Summit360

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. 

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.
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.

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 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...

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. 

Generally speaking, after so many years I feel I can say that invision is a company that thinks well about the choices it makes. But this time, as others have already written, I am very concerned about the collapse of the Marketplace. It is quite clear to me that the new pricing policy and the type of support offered for a fee is aimed exclusively at the business sector. This means that hundreds of hobby forums will be looking for alternative software solutions and this also means less appeal for me and many other developers to develop app and plugins.
Although I don't know the reasons for a series of "blows" thrown at the customer at the same time, I find some of the choices made by Invision risky.
Even if I accept the price increase, which is something I can live with, I think it was a mistake to remove the possibility to pay every 6 months. This has disoriented customers even more, even giving a perception of a heavier increase than it really is.
Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that one of invision's greatest assets has always been its ticket support. 
In short, I'm a bit worried, I'm sure I'll be one of the last to abandon ship... I've been here for 20 years... but I confess that I've been looking for alternatives for the first time in many years.
The problem is not the price, I am more concerned about the choice to let the hobby communities go.
Unfortunately I don't think the the fresh new green buttons can turn this into good news.

Let's see, I understand that even the pandemic period is not the best but let's try to give confidence to Invision as Jordan asks. Instead I would ask invision to review at least the possibility of returning to payment every six months, not for me, but I think it would help many.

"Don't worry, you won't be hurt, just bend over and cough!"

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.
 
 

Strange, after more than 21 years now using IPB forums, now I have to consider switching to another forum platform.

I am not sure where to start with all this. I cant believe you guys did all this along with a site redesign at the same time and no notice period, I am speechless!
I cant believe I will be losing email support while you increase the price at the same time. I paid for priority support and now that's an insane price per year for what is email support. It takes serious cahoonas to both increase the price and cripple email support at the same time. Email support pricing should be far far more reasonable, I honestly thought $1250 was a mistake when I saw the screenshot above, I could understand having an email support pricing tier and then a $1250 priority support tier but also renewals shouldnt be going up while we lose proper email support.
Then if we dont pay for support we cant use the market place and cant even save our prior purchases so if we need to reinstall an addon we are out of luck.
We are lucky, we can afford the support increase price wise but one of the HUGE reasons I liked IPB was the email support, it can be very curt at times but I valued it and if you had only increased the price and not removed email support I would have dealt with it as it has been a decade.
I am strongly considering renewing our Xenforo license to have a play and test viability after this.
Initial feedback:
Build the knowledge base publicly first before removing support
I understand the desire to have self support with a knowledge base, its a good thing for everyone if it gets populated but you should have been doing this months ago building the knowledge base publicly before doing any changes, that way you can point to the option and say its there and useful. Get a common ticket theme in, create a KB article then have the subject field for support request do a search as you type pointing you to articles that sounds similar before submitting the email request.
We need a reported/acknowledged bugs area
This needs to be along with the knowledge base really, a bug tracker would have cut your support requests because people would be able to see if it has been reported before, I know the support forum kinda does that but its not a bug tracker and its not clear if its an active bug with a fix pending or release or even workaround.
When I hit an issue on other software I always check to see if it has been reported first on bug trackers but because of the strange mantra of open a ticket you guys have we are blind to upcoming fixes usually until release, Jordon has at least been mentioning them but its still not a proper solution.
Both things above should have been done before these policy changes with support
That way your customers would have become familiar with them and you could have iterated through any issues with them before removing email support and you could actually see if this type of support works well before causing big issues for your customers, it seems so rushed.
You guys made the whole "tickets are similar" problem yourselves with the submit a ticket mantra that is here, you should have been correcting that before making sweeping changes to support. You have entered self support mantra with none of the real tools used by others to help aid people do this. You may have plans for these tools but you literally have not shown them to us which is crazy if they exist. Right now we have a sole forum for support, I have no idea why you have rushed this through.
I have more to say but I thought I would shoot out first.
Please get the knowledge base live and a bug tracker live asap to at least help and to be honest delay the email support changes past the renewal/January deadline until this mess is sorted and people are comfortable, this should be a much much slower transition.
 
