Hump Day: A Refresh Has Arrived!

[Tom_F]

Hmm so my 6 monthly fee of $60 has now gone to an annual fee of $235.  $5 short of doubling in cost. 

I've been here since moving across from Ikon and supported IPS in early days financially, paid for lifetime licences which I've begrudgingly accepted would not help IPS survive further down the line. 

My boss will be on me like a ton of bricks with that increase and with no email support (are you kidding me?) - I am, after 19 years, having to think can we continue.   I've always had first rate support from IPS, coupled with a friendly relationship with Matt who's helped me out plenty of times, but I've also let them use my server to test MSSQL drivers and IIS issues when they hosted/worked with the likes of AMD.  To turn around to that degree is a proper kick in the nuts.

I understand they have to pay the bills, but we all do.

A doubling of my licence fee would be a hard one to take on its own but the removal of email support as well?  That is not just a small issue. 

Edited September 15, 2021 by Tom_F

[The Old Man]

I'm reminded of the old adage... Don't pee down my neck and tell me it's raining.

[PasXal]

I was shocked to read the email about the increase and it was like a slap in the face!

I can understand a price increase, but the prices here are going up extremely in one fell swoop. Corona has already caused a sharp drop in income and now we are supposed to pay the price increase? I can almost no longer afford that for my hobby forum. 

The price increase is even higher because the e-mail support is no longer available. Community support can be provided for freeware, but not for expensive licensed software!

Thank goodness I recently renewed for 6 months at the old price. I will now definitely look for an alternative and move my forum to another system if they don't reconsider the decision here...

[NZyan]

I have seven active licenses. 

As it lies in the nature of bugs and issues, they show up randomly on all communities

Does that mean I'd have to have 7 times priority support to cover all issues per mail? 8,750 $ per year?

Your support was one of the strongest argument to stay with Invision (thanks Marc!), but after this change I can't recommend Invision any more. And I have to think about my future strategy.

Andreas

 

[Matt]

8 hours ago, Square Wheels said:

So here's an example.  I put in a ticket (a while ago) and was told the slowness of clicking view more content at the bottom of a stream was a query issue on their part and would be fixed in the current release.  It does not seem to be.  So now, I need to pay 1250 dollars to ask you to fix an issue with your software, that I paid for, and hear again that I need to wait for the next update?

I'm normally a pretty levelheaded person.  I can't understand, or explain, how angry I feel, how tricked and deceived this makes me feel, and how likely I will simply move my sites to another platform just to feel like I won.

I need to cool off for a bit, I am one very unhappy customer 

You absolutely do not need to pay $1250 to have a bug fixed.

You keep email ticket support until 1st Jan 2022. We ensured that all current license holders had months to adjust to how to get support.

So things carry on as normal for you with regards to support.

In the future, you would just post it in the support forum and our team will take care of it. If you check out the support forums now you will see that virtually every single topic has a team response, and many of the topics have had the topic converted into a ticket for a developer to examine and communicate with you.

8 hours ago, Zapusto said:

Your sandbox, your rules.

Certainly I can understand the price increase as that helps foster development. But it should also foster a quality and convenient support level.

I can say without hesitation that i have zero interest in posting a support question publicly, to then have it dissected and commented upon by people with whom I have no financial relationship. And with the alternative being $1250 for a few questions I have during the year, I just cannot justify that cost. Without justifiable product support, it's time to move on.

As an aside, with my first license being 17 years ago in 2004, it's been a good run.

Best regards.

You do not need to spend $1250 to ask us questions. We are right here on the forum or if you want to raise something in private, please use the contact us link. If you need support, please use the ticket system as normal. After Jan 1st 2022, you can reach us in the support forum. If you need to share private information, just state that and we'll convert it into a ticket for you.

We are not removing support, just changing how to get it.

8 hours ago, abobader said:

What strange email I got today from @Matt 

First the subject was somehow give the idea my account license had problem, then they are good news to start with as price rise? Good news for whom? Yes for IPS indeed not for customers.

I and other whom been with IPS from start been with this, no problem, if that will lead for better support, but:

Now with this price rise you drop the support (no matters how you explain it, it very clear you drop your support) and force me to use the community for it, or of Couse pay as well for support.

