequent, it's frustrating and it's entirely avoidable. If you refuse to learn, refuse to take it seriously and don't change the way you do things after so many years and so many occasions, why should your paying customers keep giving you the benefit of the doubt?

It's not enough to say you care as you're picking up the pieces of another mess, or arriving back onto the scene of another feature left on the shelf for months with zero communication (think mobile app, as one example). You need to show you care, and you need to step up and own the problems that are of your own making by showing some flexibility.  EG - maybe look at a longer period of 6 month invoicing for existing customers who request it, offer a discount code for those with renewals within 3 months or something - just do something, anything to show it's not all pr style fake 'regret' just to play for time until everyone calms down or gives up. It's very little effort on your side in the great scheme of things, but could make a massive difference to the customers you're doing it for.

Oh, and finally (long post, sorry), look after your third party developers - you need them, so show some gratitude and a spirit of partnership by working with them.

Edited September 16, 2021 by Dll

[Hexsplosions]

2 hours ago, Dll said:

You need to show you care, and you need to step up and own the problems that are of your own making by showing some flexibility.  EG - maybe look at a longer period of 6 month invoicing for existing customers who request it, offer a discount code for those with renewals within 3 months or something - just do something, anything to show it's not all pr style fake 'regret' just to play for time until everyone calms down or gives up.

100% agree with this. It's a two-way street.

None of my concerns have been addressed and I didn't get a response to most of what I said. I may have well just shouted into the wind for all the good it did me to post my views.

"We're sorry" - fine, you're sorry.

"We're sorry, we should have given more notice. We'll apply discounts for any renewals within X months to allow you time to plan." - much better, and means a mistake has been owned.

As it stands, the only thing keeping me from immediately leaving is the tight integration between two cruical apps - forums and commerce. That's a sad state of affairs, because prior to this I would have been staying because I believed in the product and the team. That belief has been shattered.

Edited September 16, 2021 by The Heff

[Jimi Wikman]

My thoughts turned into a blogpost instead 🙂
https://jimiwikman.se/articles/professional/the-importance-of-communication-when-trust-dies-horribly-and-organizations-fail-r229/

 

[Matt]

I want to thank you all for your feedback. I appreciate everyone who took the time to leave their thoughts and concerns. I've read every single one and replied to almost all of them.

Firstly, I want to say that I understand that the messaging that went out ahead of this update fell short of what you deserve, and I want to apologise for that.

After spending two days reading every single post, almost all concerns fall into these three areas:

1) The future of support
I've seen many people use the phrase 'no more support', which isn't true. I know the change from ticket support to staffed community support is a significant change, but I genuinely believe that it will benefit customers. I believe that we can create a living knowledge base of solved issues just like many brands do. For example, when I have a problem with my iPhone, I google it and invariably end up with a link to a topic within their support forums with a solved answer. I don't need to raise a ticket with them and wait for a reply.

There are many "what about" concerns mixed in, and I ask you to try the new staffed community support areas and give us your feedback once you've used it regularly. We will work with you based on that feedback and make improvements where it is needed.

We have custom functionality that shows our team links to your client accounts, including license keys, etc., so we know who you are and have all your information right next to the topic. You will never need to divulge personal information, or even your site URL if you do not want to.

If your support issue is complex or needs developer intervention, with a click of a button, our technicians can convert this into a ticket for you and we will continue to resolve the issue with you in that ticket.

You will be in safe hands.

2) Price Rises
We have not raised our prices for well over a decade. We've always been reluctant to do it and held off for too long, resulting in a large jump to make up for a lost time.

We can't reduce the prices to their pre-September levels, but we will be much more mindful of price rises in the future.

3) Annual Renewals
We want to simplify billing and reduce the number of invoices we need to send, and you need to pay. An annual invoice seemed logical to achieve this.

However, you have made it clear that moving to annual renewals affects your budgeting, and we have listened to that.

We have reverted this decision and have restored 6-month renewals in your client area. This is not a temporary one-off offer; it's a permanent change.

Again, I want to thank you all for being so vocal and passionate about Invision Community. We want to keep offering you the very best community platform to help your communities succeed.

[rnorth6920]

Thank you for listening to the community, it's a step in the right direction.  Most of us have mentioned that we're okay with the price increase - it's part of life and we're willing to support IPS, because your product supports us.  But we were not okay with the bombardment of changes all at once with no notice. That being said, I was 100% ready to jump ship and not re-up.  Now, I think I can revisit the changes and probably be okay with making my payment in the next week.  

[Jordan Miller]

16 hours ago, Pleeb said:

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.

Appreciate all the kind words! I'd encourage you to give the shifted support system a chance. 🙏 If anything, I think there will be more support available versus less because inevitably many will find answers to their questions and won't even have to submit a ticket, freeing up our team to answer other not-yet-answered support questions. Consider opening a support topic as a ticket. It's just public now, which means the community can also weigh in. There's a kind of togetherness with this format which is pretty cool. 😇 

[jesuralem]

9 minutes ago, Matt said:

We have reverted this decision and have restored 6-month renewals in your client area. This is not a temporary one-off offer; it's a permanent change.

You are gonna kill me but it was actually a good change for those of us who have to account invoices etc...

Is there any way we could choose between 6 months and 1 year ?

 

BTW, i have to say i have the most respect for what you have been doing for 2 days answering to everybody here.

[Charles]

Just now, jesuralem said:

You are gonna kill me but it was actually a good change for those of us who have to account invoices etc...

Is there any way we could choose between 6 months and 1 year ?

 

BTW, i have to say i have the most respect for what you have been doing for 2 days answering to everybody here.

For those of you who have accounting back office overhead (I get it!) I would say just do an account credit pre-pay equivalent to a year and then you're good to go.

[Jordan Miller]

10 minutes ago, Matt said:

We have reverted this decision and have restored 6-month renewals in your client area. This is not a temporary one-off offer; it's a permanent change.