Also contributors/devs need a discount/special license to prevent the massive bleed that will happen.
Its crazy you dont have a way of reducing their burden and its a major issue to the viability of the market place and IPB. Their are fewer addons here than other competitors and it will only get worse with dev's having to pay large amounts to renew AND customers of devs having to pay to even buy their addons or even install them. This is crazy crazy crazy and so hostile to developers. Its one of the main reasons no one wants a certain v5 of software out there, regularly people complain about the lack of addons.
You could get them to apply with the proviso the license isnt used to sell addons not on the marketplace and not run a full site on. Aka they can have a public site showcasing with the options etc and even getting support there but it cant be a way for a serious site that has nothing to do with the developer to get a cheap license. Hell they could apply after they have published an addon and the large discount applies to the renewals side of it.
I am really disappointed some of the best developers here are now looking at possibly removing addons to reduce their burden rather than developing for those addons and being able to test on those addons, its so opposite and harmful because of the increased costs.
 
And there was me thinking things had improved a lot when @Jordan Miller with communications and community activity, I actually could see things improving a lot with better engagement with end customers then this whole chaos happens.

Hello,
I haven't dared go look at my Client Centre yet! The few groats I've earned from the Marketplace are all I've had as income since 2017 since being made redundant due to UK austerity cuts. So it's a scary prospect.
Honestly... Nobody likes change. It's rarely good. Someone always gets the pointy end of the stick. It's usually me or the little guy, but rarely the enterprise corporations who can afford the change.
However I appreciate that prices haven't increased for a decade, and a reasonable increase would be understandable, we know this, it's overdue but it needs to be said these significant changes are sadly once again being poorly implemented and probably compounded by an almost total lack of notice, no dialogue, a lack of communication, causing major headaches and increasing uncertainty.
Yes, of course you don't have to consult or engage, but in my experience, just like change between employers, managers and employees, if you do, you'll often find it makes change a lot more smooth and easier to swallow. Both company and customer may come to appreciate things they were unaware of, and/or offer suggestions or alternatives.
A few points of feedback for what they may be worth...
Re the price changes...
I think there has been an obvious failure to give fair and reasonable notice of the financial changes, in particular to those needing to renew in the real short term (meaning days, weeks) but especially to everyone who needs to renew in the next few months. Hopefully Lindy and Charles will realise this oversight, take ownership of the situation from a customer service perspective and immediately ensure no financial impacting changes until the next 6 month renewal period for all non-enterprise clients has expired. After all IPS says it's all about supporting communities. So do the right thing.  This is a decision that will strike at the heart of IPS communities that were already struggling even before COVID impacted, and those under significant financial pressure. For many, having to find more than double the funds up front for a year in advance, is not an easy sell, but for many is not easy to accommodate either especially with short notice. The lack of a small discount for multiple license holders is disappointing. Don't compound things, please space them out and easier to swallow!  
Re the Support changes:
Removing Support Ticket facility is a seriously poor and frankly ridiculous decision. Increasing the license costs at the same time is pretty terrible and almost ridiculous. IPS Support should make better use of the Support Forums, absolutely, but in addition to Support Tickets, not instead of them. Many I suspect are fed up already with being to create a ticket for most Support Topics they create reporting problems. You tell us it's because you need site access to investigate or fix things, so how will this help? 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 considerations. If you don't use your own ticket system, I can see a time coming when you drop it entirely from Commerce. Maybe even move it to a separate app or module for Commerce. "Our enterprise clients use dedicated solutions like Zendesk, so we're dropping it" sort of thing.

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 

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.

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).

I honestly think I'm done here.

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.

Just got the email. It starts funny, I must say:
”Don’t worry, it’s not bad news, but there is a price increase”
Yes, it’s bad!

It's waffle, Jordan. It's the equivalent of "Look at this shiny thing over here while we sh*t on your doorstep" in internet terms. I've kept schtum about things on here for years, but this is getting to be the final straw.
And don't reply to me with the "I feel you" waffle, please.
 

And between you all, none of you thought that communicating the changes in advance may be the way forward? 