My records show I always goes and supporting IPS, but this time, the term for support is not acceptable at all.

I hope you reconsider you support term again, thanks.

 

We are not removing support, just changing how you get it after 1st January 2022. Take a look at our support forums now, you will see very fast responses from our team. We are staffing the support forums to ensure that no question is missed.

9 hours ago, Square Wheels said:

Holy crap, I missed the no more support part.

So, just so I understand.

Improvements and substantial releases will likely continue at the snail's pace we've seen over the past few year.

I like the six-month plan because of the lack of updates.  Why do I want to pay when there's nothing to upgrade?  Now I can't do that any longer.

Everything costs a lot more, more than hobby sites can afford.

Developers are already telling us (after only a few hours) that they are bailing out.  Add ons (sometimes for things you remove) will dry up.

If I need support, I have the honor of paying for it.

Seems like you helped your small customers make up their minds.

What a mess.

Release cadence is relative. We are making more regular releases and are now dropping into a monthly release schedule with new features being released within them. We are no longer holding up major releases for 9 months.

9 hours ago, Yamamura said:

Sorry, but "support" from the community on forums is inherent in free software. When a client pays money, he wants to have a private communication with the support (there can be many reasons for this).

We want to create a support community that benefits you as the customer. Our staff will read every single topic posted and triage them into either tickets, our internal bug tracker or drop an answer if they think that will be the best approach. We are not removing support, we are not removing the ability to talk to us, we are not removing the ability to get help. We are just changing how you get it.

5 hours ago, Ocean West said:

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.

 

Absolutely never submit logs. After January 1st 2022, just post a topic with a brief overview, let us know you have data to share and we'll convert it into a ticket. We can even delete your topic if you request it. If it's really private, then you can use the contact us link.

3 hours ago, Deathicated said:

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.

We are not removing support. I know I'm repeating myself, but I wanted to reply to as many people as possible. Priority support is different from the ticket support license holders get. As above, you have until Jan 1st 2022 (or when your license renews if renews past that date) to use tickets as normal. After that, the support forum is monitored and triaged by staff.

Zapier is available to self-hosting customers.

3 hours ago, Deathicated said:

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.

$80/6 months is $160 a year. That's a $90 increase. You do get support. I would not even call it basic. You have tickets until Jan 1st 2022, and then triage via the support forums. These forums are staffed, you can already see this by looking in the support forums.

2 hours ago, kims79 said:

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.

 

 

As above, support has not gone or being taken away. We want to build a rich support community here on our own forums. Most support tickets are simply "how do I do this" type questions. If these are visible on the forum, then it is more likely that you will find your answer before having to open a ticket and wait for a reply.

If the support issue you have is more involved, we will convert it into a ticket for you. This is what is already happening on the support forums.

35 minutes ago, Tom_F said:

Hmm so my 6 monthly fee of $60 has now gone to an annual fee of $235.  $5 short of doubling in cost. 

I've been here since moving across from Ikon and supported IPS in early days financially, paid for lifetime licences which I've begrudgingly accepted would not help IPS survive further down the line. 

My boss will be on me like a ton of bricks with that increase and with no email support (are you kidding me?) - I am, after 19 years, having to think can we continue.   I've always had first rate support from IPS, coupled with a friendly relationship with Matt who's helped me out plenty of times, but I've also let them use my server to test MSSQL drivers and IIS issues when they hosted/worked with the likes of AMD.  To turn around to that degree is a proper kick in the nuts.

I understand they have to pay the bills, but we all do.

A doubling of my licence fee would be a hard one to take on its own but the removal of email support as well?  That is not just a small issue. 

Hi Tom, I looked at your account and I can only apologise for giving you a heart attack. The renewal cost of $235 is actually wrong. The rebuild we ran to recalculate prices did not account for cancelled apps. I've re-run the rebuild and your renewal price has now gone from $120/year to $175/year - an increase of $4.58 a month.

To others who have seen double prices, please go and check your client area. It's likely you also had cancelled products that have been incorrectly folded into the renewal cost preview.

[jesuralem]

I have to say i did not read this topic at first because i thought the changes were only on the web site.

