Missing features in version 5

[Dll]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

We do consider the Classic license as part of that tier, and when you consider the cost gap between the Classic license over the course of the year, and the price of the higher tiers, it should be the case that there is a feature disparity between them. We are no different from almost every other vendor. For example, Ahrefs offer a ‘lite’ package at $99/month and an advanced package at $359/month which offers much more.

It would be disingenuous to wrap up all the concerns as merely not understanding pricing tiers because the real friction comes from our legacy of being a self-hosted first company and “them versus us” feeling between self-hosted and cloud packages.

Ahrefs is a brilliant example - yes they have tiers, but they also communicate about them properly. They also have impeccable timing, as right now they are beta testing a new ai content feature and they're properly transparent about it, in that they're saying that 'at the moment' everyone has access while it's a beta feature, but in time it will be a paid for addon. Everyone then knows where they stand.

As for the 'them vs us' - the sad thing in that the biggest cause of that isn't the change itself - most people get how different products and pricing tiers work. It's the way it has been handled and communicated from the off. It's become a problem of Invision's own making, which is a shame for all concerned, especially as the lessons just never seem to be learned. 

Edited December 2 by Dll

[EliasM]

Honestly I think you lost transparency this time,

When you post a blog about a new feature you should write at the end "as you always do" that it is not available in the classic version,

Or say that you haven't decided yet whether it will be available in the classic version or not,
Many of us including me bought a license because of the features that were announced and were supposed to be available in the classic version,

But it seems that you were actually planning to include them in the classic version and then changed your mind later, because I noticed some features that were present in the beta 1 version but were removed after that,

Like the feature of automatically showing comments when someone comments on the topic,

This makes me feel very sorry😔

[Matt]

No features have been removed. You may have been testing a cloud demo site and then self hosting, perhaps. 

[PanSevence]

3 godziny temu, EliasM powiedział:

Like the feature of automatically showing comments when someone comments on the topic,

These functionalities were marked from the beginning as being available only in cloud packages, so you must have made a mistake.

[Marco Junior]

Why not release these features for us to test in BETA?
This could boost cloud sales, as we could test something that we somehow like and that would be useful in our communities.

Not that this is my case, unfortunately the extremely high price does not allow me to dream of getting this product.

[Marc]

11 hours ago, Marco Junior said:

Why not release these features for us to test in BETA?

Its often not as simple as that, due to the way they are developed and what they use (they use features on our cloud network, not just on the core software)

[Matt]

13 hours ago, Marco Junior said:

Why not release these features for us to test in BETA?

Live community features, and the topic summary feature relies on our own cloud platform. The topic summary is actually pretty clever in that our cloud platform pulls data directly from the database outside of the software and runs the whole thing through a custom algorithm written in python to calculate a score for each post. It then updates the database. This isn't run via tasks or cron it's run via our own queuing system on cloud. 

Topic assignments is likely to be added to the business tier and all those above. We are no different from others selling services that restrict some features to higher plans. In the past, plans were based around storage GB and bandwidth but that's rarely the case now. Tiers are now based on feature sets.

I know it can be uncomfortable to talk about the cold realities of running a business, but the landscape has changed for community platforms.

We feel that relaunching self-hosted with the Classic license has allowed self-hosting to remain viable for the life of v5. That doesn't mean it won't be the case for whatever comes after, it just means that no one internally is even thinking about v6, let alone making plans for it. I can't give you a cast iron guarantee of something that may not exist. Who knows where we'll be in five years time. 

In 2024 to date, cloud represents 86% of our income. Without Cloud, Invision Community would not be here, or at least not as we know it now.

By having a profitable model, we can still provide a self-hosted option which just about breaks even or makes a small loss depending on how many bugs us developers add in. We are happy with this. Hopefully you are happy with this. We have committed to this model.

But it does mean that there will be a divergence in feature sets. Partly because it's hard to build modern features with just PHP and MySQL and partly a business decision to entice people up the tiers.

