vometia

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.

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.
 
 

Just spit balling ideas for helping with devs but another option would be to tier commissions for addons potentially.
I dont know what IPB charges right now as a % but say a dev gets a X% discount on renewal when the commission is higher for sales which would get the interest of smaller devs and help with free dev's. Then when they grow and sell more they can do the math and pay the full renewal cost to reduce the % because they have peaked over that. I know free addons have a staff cost but they really really help the ecosystem of IPB.
This is a premium product but without dev's it becomes a niche product just like many many other tech examples out there.
Also email support really really should be kept for the foreseeable, hell you could even do a discount for renew for no option to email support like inverse priority support although I know that may be a lesser option but it would help out smaller sites.
I am not sure how much this was all dogfooded with 3rd party devs or smaller customers before these decisions were made but I am surprised this fallout was not better prepared for or handled.

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.

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

These news are nonsense. From what they are to the way they are being communicated.
"It's not bad news" - yeah, that's right. It's not bad news, it's terrible news. You can't call a 50% price increase "modest" while removing e-mail support and pricing it 1250$ annually. 
By doing that you effectively cut hobby sites like mine. Paying 215$ for software that isn't making money in a country where median salary is 400$ is not a good idea at all.
But what's even worse is that you lack honesty in this. Instead of communicating this like "guys, there's a huge change in our business model, we now want medium and large businesses as our clients" you say something about "modest" price increasing and "strong community" that will help with bugs how? Why would I want to pay 215$ annually for not being able to deal with bugs at all? And I've found many before, which I was able to resolve thanks to your now gone support.

I won't be supporting this.

Jesus Christ
The timing of this is just so uncanny to me. I was already doing the last app/plugin updates for what we have on our community with our current renewal, but we(staff) already silently decided to leave Invision behind going forward and I'd say we made this decision at the perfect time. 
When I joined back in 2017 this community was thriving. Now I come to check and it's quite dead when you take into consideration how many users it has and how many used to be active. I believe the final nail in the coffin for this was when the forum was reorganized and all community content was placed behind a paywall (needing an active license).  It's pretty much a ghost town unless you give someone something to argue about, but I've already given my opinions on this in the past so I won't waste time rehashing.
In the past year alone we have noticed a huge decline in the marketplace with numerous developers leaving and a lot of things becoming abandoned due to low sales and neglect from Invision's part for some of their own apps. I've been worried about this since 2018/19, and my concern just kept growing after each update and policy change. I've slowly realized that this may have not been the best software to use for my type of community, but I knew with the marketplace we could do our best to mold it the way we need it.  That clearly won't be an option for us now when there's only a few developers I trust to buy from and I see them posting about dropping support for apps that we use heavily. (An art site can't exist without a gallery, even though the gallery app is the most atrocious thing and we've spent so much money trying to improve it ourselves.)
I say good luck to those who didn't have plans of leaving before today and also to those who decide to stay due to whatever circumstances. We've put thousands of dollars into this software, but eventually you have to sit down and really think about whether or not taking the loss is worth it in the end if you can do better elsewhere. The lack of transparency while preaching about transparency, the cheesy community manager reply rhetoric, and the subtle gaslighting is just bonkers.

I am concerned that you might think that the feedback is "send an e-mail a few hours before changing the look of your web site (and oh-by-the-way-side-note-pricing-models-for-existing-clients-go-into-effect-immediately-with-no-significant-advance-notice)."
The feedback is that you should have provided notice on revised pricing models, inclusive of what those revised prices would be months before implementing those changes so that organizations could make appropriate changes in their expected operational expenses.
Speaking for our organization, there's no issue with the changes other than you didn't give any notice to revise our operational forecasts and planning, and our renewal is also in November. Thankfully, we have the ability to reallocate funds unexpectedly, yet not all of your customers are in that position, and it's rather poor form for what we consider a partner in our organization's ongoing success.
I receive an e-mail from a streaming video service that their monthly price will go up one dollar with more than a month's notice. It's just inexcusable to have tied this all into throwing a new shade of paint on your sales site.

No no no. Come on. You weren't minutes late, you're weeks late. You have clients who have renewals at the new price due in days (maybe hours), which due to the change to annual pricing and the increase will mean an outlay of more than double what they were expecting. Can you not see how giving a reasonable amount of notice is the least you should have done?

Again, change comes very slow, and often we get things we never asked for.  "Pay us lots of money and wait to see what you get..."  I don't think so.
I am not a happy customer at this time and still feel this was done to suit the big customers.
Moving to your online plan is not an option for me.
Like others have said, we have options, and it looks like many of us will exercise those options.

In advance would have been a start. 

I knew the prices would rise with this site relaunch, but I expected more a generous correction for inflation for new orders (not renewals). But the changes are far from slight. And for people like me who have many licenses, it actually threatens my entire business, because the price change is multiplied by the number of licenses. And the new terms make it all even worse. For my oldest license, I had an upcoming renewal of $85 as the last payment in this financial year. Now that jumped to $310—well over 300%! Yes, it’s for 12 months, but I still need to pay it NOW without having earned this money through the site or even planned for it. And even if would manage with this one site, I certainly can’t manage it for 5 self-hosted licenses and their upcoming renewals. 
And it didn’t had to be this way. There is the established system of grandfathering existing prices while only charging more for new customers for example. Or it could be a slow transition that is announced a year or two in advance, so we could have prepared for it someone. Dropping these drastic price and terms changes on us like a bomb, effective and possibly charged immediately, was a bad move.