Now i have 3 comments here :

- Switching to yearly renewals is definitely a very good idea, most clients are here for a while and having to go through the order and payment process every 6 month is a pain.

- To my view IPS was and still is quite affordable given its features, but still the increase is around 50% for most clients and this might be issue for some of us who having small sites just for fun without income. Now you can assume that these clients are not your target.

- Removing ticket support is very hard to understand for thouse of us who are frequently on the community forum : for the 2 years i have been here (i think), i would say 90% of issues i saw reported by clients on the forum have been answering by "open a ticket". And now you say we won't be able to open tickets... you have to undestand this is not a good feeling.

To conclude, you absolutely have to give free licenses to apps and plugins developpers, ther definetely are vital to the ecosystem and if guys such as @Nathan Explosion and @Adriano Faria were to loose interest in IPS this would be huge loss for your products.

 

 

[Matt]

16 minutes ago, NZyan said:

I have seven active licenses. 

As it lies in the nature of bugs and issues, they show up randomly on all communities

Does that mean I'd have to have 7 times priority support to cover all issues per mail? 8,750 $ per year?

Your support was one of the strongest argument to stay with Invision (thanks Marc!), but after this change I can't recommend Invision any more. And I have to think about my future strategy.

Andreas

 

100% not, no. You have until January 1st 2022 to keep using email ticket support. After that, simply drop your support needs in our support forum where our staffed team will triage them. We understand that some support issues are complex and require us logging into check data, etc. so tickets will still be very much in use for this.

[Duken]

2 hours ago, Duken said:

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?

@Matt can you anwser this?

[Matt]

3 minutes ago, jesuralem said:

I have to say i did not read this topic at first because i thought the changes were only on the web site.

Now i have 3 comments here :

- Switching to yearly renewals is definitely a very good idea, most clients are here for a while and having to go through the order and payment process every 6 month is a pain.

- To my view IPS was and still is quite affordable given its features, but still the increase is around 50% for most clients and this might be issue for some of us who having small sites just for fun without income. Now you can assume that these clients are not your target.

- Removing ticket support is very hard to understand for thouse of us who are frequently on the community forum : for the 2 years i have been here (i think), i would say 90% of issues i saw reported by clients on the forum have been answering by "open a ticket". And now you say we won't be able to open tickets... you have to undestand this is not a good feeling.

To conclude, you absolutely have to give free licenses to apps and plugins developpers, ther definetely are vital to the ecosystem and if guys such as @Nathan Explosion and @Adriano Faria were to loose interest in IPS this would be huge loss for your products.

 

 

Thanks for the feedback. I realise the annual change is a lot to digest but once we get past the first renewal, I feel an annual renewal makes more sense. It's less to think about, fewer invoices, and fewer payments to make.

I understand the shock of seeing $25 every 6 months to $80 a year. It's a big leap in numbers. The truth is that the $25 renewal fee that was set in 2005 was just barely covering a single ticket, let alone development time. Keeping in mind that we do not charge a new license fee for every major release, even $80 a year (or to go back to 6-month thinking $40 every 6 months) is still good value when you consider that you are getting a market leading platform that gets new functionality added very regularly. Broken down monthly, it's $6.66 a month for a market leading platform with rapid support when you need it.

We should have increased the price annually to keep track with inflation - which has eroded nearly 30% from the dollar value over the past 15 years or so. Simply put, that $25 renewal is worth 30% less just because the cost of living (and thus our running costs) have increased.

We haven't removed support. As above, we will keep your ticket access until Jan 1st 2022 (or if your current license renewal expires later, then when your renewal expires). The support forum is now staffed and your request will be triaged to get you the best help in the fastest way.

[ZLTRGO]

4 minutes ago, Duken said:

@Matt can you anwser this?

Maybe the big devs here will get together and create their own Marketplace website where people will always have access to their bought goods and not only when they have an active sub at IPB ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°) wouldn't that be great.

[byMarcoX]

Perso, j'abandonne 110$ x2 pour 2 forums qui ne me rapportent rien + 300€ d'hébergement çà commence à faire lourd, pour quelques mises à jour, je vais donc arrêter les frais là! Merci ! Déjà que je trouvais que Netflix abusé avec 3x 2€ en 2 ans, mais là on passe de 70$ à 110$ vous pensez que je fais pousser l'argent sur les arbres ?! après on s'étonne que les gens choisissent les versions pirates! 😞

Ce n'est plus une augmentation, c'est carrément du racket !