We could create a docker image with node, etc and be incredibly rigid with hosting environments to the point only a few hosts are supported with droplets, etc. But that would decimate our self-hosting customer base with most not being able to run the required servers, or not having the knowledge to set it up and it would decimate our cloud business by offering the same functionality but elsewhere.

That's the business stuff, let's move on to transparency.

Part of the discourse around self-hosting versus cloud (even though we never frame it like this) is toxic. There is a small but incredibly vocal minority that refuse to accept that they cannot get every single feature we write and drag every feature release blog down with negativity, angry posting about cloud's existence, and accusations of 'money grabbing' (you are very welcome to pay our AWS bill). This can be hard to handle in a public forum. We have two options; endlessly have the same conversations or hide/block/ban posts and people which then comes across as thin-skinned and unable to take criticism.

Ahrefs does not have the problem that we have. Their customers are all 'cloud' customers and they're used to not getting all the features, so to say "yeah we'll test it in beta but you might not get it" will not be met with (much) anger and resentment that we seem to get when we mention "cloud only".

This has been ongoing for years and is the reason why we heavily moderate comments on our blog posts. You don't get to see a lot of the rage posting because we never approve it. But it's there. It's always there.

With v5, live topics, live community and topic summary were only ever going to be cloud only due to the underlying technology. Two out of three of those already exist on cloud so should come as no surprise that they remain so.

The other features we were undecided. From our point of view, everything is a tier. We could bring topic assignments to Classic, but then it would mean that we'd need to bring it to all cloud tiers. Which means that there's little incentive to pay for a higher tier level.

We could have said "this feature may be on a higher tier than classic" on the blog announcement but it would only invite more toxicity and more anger from this minority group. We wanted to wait until we had it decided. And part of that decision was based on how it went over during the alpha and beta stages. When we create a feature, we never truly know how it'll shape up, or even if we'll keep it; more true during the early stages.

Now we're in the beta stages, we have a firmer idea of its usefulness and future direction and are more able to make those decisions. That's the honest truth. There is no conspiracy. We have customers who run large enterprise communities testing these same features and offering input too.

We could have done better for sure. But it's a really tight line we're trying to walk on between informing customers about where possible features may end up without instigating another round of self-hosted versus cloud which is draining quite honestly. Not to mention demoralising for our team who proudly present their work and a good portion of the feedback is on why self-hosted licenses aren't getting it.

But moving back to features, if you look at the volume of work that has gone into v5 and all the good stuff that's been added, it really is a very small percentage of features that will not make it to every single product tier we offer.

As always, we may not be perfect, but we're here and talking about it.

 

[EliasM]

Mr. Matt, you are right

The only thing that is annoying is that you did not clearly mention during the post that the feature is still not specified for cloud customers,
However,
I would like to suggest that all the features that can work on self-hosting be available in the classic version with different plans for the classic version starting from $500 to $1500, and we would be free to upgrade or stay in the discounted package,
The cloud will still be special,
But we would rather get some additional features for paying a higher price than getting nothing😂
Please think about it

Thanks

Greetings

[beats23]

15 minutes ago, Matt said:

But moving back to features, if you look at the volume of work that has gone into v5 and all the good stuff that's been added, it really is a very small percentage of features that will not make it to every single product tier we offer.

The new dark mode, mobile theme, front-end theme builder, menu system, and all the other new features in the classic package are excellent. Imagine if those features were for cloud-only 😃. 

It was stated in the beginning that IPSv5 would have features like paying to view a forum topic. I don't see any pay-to-view features announced. Are those features still coming in the classic package? 

[Matt]

16 minutes ago, EliasM said:

I would like to suggest that all the features that can work on self-hosting be available in the classic version with different plans for the classic version starting from $500 to $1500, and we would be free to upgrade or stay in the discounted package,

Yes, it is technically possible but doesn't fit with our business plan.

