Davyc

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.

I'm really glad with all new features, but this new renewal pricing give me a serious pause here. sure there were discussions and decisions about this, but I really hoped Invision at least take developers to account on this. in a few month I have to renew my license with almost empty marketplace credit. no heads up no nothing, just pay renewal by year with this kind of price ups. I may decide not to renew for awhile, or remove some apps from my license and discontinue many of my resources in marketplace. my plan was to expand, create more resources, themes ... and not this. can IPS come up with better solutions for this?

"Don’t worry, it’s not bad news".
Going from $190.- a year to $280 a year is not bad news?
Cutting email support while hiking up the price like this is not bad news?
Cutting email support while having a terribly lacking documentation (since day 1) is not bad news?
Keeping innovations away from those who self host then when that dust settles, hiking up the price is not bad  news?
 
I dread the day you do come with what you consider "bad news".
Going to have think this over. Might going to cut this chord.
 
Looking at your pricing structure I get the feeling you are in the process of driving those who self host away. I can be wrong but it would make sense to just have medium to large businesses as your clients. 
 
 

I agree and when looking at different platforms for whatever, I always look at third party apps and integrations for expansion. A healthy 3rd party marketplace tells a story of a healthy platform in my opinion. 

Sounds good, but if customers leave and addon sales drop, free licenses won't keep devs here.

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.

Holy crap, I missed the no more support part.
So, just so I understand.
Improvements and substantial releases will likely continue at the snail's pace we've seen over the past few year.
I like the six-month plan because of the lack of updates.  Why do I want to pay when there's nothing to upgrade?  Now I can't do that any longer.
Everything costs a lot more, more than hobby sites can afford.
Developers are already telling us (after only a few hours) that they are bailing out.  Add ons (sometimes for things you remove) will dry up.
If I need support, I have the honor of paying for it.
Seems like you helped your small customers make up their minds.
What a mess.

I honestly think I'm done here.

This is kind of a bummer for me today. Just last week I was so excited to convert over from Xenforo. I thought man I really like this community and the route that they are going with their products. I wanted to join this platform so bad. Was so excited to see what the future holds. I really liked the way all the developers interreacted with the members here. I am ok with a slight price increase for a better product. I think the biggest disappointment is the lack of support coming. I am paying for a product, if I run into a problem with that product as long as I have active support I would like help with it. It's like purchasing insurance. Might not ever need it but it's nice to know that it's there. I even thought about paying for the premium support here recently. For $100 even if I never needed it I thought it's not to bad of a price, now mine shows $1250 for that same support. I thought this morning after checking out the new site design, that this was all just a mess up with the prices from the new site design. But after reading all day it seems real. No one will go with the addons purchases anymore unless you are a big forum because of the price increase. Then it will start a chain reaction and won't have developers anymore for addons since people will be bailing. Now I am stuck with two choices either pay the high prices or now I have to convert everything back over to Xenforo after being back with IPS for only a week. Kind of depresses me. 

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.

This, to me, is the worst thing - I'm unaffected, I can plan for February, I can cover things.
But when you have someone who suddenly sees a "slight" rise in what they have to pay in a few days compared to what they had previously budgeted for? That's not on.

Thanks for support us / me the last years... But now it's time for me to check new possibilities.
310 $ a year are bad news. 

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?

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.
 

I don't understand this at all. What do you mean there was no great way to communicate this?
From: IPS Community
To: CoffeeCake <coffeecake@mmmcoffee.cake>
Date: September 1, 2021 9:00 am
Subject: Upcoming changes to your subscription
Dear community administrator,
Effective December 1, 2021, we will be making the following adjustments....
<insert changes here>

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. 

I've done it - removed my payment method and exploring other options. No one likes price rises, but when people are still recovering from the pandemic this is like a sledgehammer blow.  It's also going to affect devs who supply much needed apps in the marketplace; if people start leaving then their revenue is going to slip and then they may leave too.  It's a slippery slope IPS has ventured into and may be something to regret later. I just bought another license this year for another project, now that's on the bonfire until I find another solution.  Talk about being hit between the eyes!

When doing your refresh can you also take a look at the help files?  Some are way out of date and most don't give clear examples on how to implement some of the options available.  Not everyone is a PHP coder, but many don't mind getting their hands dirty now and then to make some positive changes to their sites.
An example would be (and this is just an example as it comes to mind) - how to implement Google Maps.  The instructions are out of date and it was a minefield navigating how to set it up - I gave up at the finish.  Another would be how to use custom fields and how to best use them, including any CSS examples that are needed to dress those fields so they look the part. Plain English examples are needed.
I'm sure that a lot of people would appreciate being able to make changes without any horror stories occurring.  As the suite evolves so should the help files and if you are including community enhancements that involve third parties, who are also evolving, then the help files should reflect this.  I believe this is just as important as a site refresh and apologies for hijacking the topic, but a refresh should be more than just some site cosmetics 🙂
 

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?

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.
 

Kinda funny, the only reason why I have chosen Invision is because of Plugins/Apps from Adriano and DawidPi(I probably have like over 15-20+ of their plugins or so).
I'm not saying Invision is a bad Forum system, but out of the box it just lacks certain features that I really need and feel like they should be implemented by IPS themselves.
The fact that developers with a such a high amount of active apps/regular updates etc. have to pay for their licenses is in my eyes really "dumb".
Yes they earn money from it, but now with this price increase it could be a death blow for a lot of the developers ^^, maybe not instantly but definitely gradually...

If Adriano or DawidPl left this site, I could no longer update my forum to the newest version, which would also make me not renew my license and in the long run 100% move to another platform.
I feel like this will end bad, terrible in the long run.