Personally, I'm giving up $ 110 x2 for 2 forums that don't bring me anything + € 300 hosting it's starting to get heavy, for a few updates, so I'm going to stop the costs there! Thank you ! Already I found that Netflix abused with 3x 2 € in 2 years, but now we go from $ 70 to $ 110 you think I'm growing money on trees ?! then we are surprised that people choose the pirate versions! 😞

It's no longer an increase, it's downright racketeering!

Edited September 15, 2021 by byMarcoX

[Talksofa]

The announcement of a price hike combined with no more ticket support is reason enough for me to reconsider my business strategy.

I rarely need ticket support, I usually solve the problems myself. But having no ticket support for a software is simply a no-go for me. And having a newsletter that tries to sell a drastically price hike from $50 to $80 as "increase of $2.50/month" is more cynicism than I need from a provider. If I need cynicism or sales speech I will do that myself.

I worked for more than 20 years as a developer, team leader and divisional head in the software industry and I think I have a sixth sense for software companies and how they work and think internally. In the last year I have got too many bad signals from Invision: maybe in the future cloud only? Zapier not until protests? Price hike. No more ticket support.

I'm in the process of converting a bunch of Xenforo and Wordpress sites to Invision and today I've halted the process. Final decision how to proceed until end of the year. In the end, its all about trust.

[PoC2]

8 hours ago, The Old Man said:

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

QFT – This is a serious point.

I can handle the price increases (10 years is a long time without one, absolutely) but the way they were communicated and implemented has been... poor.

Que Sera

One other note, as mentioned above, more recent PR and community management has come across as rather shallow and insincere.

We are not children.

Some of us have dealt with death on a daily basis and are not 'funky teenagers'. If you are a business, with business prices, please endeavour to keep it business-like, with a business-like respect for your customers' intelligence.

Thank you.

[Matt]

5 minutes ago, ZLTRGO said:

Maybe the big devs here will get together and create their own Marketplace website where people will always have access to their bought goods and not only when they have an active sub at IPB ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°) wouldn't that be great.

They are certainly welcome to do that. It's hard to get traction on a new site and harder to build trust to sell items which is why we put so much effort into our marketplace and putting it front and central in the Admin Panel where tens of thousands of community administrators can browse for new add-ons.

12 minutes ago, Duken said:

@Matt can you anwser this?

You can keep getting updates from third party apps until those third party apps expire, regardless of your Invision Community license situation.

[jesuralem]

3 minutes ago, Matt said:

Thanks for the feedback. I realise the annual change is a lot to digest but once we get past the first renewal, I feel an annual renewal makes more sense. It's less to think about, fewer invoices, and fewer payments to make.

I understand the shock of seeing $25 every 6 months to $80 a year. It's a big leap in numbers. The truth is that the $25 renewal fee that was set in 2005 was just barely covering a single ticket, let alone development time. Keeping in mind that we do not charge a new license fee for every major release, even $80 a year (or to go back to 6-month thinking $40 every 6 months) is still good value when you consider that you are getting a market leading platform that gets new functionality added very regularly. Broken down monthly, it's $6.66 a month for a market leading platform with rapid support when you need it.

We should have increased the price annually to keep track with inflation - which has eroded nearly 30% from the dollar value over the past 15 years or so. Simply put, that $25 renewal is worth 30% less just because the cost of living (and thus our running costs) have increased.

We haven't removed support. As above, we will keep your ticket access until Jan 1st 2022 (or if your current license renewal expires later, then when your renewal expires). The support forum is now staffed and your request will be triaged to get you the best help in the fastest way.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the answer and i know you have a lot of remarks to answer but you should read them better, i actually on most of what you are saying regarding the yearly renewals and the global value of IPS.

Now regarding the price increase, everybody can understand that the price had not move for 15 years and that you need to realign, but maybe you could have announced it a few weeks/months before actually applying it. Alsogiven the 50% incerease a stepped increase would have been approriate (20% in 3 months, 20% again 6 months later for instance).