To do that would mean you'd need to be very rigid with the type of host. We'd also have to completely re-tool those features already written to work with that droplet/docker image. We'd also not really be able to make it profitable given the number of people willing to host things themselves.

There are very few self-hosting only community platforms left. There is a reason for this. 

9 minutes ago, beats23 said:

It was stated in the beginning that IPSv5 would have features like paying to view a forum topic. I don't see any pay-to-view features announced. Are those features still coming in the classic package? 

I don't remember this being discussed as something on our roadmap specifically. There was a notion of doing more to monetise communities around the start of v5.

21 minutes ago, EliasM said:

The only thing that is annoying is that you did not clearly mention during the post that the feature is still not specified for cloud customers

Yes, I addressed that in my post but a shorter version is that discussion around self-hosting licenses and not getting features is toxic and dominates any feedback we get from a small minority. We didn't want to make announcements about that until we were very sure about it. We are still in the early stages of beta testing.

[beats23]

18 minutes ago, EliasM said:

Mr. Matt, you are right
I would like to suggest that all the features that can work on self-hosting be available in the classic version with different plans for the classic version starting from $500 to $1500, and we would be free to upgrade or stay in the discounted package,
The cloud will still be special,
But we would rather get some additional features for paying a higher price than getting nothing😂
Please think about it

Thanks

Greetings

True. It takes 100 cents to make a dollar, which means every cent counts, no matter how small. I'm 100% sure your company would make extra income by offering extra features, such as your course app, to classic customers. 

[Matt]

2 minutes ago, beats23 said:

True. It takes 100 cents to make a dollar, which means every cent counts, no matter how small. I'm 100% sure your company would make extra income by offering extra features, such as your course app, to classic customers. 

But we risk spending 150 cents to make that dollar by doing that.

[beats23]

21 minutes ago, Matt said:

I don't remember this being discussed as something on our roadmap specifically. There was a notion of doing more to monetise communities around the start of v5.

The pay-to-view (pay-to-access areas in the forum and page app) feature was mentioned a few times by @Charles. I can't find the threads. In the April release live chat, I asked if the feature was coming to IPSv4, and Charles said it's part of a commerce update you're working on for IPSv5.

 

You can see Charles's response in the YouTube video.

Quote

Hi, will these features mentioned on the forum, pay to access areas in the forum and page app be release before IPS v5?

(Jump to the answer in the video)

 

 

 

 

[Matt]

Ok, we still have plans in that direction, but not everything will get into 5.0.0.

1 hour ago, EliasM said:

I would like to suggest that all the features that can work on self-hosting be available in the classic version with different plans for the classic version starting from $500 to $1500

I genuinely do not think there is a market for a $1500 self-hosted option outside of enterprise which often have needs way beyond hosting things themselves and the cost to run that size of community means we're probably much more cost-effective just to host it anyway. We have more knowledge and experience with our platform and the resources it needs.

[Marco Junior]

2 hours ago, Matt said:

Live community features, and the topic summary feature relies on our own cloud platform. The topic summary is actually pretty clever in that our cloud platform pulls data directly from the database outside of the software and runs the whole thing through a custom algorithm written in python to calculate a score for each post. It then updates the database. This isn't run via tasks or cron it's run via our own queuing system on cloud. 

Topic assignments is likely to be added to the business tier and all those above. We are no different from others selling services that restrict some features to higher plans. In the past, plans were based around storage GB and bandwidth but that's rarely the case now. Tiers are now based on feature sets.

I know it can be uncomfortable to talk about the cold realities of running a business, but the landscape has changed for community platforms.

We feel that relaunching self-hosted with the Classic license has allowed self-hosting to remain viable for the life of v5. That doesn't mean it won't be the case for whatever comes after, it just means that no one internally is even thinking about v6, let alone making plans for it. I can't give you a cast iron guarantee of something that may not exist. Who knows where we'll be in five years time. 