 

Yes there was. The email should have landed first. Logging into a refreshed website to find out the prices have increased without so much as a whisper, especially when increasing as much as they have, is quite frankly appalling. If customers in the sector I work in found out about prices like that, we'd be fined by a regulator for treating customers unfairly.
In the years I've been an IPS customer I can count on one hand, with fingers to spare, how many times I have been upset about something IPS has done. I have truly been an advocate of IPS in all that time. This is a time I am really quite upset, because the feeling I am left with is simply that IPS no longer values me as a customer. If it did, it would have taken steps to communicate with me in a more proactive way. An email landing tomorrow is like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted... Pointless.
I've gone from a $140 renewal split across two 6-month periods to a single $205.00 renewal every year.
Firstly, that's a 68% price increase in one go and it's an inflation-busting one at that. I do not expect a business to holds its prices forever, but I do expect to have price increases communicated before they're made effective, and I do expect them to be reasonable. Secondly, and this is leaves a far more bitter taste in my mouth, it's a great way of increasing IPS's cash flow whilst simultaneously hurting mine. IPS benefits from a big chunk of renewal cost all in one go, while I'm left trying to desperately plug a short-term financial gap that was not planned for. Thirdly, it's due in November so I am left with little time to deal with this situation. It may not be as short notice as some, and I really feel for those people, but a small hobbyist website like mine can't just muster those kind of funds in that short space of time.
This entire fiasco really is a piss-poor show towards a long-time loyal customer.
I'm afraid that suggestion falls flat as soon as this happens:

To not renew, and risk running unpatched software, simply puts my users' data at risk. That is the reason I renew religiously every 6 months, and have always done so. I know that technically we can do this, but I do not believe it to be sensible to do so.

I've used this in the past as well.  
 
 
 
Guess that settles it!  I will NOT be renewing my IPS but will continue to use it as is.  The real losers here are the independent developers who I've purchased from many times in the marketplace.  I will revisit renewing once 4.7 or maybe 5.0 is released, as 4.6 was a yawn-fest in my opinion. 

Bottom line: You didn't communicate these changes effectively at all, and you didn't learn from the last time(s) you didn't communicate effectively.
What will the next surprise be that you don't communicate effectively to your customers be?

1. You chose to update your website and the price that your existing customers pay before emailing them. It's not really about what is posted on here. And you make it sound like emailing 'thousands' of clients is a difficult or time consuming process. Which of course it isn't, beyond writing the email, which could have been done weeks ago, unless you made the prices up on the spot this morning.
2. You're probably going to have to drop the 'barely any clients use this forum' line to justify the lack of reasonable communication on offer, now you're only offering support through it to the majority of your clients.
I'm broadly supportive of the price rise, but can you not just admit that the way it's been communicated has been poor and stop spinning it. It would be so much easier to believe the 'we want to be transparent' pr type guff then.

I've been wondering for a few hours whether to leave an opinion or not ...
I can accept new prices - it is clear that you have an argument for this.
But!?!
Even 4.6.6 does not offer a performance boost, especially for mobile.
Too many sites that allow Google ads - Web Vitals have desperately bad results - I don't see anything in this direction in your work, developers.
And what should owners of these sites do? Google lowers their revenue, you increase their license!
Apart from your own budget, don't you have an interest in performance improvements for your clients?
You have good enough developers and you can easily solve all the requirements for Web Vitals. Why don't you do it?
I wonder if I'm wondering, but your new site is also performing poorly

 
Your FCP and LCP results for the last few hours are deteriorating.
You have also allowed duplication ID of "elSigninButton_mobile".
https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Finvisioncommunity.com%2Fforums
In short - nothing new, but more expensive.
 

In 2017 I paid 550$ for this:

Now it's increased near 50%, the renewal went from 190$ to 280$ / year.
For me, the price increase is still bearable, as long as my income from the forum does not drop significantly. But for hobby communities, such prices are probably harder to bear. By the way, these hobbyists are free advertising media for Invision, as they promote their product. Ultimately, new forum operators orientate themselves on the platforms in which they themselves are active. If they disappear from the market, this advertising also disappears. Another very important aspect is the existing add-ons of a forum platform provider, these are and always have been a driving force for a successful community, see vBulletin. Some developers have already spoken out about the price increases. If this price increase causes them to turn away from Invision, this will also lead to lower licence sales in the long term. So this new development could lead to a downward spiral.
I don't understand why developers as important as openfont and Adriano have to pay licence fees at all, because without them Invision would certainly not be where it is now. Without developers, without high quality addons, no customers, to put it bluntly. Just because of a few hundred dollars more revenue you risk losing everything you have built up over the years. This is not a wise decision because the developers are the be-all and end-all of any successful forum platform. 
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