About support, as i said i think the most difficult part for us is that it is a complete u turn from what we've seen here for years. IPS teams has almost never provided support on the forum and rederected issues to the support tickets. Now i thin tha thaving support on the forum is nice because people having the same problem will find their solution form other people tickets. But you have to agree that it was not your policy so far.

 

[Matt]

4 minutes ago, byMarcoX said:

Perso, j'abandonne 110$ x2 pour 2 forums qui ne me rapportent rien + 300€ d'hébergement çà commence à faire lourd, pour quelques mises à jour, je vais donc arrêter les frais là! Merci ! Déjà que je trouvais que Netflix abusé avec 3x 2€ en 2 ans, mais là on passe de 70$ à 110$ vous pensez que je fais pousser l'argent sur les arbres ?! après on s'étonne que les gens choisissent les versions pirates! 😞

Personally, I'm giving up $ 110 x2 for 2 forums that don't bring me anything + € 300 hosting it's starting to get heavy, for a few updates, so I'm going to stop the costs there! Thank you ! Already I found that Netflix abused with 3x 2 € in 2 years, but now we go from $ 70 to $ 110 you think I'm growing money on trees ?! then we are surprised that people choose the pirate versions! 😞

I'm sorry to hear that you're thinking of leaving. I hear you on costs. Everything seems to be getting more expensive. Hosting costs keep rising, even things like Netflix creep up on you.

Rising costs suck. It's the same rising costs we face every day keeping the lights on and paying our team for their hard work.

Just now, jesuralem said:

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the answer and i know you have a lot of remarks to answer but you should read them better, i actually on most of what you are saying regarding the yearly renewals and the global value of IPS.

Now regarding the price increase, everybody can understand that the price had not move for 15 years and that you need to realign, but maybe you could have announced it a few weeks/months before actually applying it. Alsogiven the 50% incerease a stepped increase would have been approriate (20% in 3 months, 20% again 6 months later for instance).

About support, as i said i think the most difficult part for us is that it is a complete u turn from what we've seen here for years. IPS teams has almost never provided support on the forum and rederected issues to the support tickets. Now i thin tha thaving support on the forum is nice because people having the same problem will find their solution form other people tickets. But you have to agree that it was not your policy so far.

 

I can't disagree with any of that. 🙂

I understand that in the past forum support has been peer-to-peer and we've been very firm that we only offer 'real' support in tickets - so I totally get that now we're saying 'use the forum and let us decide what needs to be a ticket' is a big change and we have to prove that this will not result in a bad experience for everyone. We've already got a head start on this, if you check out the support forums now you'll see our team super active in there.

6 minutes ago, PoC2 said:

QFT – This is a serious point.

I can handle the price increases (10 years is a long time without one, absolutely) but the way they were communicated and implemented has been... poor.

Que Sera

One other note, as mentioned above, more recent PR and community management has come across as rather shallow and insincere.

We are not children.

Some of us have dealt with death on a daily basis and are not 'funky teenagers'. If you are a business, with business prices, please endeavour to keep it business-like, with a business-like respect for your customers' intelligence.

Thank you.

I appreciate your honest feedback, thank you.

[jesuralem]

Also, does this mean that we should be prepare to yearly price increase from now on ?

I am not saying it would not be reasonable (most IT contracts take 3% per year), but we have to be prepared :).

[Matt]

7 minutes ago, Talksofa said:

The announcement of a price hike combined with no more ticket support is reason enough for me to reconsider my business strategy.

I rarely need ticket support, I usually solve the problems myself. But having no ticket support for a software is simply a no-go for me. And having a newsletter that tries to sell a drastically price hike from $50 to $80 as "increase of $2.50/month" is more cynicism than I need from a provider. If I need cynicism or sales speech I will do that myself.

I worked for more than 20 years as a developer, team leader and divisional head in the software industry and I think I have a sixth sense for software companies and how they work and think internally. In the last year I have got too many bad signals from Invision: maybe in the future cloud only? Zapier not until protests? Price hike. No more ticket support.

I'm in the process of converting a bunch of Xenforo and Wordpress sites to Invision and today I've halted the process. Final decision how to proceed until end of the year. In the end, its all about trust.