In 2024 to date, cloud represents 86% of our income. Without Cloud, Invision Community would not be here, or at least not as we know it now.

By having a profitable model, we can still provide a self-hosted option which just about breaks even or makes a small loss depending on how many bugs us developers add in. We are happy with this. Hopefully you are happy with this. We have committed to this model.

But it does mean that there will be a divergence in feature sets. Partly because it's hard to build modern features with just PHP and MySQL and partly a business decision to entice people up the tiers.

We could create a docker image with node, etc and be incredibly rigid with hosting environments to the point only a few hosts are supported with droplets, etc. But that would decimate our self-hosting customer base with most not being able to run the required servers, or not having the knowledge to set it up and it would decimate our cloud business by offering the same functionality but elsewhere.

That's the business stuff, let's move on to transparency.

Part of the discourse around self-hosting versus cloud (even though we never frame it like this) is toxic. There is a small but incredibly vocal minority that refuse to accept that they cannot get every single feature we write and drag every feature release blog down with negativity, angry posting about cloud's existence, and accusations of 'money grabbing' (you are very welcome to pay our AWS bill). This can be hard to handle in a public forum. We have two options; endlessly have the same conversations or hide/block/ban posts and people which then comes across as thin-skinned and unable to take criticism.

Ahrefs does not have the problem that we have. Their customers are all 'cloud' customers and they're used to not getting all the features, so to say "yeah we'll test it in beta but you might not get it" will not be met with (much) anger and resentment that we seem to get when we mention "cloud only".

This has been ongoing for years and is the reason why we heavily moderate comments on our blog posts. You don't get to see a lot of the rage posting because we never approve it. But it's there. It's always there.

With v5, live topics, live community and topic summary were only ever going to be cloud only due to the underlying technology. Two out of three of those already exist on cloud so should come as no surprise that they remain so.

The other features we were undecided. From our point of view, everything is a tier. We could bring topic assignments to Classic, but then it would mean that we'd need to bring it to all cloud tiers. Which means that there's little incentive to pay for a higher tier level.

We could have said "this feature may be on a higher tier than classic" on the blog announcement but it would only invite more toxicity and more anger from this minority group. We wanted to wait until we had it decided. And part of that decision was based on how it went over during the alpha and beta stages. When we create a feature, we never truly know how it'll shape up, or even if we'll keep it; more true during the early stages.

Now we're in the beta stages, we have a firmer idea of its usefulness and future direction and are more able to make those decisions. That's the honest truth. There is no conspiracy. We have customers who run large enterprise communities testing these same features and offering input too.

We could have done better for sure. But it's a really tight line we're trying to walk on between informing customers about where possible features may end up without instigating another round of self-hosted versus cloud which is draining quite honestly. Not to mention demoralising for our team who proudly present their work and a good portion of the feedback is on why self-hosted licenses aren't getting it.

But moving back to features, if you look at the volume of work that has gone into v5 and all the good stuff that's been added, it really is a very small percentage of features that will not make it to every single product tier we offer.

As always, we may not be perfect, but we're here and talking about it.

 

I understand all !

Let me be clear that I am not questioning the way you manage your business, or trying to offend the work of the entire team, especially since I am a developer and I know how much effort you are all putting into the official launch of a new product.

I really just wanted to understand the issue of self-hosting, whether or not it has the "assign topic" feature. The other features have already been offered in the cloud, so I know that to have them I would have to be a cloud subscriber.

As for the "assign topic", when you manage a gaming community, assigning replies and topics in general is a brilliant feature, and it really gets me excited, so much so that I started using the services again because of these announcements!

Anyway, if any of my posts directly offended any member, whether on the team or not, please forgive me, it was not intentional.

[Adriano Faria]

13 minutes ago, Marco Junior said:

I really just wanted to understand the issue of self-hosting, whether or not it has the "assign topic" feature.

