My two cents: Invision is in a tough spot. Price hikes probably should have been gradual over the last 10 years. Moving to annual billing at the same time as the price increase, though, re-started our community's long-running discussion about moving off of IPS entirely.
The value of IPS for us has eroded over the 10 years we've had the product, mostly due to changing members' needs. So many other communities have turned to zero-cost solutions (like a sub-Reddit) or have completely abandoned forums for SNSes like Twitter, Facebook, Discord, etc. Those who still want their own private forum increasingly use open source software like Discourse.
Unfortunately, many of the other IPS features (Blog, Gallery, Pages, "calendaring") still feel half-baked when compared with software like NextCloud, WordPress, GApps, etc. Downloads & Commerce, however, are probably priced right for people who earn their living on this platform.
Since it sounds like the price increase is going to fund more development, I went over the list of new features in the past 2 years that Matt shared earlier in the thread with my community, to see if they felt they have been getting their money's worth. The only features they said they value are "Highlight topics in forum view when staff reply" and "Club improvements", both things we used to get from plugins.
As for @Matt's suggestion to go with their managed offering:
I suspect that this message falls on deaf ears for anyone posting in this thread right now. If you already have the knowledge to run (and extend) a solution like IPS yourself, $50/mo gets you a lot, even from the more expensive hosting providers out there. (Of course, IPS's hosted offering is much cheaper than Discourse's.)
For the changeover to forum-based support, I believe the messaging was worse than the decision -- it took reading this entire thread to come to terms with what was actually happening. We've had both great and poor experiences, both in private tickets and public threads. I think the move can be a good one, if the new forum can be well curated, easily searchable, and the process continues to make sense for things that shouldn't be public.
What to do? For now, we've requested a one-time, 6-month payment period reprieve, as offered in this thread, and are waiting for Sales to confirm. Thank you for making this available. We'll be taking the next few months to decide if we stay or jump ship. It's not a straightforward choice, and we share concerns with many of the others already expressed in this thread. We look forward to seeing what the monthly improvements will be, and are hoping for a road map of potential new features to come. In parallel, we'll be costing out what effort it'll take to move to a different solution.