Summit360

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. 
 
 

"we want to be as transparent as possible"
So springing a wild price increase out of the blue is being as transparent as possible, is it? What utter nonsense.

Hang on the price has increased for the license and with that we also lose email support?
So if my site crashes during an upgrade and I'm stuck, I can't get support as I used to anymore to help get it back despite paying more

I've gone from $85.00, to $250.00 / year?

Sorry. I can't afford that. Again, like others I only run hobby websites in my spare time (for fun).
I really think, that's me done with Invision. 20 years later. I fear, we will just all drop like flies...

I've been running an online forum since 2006 and I have been using IPS since (I think) at least 2011), so I've been a customer for 10 years. I have two licenses, another one is used for a client's website. 
I just want to say something about what I perceive is poor development practise from IPS regarding upgrades. Since version 4, every major point upgrade has brought me nothing but grief. You remove features that are integral to the functioning of my community and you introduce things that are, to be honest, seldom very useful. 
I don't know why you remove these things. Maybe there are reasons that make sense to yourselves as a company, but I have to tell you that after 10 years of going through these upgrade dramas, I am fast approaching the last straw. I don't have hundreds of hours to waste fixing things that were working before "upgrading" so that I can continue to use software I am paying for and which is supposed to me making my life easier (not harder). 
I understand the need for technology to change, but functionality should never just be tossed out the window because you may think it isn't working for your customers. 

+12 months any firmer ideas yet? 

https://invisioncommunity.com/4bugtrack/

Totally agree with @Dean_ &  @Paul E. this needs sorting. 

Absolutely a necessity to support multiple localhost development environments and to support the download of application/plugins directly from the IPS marketplace as existed in 4.4 and earlier. The inability to download files directly from the marketplace limits severely limits those that have installations that are not accessible from the outside internet, whether that be an internal corporate install or various development / virtualized environments.
It also prevents administrators and security folks from being able to audit applications and plugins prior to installation in any environment. At present, one must install an application/plugin prior to being able to review. In the past, we've purchased plugins/applications that upon inspection of the downloaded file, we found that there were breaking changes that did not follow IPS development guidelines and that would have resulted in a degradation of service in our production environment. Without inspecting those files in advance, we would have not been able to identify these issues.

As recommended, I'm creating this topic to reinstate the option to download files manually from the Marketplace.
It's bad enough you don't allow the download of apps we purchased when our licence has expired. But, to completely change the way file downloads are handle is a little much.

Please don't get me wrong, I love the idea that we can now do it all with ACP, but you shouldn't disable/change the way that a lot of us download files for localhost setups to test our sites before going live.

Please, please, please allow the option to download files manually like we've done for so many years!
 
(Edit: Happy 600 posts to me, woo!)

The stable version 3.0.0 is now available for download.
I introduced more control in update 3.0.0:

you can't
There is a big thing missing on Classified apps :
1) the possibility to filter the results : by price, by brand etc
2) A real search box with multiple criterias like you can see on various marketplaces :
i want to see the adverts with price less than $100, belonging to a category in particular etc
This is the major improvement we need for Classifieds
PLEASE LIKE THIS POST IF YOU SUPPORT THIS REQUEST !

Just to add to this as I'm sure we're not alone... I've reached the end of the economic line for a single VPS. I count myself lucky the provider is excellent and very few SPOF incidents. I don't wish to move to a single commodity dedicated server, I'm going horizontal. Using any of the leading VPS providers there is a 'private' network which isn't actually 'private'. A couple do offer it. A VPN would be the only solution that works at any host, based on your feedback @Lindywhich is more complex to setup and manage than certificates.
I don't think it's unreasonable for us to have a way of securely connecting to our database servers out of the box, others manage it.

Issuing certs and distributing them isn't really a challenge. With the rise of tools like RDS and other 'remote' cloud services, we're increasingly connected beyond the idilic single server setup. As @Johno2518 says, transport security is the key. Because even in a private world, it's not if, but when!

I'm probably going to solve this with either editing the core files, or following plan A with running Maria in a cluster and still having a 'localhost' connection. Its far better now than it used to be ? i.e. it works without needing a full-time dba to keep it running ?
 

Rob,

There is a quite straightforward and effective strategy I've used with my Vbulletin forum. I will be repeating it for the IBP forum I am migrating to.

This crowd offers a great CDN service that is very easy to setup. www.simplecdn.com is who I've been using for a couple of months now. They start of by giving you 15$ worth of credit to experiment with. Once you are happy you can apply for a CNAME extension, these actually cost $25SUD and it's the point where you have to part with money.

Since July it has cost me 100$ (added to account) however I have 77$ left on my account, you have to prepay before your 15$free runs out. I've just paid a transit charge of 0.38$ for 9.78Gb of usage.

I'm using a mirror bucket and you can vary the cache time, it's really simple, you change the asset url e.g. js or css to there server. The first time the asset is requested, the mirror will connect and cache the file and then serve the file, thereafter it's all on there cache till it expires.

You can also use both gzip and non-gzip'd mirrors along with different hour caches settings, for example:
1 Hour Expire; gzip Enabled 1 Hour
http://xxx.lg1x3z.simplecdn.net/ 3 Hours Expire; gzip Enabled 3 Hours
http://xxx.lg1x4z.simplecdn.net/ 6 Hours Expire; gzip Enabled 6 Hours
http://xxx.lg1x5z.simplecdn.net/ 12 Hours Expire; gzip Enabled 12 Hours
http://xxx.lg1x6z.simplecdn.net/ 24 Hours Expire; gzip Enabled 24 Hours
http://xxx.lg1x8z.simplecdn.net/ 7 Days Expire; gzip Enabled 7 Days

for images with IPB it appears you could edit the image url in general config (v3.0.#) for other assets css, js and so on there might be a little more editing to be done.

Hope his helps, it has for me :)