That's not really a big thing, Marco. Any 3rd-party developer can replicate this in a custom job for you: https://www.invisioneer.org/forums/forum/17-custom-requests/

[Omri Amos]

6 hours ago, Matt said:

In 2024 to date, cloud represents 86% of our income. Without Cloud, Invision Community would not be here, or at least not as we know it now.

By having a profitable model, we can still provide a self-hosted option which just about breaks even or makes a small loss depending on how many bugs us developers add in. We are happy with this. Hopefully you are happy with this. We have committed to this model.

 

I get that, this makes total sense (considering your high prices for the cloud hosting), but your business started as a software, and some customers rely on that software.

I have my own server (by the way, costs less than your cheapest plan..) and I use it to host my Wordpress website. This website also includes the IPS forums, with tight connections between them (custom automatic SSO, articles->topic and comments->messages syncing, etc) - I technically can't and won't switch to cloud hosting just for the forums - it simply won't integrate well with my entire website that I have around the forums.

I believe you should offer your cloud hosting to the customers that are interested in that, and you can even have some cloud-only features if that it technically only possible to make these features under your own cloud platform.

But what I don't understand is why you are limiting and blocking features, that as far as I understand, CAN technically run on the self-hosted software, and it's limited just because you decided it should be a higher-tier only feature - and that tier is unavailable at all for self-hosted customers, for no real reason other them trying to lure them into the cloud hosting option.

Limit features - that's fine.
Create higher tiers - that's fine.
But let us actually choose these tiers, even if we choose to self-host the software on our own servers, for whatever (technical or not) reason.

[PanSevence]

Let’s appreciate the work of the Invision Community team in developing the IC5 software. As a self-hosted user, I fully agree with this approach. The christmas holidays are coming, so let’s enjoy what we’re receiving because the new version of the software is amazing and brings great value. Let’s hope the new business model for self-hosted users meets your expectations, and we’ll see another version in the future. Unfortunately, looking at the issues caused by self-hosted users, I think there’s a high likelihood that you might move away from this model entirely, but that’s just my humble opinion.

Edited December 3 by PanSevence

[Marco Junior]

7 hours ago, Adriano Faria said:

That's not really a big thing, Marco. Any 3rd-party developer can replicate this in a custom job for you: https://www.invisioneer.org/forums/forum/17-custom-requests/

I will not afford to pay third-party developers again.

Many of them barely respond to their customers after the marketplace closed!

I have purchased several third-party plugins and some exclusive ones, some of which were very expensive and I have only lost money.

I send messages and the developers do not respond, or they simply ask for more money for something that has already been paid for and there were promises of updates!

It is difficult to trust third-party developers again.

I know very well that it is possible to develop this and any other feature, but what guarantee do I have that I will receive updates from at least decent support.

I no longer recommend anyone to buy services from third parties.

[Matt]

3 hours ago, Omri Amos said:

I get that, this makes total sense (considering your high prices for the cloud hosting), but your business started as a software, and some customers rely on that software.

I have my own server (by the way, costs less than your cheapest plan..) and I use it to host my Wordpress website. This website also includes the IPS forums, with tight connections between them (custom automatic SSO, articles->topic and comments->messages syncing, etc) - I technically can't and won't switch to cloud hosting just for the forums - it simply won't integrate well with my entire website that I have around the forums.

I believe you should offer your cloud hosting to the customers that are interested in that, and you can even have some cloud-only features if that it technically only possible to make these features under your own cloud platform.

But what I don't understand is why you are limiting and blocking features, that as far as I understand, CAN technically run on the self-hosted software, and it's limited just because you decided it should be a higher-tier only feature - and that tier is unavailable at all for self-hosted customers, for no real reason other them trying to lure them into the cloud hosting option.

Limit features - that's fine.
Create higher tiers - that's fine.
But let us actually choose these tiers, even if we choose to self-host the software on our own servers, for whatever (technical or not) reason.

I think I answered this fairly comprehensively in my post above.