I want to point out that "no ticket support" isn't what we're changing. After Jan 1st 2022 (until then you can use tickets as normal) we are asking that you post in our community support forum which are actively staffed by our team who will then triage and move more complex issues into a ticket, or into our internal bug tracker.

I understand your point about trust too.

[Dll]

I'm imagining a parallel universe, where rather than a condescending, pr spun, rushed out email had been sent after the event, instead a clear, honest, professional and concise one was, ahead of time.

If only.

I'd like to assume that Invision's ability to shoot themselves in the foot with bad/lacking communication is due to their focus being on other things within the business. But one part of me starts to wonder if it's just a case of not being bothered enough about their customers. Time will tell, as at some point these lessons are going to have to be learned.

[Matt]

1 minute ago, jesuralem said:

Also, does this mean that we should be prepare to yearly price increase from now on ?

I am not saying it would not be reasonable (most IT contracts take 3% per year), but we have to be prepared :).

I don't think it would be fair to increase it again anytime soon. 🙂

In the future, we feel that smaller price increases a little more regularly will help for sure.

[Davyc]

2 minutes ago, Duken said:

@Matt can you anwser this?

He most likely can but you won't get the positive answer you want.

I've had time to sleep on this and my conclusion is this:

You say you haven't increased prices in a decade. Who's fault is this?  A small annual increase is easier to swallow than a massive increase in one fell swoop.

Such a large increase for your corporate clients will be less than chicken feed and they will most likely offset this against tax. Us hobbyists can't do that and such an increase of these proportions is ridiculous if expect us to buy into it.

In a declining hobbyist market you would be best placed to split your business into two - one catering for corporates who you can charge whatever big bucks they're willing to part with, and one more affordable option for hobbyists; the two are mutually incompatible and you can't expect hobbyists to pay corporate prices.

You need to take a look at what your competition is charging and price yourselves competitively.  You can argue that you have the better product, but when priced way above competitors it doesn't look so attractive from the ground up.

A small number of your clients who are used to being on this (and I say this loosely) community platform have probably voiced the concerns of many and who are now leaving the fold.  How big a number do you have to lose, silently, before you realise you made a huge blunder? A number 'we' will never know.

It's like you have taken a big stick and beaten us with it and then in come the pacifiers with, "well, you know" as though that is some kind of ointment to soothe the pain.

I just bought my second licence this year, that was bought with faith and trust in you as business, which incidentally has grown because of the grassroots support of your hobbyist clients over many years; that has flown the nest with this latest announcement.

1 minute ago, Matt said:

Rising costs suck. It's the same rising costs we face every day keeping the lights on and paying our team for their hard work.

So you should be aware that whilst your costs are rising, just the same as ours, your income is about to take a dive.

I am fully aware that prices rise constantly and it's a pain we all have to bear, but imagine if you went into your local grocery store and when you get through the checkout and have to pay the bill, you find that it's 50% more than last year.  How happy would you be with that?

Small increases over a period of time hurt less and it's YOUR fault that you didn't do this over the last decade and now you want us to swallow the sob story - no way.  Am I angry, you bet - I wasted good money buying that second licence and there's no way I'm throwing any more at it. Your loss, my gain.

You may be great at developing software, but you suck as looking after your clients, especially those who have walked this path with you since the beginning.

[opentype]

9 minutes ago, ZLTRGO said:

Maybe the big devs here will get together and create their own Marketplace website …

Speaking of that: There seem so be another change, causing entry-level cloud customers to loose the ability to even install resources which are not from the Marketplace. From a developer’s perspective, that makes offering products outside of the Marketplace even less appealing. 

[Matt]

1 minute ago, Dll said:

I'm imagining a parallel universe, where rather than a condescending, pr spun, rushed out email had been sent after the event, instead a clear, honest, professional and concise one was, ahead of time.

If only.

I'd like to assume that Invision's ability to shoot themselves in the foot with bad/lacking communication is due to their focus being on other things within the business. But one part of me starts to wonder if it's just a case of not being bothered enough about their customers. Time will tell, as at some point these lessons are going to have to be learned.