2 hours ago, PanSevence said:

Let’s appreciate the work of the Invision Community team in developing the IC5 software. As a self-hosted user, I fully agree with this approach. The christmas holidays are coming, so let’s enjoy what we’re receiving because the new version of the software is amazing and brings great value. Let’s hope the new business model for self-hosted users meets your expectations, and we’ll see another version in the future. Unfortunately, looking at the issues caused by self-hosted users, I think there’s a high likelihood that you might move away from this model entirely, but that’s just my humble opinion.

Much appreciated. Most customers are fine and topics like these are just concerned customers voicing their thoughts which is fair and reasonable. 

[Marco Junior]

Just to be clear, my comment is not related to @Adriano Faria, I had no problems with him. But rather with other PROVIDERS who today no longer respond to their customers.

[Gary]

I think your post, @Matt, needs to be featured, bold, highlighted, underlined, pinned and made a permanent announcement (at least until v6).

If there was a love reaction, I'd be hitting it!

Despite the minority, the majority are behind you and support you and the rest of the Invision Community team. Hard decisions need to be made sometimes and standing by your decisions shows true character and just how much the software means to you all. You simply cannot please everyone. However unfortunate that may be, it's reality.

Edited December 3 by Gary

[Dll]

21 hours ago, Matt said:

As always, we may not be perfect, but we're here and talking about it.

Matt, I appreciate the reply. We have been customers for the best part of 20 years now, and although I have, at times, been vocal in voicing concerns (cloud vs self-hosted not being one of them btw), I'm sorry to hear that the negativity around the cloud is continuing to create hassle for you and the team. It's a lesson learned that things may be going on out of sight which affect the things we do see, so apologies if my comments in this thread have added to that.

Edited December 4 by Dll

[Matt]

There's no need for apologies for this topic. It's better to air concerns and have a discussion than let the fester in the dark.

I appreciate your custom and sticking with us.

Our primary aim is to safeguard the future of Invision Community, not just for those that work here but for the thousands of communities that rely on us to keep delivering updates and new features to help keep their communities active. It means making tough decisions at times, and these aren't always popular but they really do help secure a future.

The most profitable model possible was the one we had 15 years ago when we were selling hundreds of licenses a month at $149.99 a go and our only costs were answering support tickets.

Our monthly AWS bill is quite frankly a hate crime.

[Day_]

I love the cloud. Extremely happy customer and for all of the criticism over the pricing, it’s worth every penny to me even without the additional features.

I don’t doubt for a second you can go and buy a dedicated server for a fraction of the price, however it’s the time to manage that server, the continuous updates to ensure efficiency and security, the time it takes to understand how to manage that server.

Many, like myself don’t have the time or posses the knowledge, that’s why the Cloud has been a godsend. Prior to the Cloud I was on a VPS playing piggy in the middle when issues arose. They said this, tell them that, it’s not us it’s them and so on. Now it’s one email sent, problem solved within the hour, all done for you sir, anything else please let us know. Shout out to @Marc.

And that’s happened maybe a couple of times in at a guess closing on 2 years in March. It just works.

I see the criticism, I understand the frustration over the tiers, however don’t go dissing the Cloud as for some of us, and I would guess 85% of the 85% Cloud users find invaluable. 

I’ll also say this, a future where @Matt and the team ever decide this all isn’t worth it, the time, dedication, stresses are not worth the financial returns, it’s a future I genuinely fear as you look at Xenforo, you look at vBulletin, with all due respect that’s not a future I want for my site.

If they were trying to sell us a car but the wheels were an optional extra for £1000 each, or headlight bulbs not coming as standard I would get it. You’re getting a fully functional car for the sticker price, but if you want the extra comforts, something to pleasure your passengers like heated seats, it will cost you a little extra and we’ll chuck in a driver as well for you so you can sit in the back and enjoy the ride with your passengers. More time to catch up.

Matt, I’ll send you the invoice for this post later, cheers!