We absolutely care about our customers. I will be replying to as many posts as I can today. The email was queued up days ago. We had some issues with the changeover so I paused the email until we were clear they had been resolved. The email went out 4 hours after the site was put back on, which we felt was a priority so customers could get support, download updates and so on.

[kims79]

Anyway, it's been some time that IPB pushes us to leave them (you plan to stop your activity?), they have absolutely no understanding of the current markets, the big boxes are moving more and more only to alternative solutions like Discord, facebook, ect ... to discuss with their community (the proof, even Bethesda closed its forums recently!)

The premium argument would be funny if it was a joke, but it seems that @Mattis serious.

Ipboard has nothing premium, it is behind in all the fields and does not evolve any more since years, it is especially about correction of bug, on the contrary, it even tends to lose functionalities!

• Ipchat -> abandoned without notice.
• Mobile application -> abandoned without notice.

4 minutes ago, Matt said:

Thanks for the feedback. I realise the annual change is a lot to digest but once we get past the first renewal, I feel an annual renewal makes more sense. It's less to think about, fewer invoices, and fewer payments to make.

No, the annual renewal has no more sense, it is a total nonsense, because precisely we have no roadmap on what is planned, on the contrary, we go from bad surprise to bad surprise with your communication completely off the mark.
Especially since @Jordan response indicating to reload our accounts 6 months before to keep this period is for me a new proof of total contempt for your customers.

 

7 minutes ago, Matt said:

I understand the shock of seeing $25 every 6 months to $80 a year. It's a big leap in numbers. The truth is that the $25 renewal fee that was set in 2005 was just barely covering a single ticket, let alone development time. Keeping in mind that we do not charge a new license fee for every major release, even $80 a year (or to go back to 6-month thinking $40 every 6 months) is still good value when you consider that you are getting a market leading platform that gets new functionality added very regularly. Broken down monthly, it's $6.66 a month for a market leading platform with rapid support when you need it.

Lol is a joke ? We should also pay you for each "major" version? So we would have to pay for the software + a renewal for security updates + an additional fee for upgrades? You're definitely missing the point! 

 

The truth is that for a few years, nothing has been added on IPB, except the club function, the rest is bug fixes! 
You put forward the webp as a novelty, no sorry, the addition of two lines of codes to accept this file extension which is already supported by the majority of CMS for a few years is not a novelty.

The addition of zapier is not a novelty either, it is above all a proof of laziness on your part to really integrate these functionalities in IPB, because if tomorrow Zapier closes, or decides like you to increase its prices of 30%, we are taken hostage! 

I will start by believing that you get a com for each request sent by an IPBoard installation.
What's the next step, suppressing the sending of mail outside the provider? By the way, why didn't you take AWS which is the most common ?

Quote

 

"Facebook/Instagram embeds stopped working"
We're not aware of this being an issue. Facebook change a lot of things very quickly and without warning so we always end up playing catch-up which is very frustrating. They tend to be locking more and more down inside the platform which increases the complexity of doing simple tasks.

Edit: I see Facebook want to now do an app request just to use embeds. We'll probably pull it out of the code and give up. It's too much hassle and app reviews cause too much support overview to be worth it for embeds.

Give us more of your hot questions. If we get enough, maybe we can do a video and go through them with some background and thoughts, etc.

 

When I read that on this subject, it confirms me even more in what I think, you try to do as little as possible today to rehash as much as possible.

You want me to pay 30% more and once a year? 
Ok, start by listening to your community, work on your software so that it respects today's web standards and that it gets the best possible score on pagespeed especially on mobile, offer us a real integration of wepb, discord, private messages in instant, do your job when you validate an extension on the market to make sure it works properly and then I would accept to pay more.

 

[Dll]

Just now, Matt said:

We absolutely care about our customers. I will be replying to as many posts as I can today. The email was queued up days ago. We had some issues with the changeover so I paused the email until we were clear they had been resolved. The email went out 4 hours after the site was put back on, which we felt was a priority so customers could get support, download updates and so on.

In all seriousness Matt. If you / the rest of the management at invision think that sort of timescale is acceptable when communicating such a big jump in price, then I really do recommend you hire someone with more knowledge and skills in communication and customer care. You needed to be weeks ahead of this, to give people reasonable notice.