sobrenome

Thank you.
I can't speak for everyone, but I can say that this is what I wanted. Action and an apology. 
By in large I don't mind this price increase, it was a shock, admittedly, but most of that comes down to the fact that it came out of the blue when I discovered it and had no prior warning of it. But to say that you haven't had a price increase in a decade? Was it really that long ago when the Branding Removal went up to $500? I thought it was not that long ago.
Either way; thank you for this. Putting it back to 6 month renewals is better for me, and hopefully a lot of other people too. My next question about support is what do we do with NSFW sites?
I'm sure you don't want porn site links appearing on your forums; which is why I am very careful about linking my forums where the public can see it, going to the extent where I alter screenshots and do inspect element to change things prior to taking the screenshots so that people can't draw connections and such, when pasting screenshots publicly. 
Finally my last question is, are we to expect regular price increases "In line with the rate of inflation" or something annually from now on like mobile phone contracts?

@Matt@Jordan Miller
Can you walk us through a support scenario where a customer without priority support has a downed site as a result of an IPS upgrade or some other unexpected IPS behavior with corresponding error message (i.e. it isn't immediately correlated to a server resource issue or configuration change)?
Old process (PRIORITY SUPPORT):
Customer opens ticket with IPS and mark as highest priority (site down) Within 24 hours, IPS evaluates via ticket information and updates ticket with resolution as to what they fixed or what was identified outside the scope of their support that needs to be fixed Customer verifies issue is resolved and if not, returns to #2 and may wait up to 24 hours (usually less) for an additional followup review?  If verified, customer addresses/closes the ticket. As I had priority support before, I had generally heard in a few hours from IPS when it came to critical issues and even high issues.  In general support, are you saying this could be up to 3 days of waiting while your site was down?
New process (NO PRIORITY SUPPORT):
Customer posts in a community forum indicating their site if offline, posts corresponding error messages and related server information, and de-identifies anything specific to their business/site if they wise to remain private OR simply requests a ticket be opened to review the issue privately? Within 3 days, IPS evaluates the issue via the topic information or private ticket and updates ticket with resolution as to what they fixed or what was identified outside the scope of their support that needs to be fixed Customer verifies issue is resolved and if not, returns to #2 and may wait up to 3 days for an additional followup review?  If verified, customer addresses/closes the ticket.  
I think the crucial aspect of support is availability and SLAs around resolving major issues that either result in the site being down or have a significant impact on its functionality.  I'm not sure what IPS' position is on this that drives the increase from $200 (I believe it was $100 per 6 months) to $1250, but it feels like the sites that are hobby oriented and have small/no revenue are priced out of the priority support and may have to sit waiting for days on end for their site to get back into an acceptable operational mode.  This shouldn't happen often, but I feel there should be an exception for these critical outage type support issues that mandates a faster response time even for smaller sites.  Or as I noted in previous reply, maybe some kind of scaling in pricing that make priority support more affordable.  IMHO, "Enterprise" (corporate) level pricing shouldn't be the same as "Small business" or "Hobby" level pricing.  However, across the board we have one single pricing model (particularly impactful at the elevated support pricing).  This just doesn't fit your customer base well:  Easy for mid/high revenue customers (corporate, bigger businesses, high traffic sites, etc) to afford, difficult for low revenue customers to afford, and impossible for no revenue customers to afford.  There simply has to be a better pricing calibration model to apply here that quite honestly gets you MORE from your Enterprise level customers and less as it tiers down to the no revenue customers.
ADDENDUM:  IMHO the goal of IPS should be enabling and expanding their customer base (all of it).  This seems like an obvious, but the current pricing increase deviates from that objective.  The more of IPS that is out there, the more visibility it achieves, the more interest it gains, the more developer incentive and recruitment there is, the more enhancements and growth are experienced.  Everyone wins in that case, and the path there is finding a comfortable pricing model that offers affordability based on the type of site and its inherent revenue, as well as rewarding IPS for the product suite they are creating.  There is a balance, but I don't think this is it as it's now impacted a subset of your customer base that you really should care if you lose.  And honestly, where it was at before wasn't it either because IPS was getting the short end of the stick not having raised prices in 10 years.

You've done the right thing. And, I'm glad you've listened to your customers. Even us small fish, who may not bring in the big bucks, but we are here. And, after all, we are here choosing your products over anyone else. So thank you. I may not always be able to pay at the 6 months renewal, and I may have to wait 2-4 months before I can pay, but you can be sure I pay when I have the funds.
As a side question Matt, with all this talk about support. A lot of us were surprised to find that you moved from your own support ticketing system within commerce and changed to ZenDesk, only then to change again to emails (or whatever you may use internally). Was (or is) Commerce just not up to the job, even if you as a business cannot use it? Is there going to be any development on it as I'm sure it's in need of a massive upgrade by now. As it's still used by a lot of us, it would be nice to see Commerce get a massive overhaul.

Thank you for reminding me of the power and wonder of community. This made my day. 

The new website design looks just amazing! Good job! I'm fine with most changes.
If I was not a developer, I would hate the fact that I need to pay $100 more yearly. But I probably wouldn't need all the apps as well in such case, and it wouldn't be that painful. Though I wish there was a cheaper cloud option, maybe with fewer apps. I think that many customers don't need all of them. I also have some concerns about the future of Marketplace, but I will be making a topic about this later on. I would say it's already too much of things to read this week, for both you and us...
 
This is probably not the best topic to share this, but I love how the software evolved over the years. I also have many memories related to your software and the entire community around it. I was 11 years old when I and my friend were setting up Minecraft-related forums - that was my first experience with Invision (some crazy things happened afterwards, but it was funny and I learned a lot).
There is no way I will ever forget this. Never. People I met on communities using your software had an incredibly significant impact on my life. And now as a developer, I am committed to helping people manage all of their amazing and meaningful communities, with apps like Brilliant Discord Integration.
And you know what? I love doing this. Why? Because at the end of the day, the most important thing in life is the value you bring to other people's lives.

I see that the debate about a new kind of support is due to differing understandings of this meaning. I agree that "asking questions" is best done on the forum, rather than contacting support in person. BUT I and many others here are talking about a different type of support requests. I contact support when problems arise on the forum (mainly after an update) or I see some bugs, I attach screenshots and screen recordings (which I post to my YouTube account), I provide developers with access to my forum so that they can go in, check and confirm problems. I don’t want to write about this on a public forum, I don’t need a "community support" for these problems (because these problems can ONLY be solved by developers), and maybe I don’t want to show a link to my forum or YouTube account. So yes, I want to be able to address such issues directly to support.

Not just the current developers but how you can better foster the next cadre of programmers who might one day be great candidates to join your firm one day. 
Provide a crippled version of the suite to develop on and allow for one or two people to test the apps being developed but not be able to be used to run an actual site off of. 

Understood. If someone wants to do that and has time, great.
I have no interest in posting a ticket and hanging around for a response or engaging in a discussion. I have far more important things to do with my day.
Jordan, understand I would only be a "member" here by requirement, not by choice, in order to receive "support". I am not interested in spending time here, engaging in discussions, begging for support in a forum, etc. -- this thread aside.
The extent of my relationship with IPB would ideally be through the software's admin area for support and the client area for billing. I have no interest in being here otherwise. With Cloud Hosted, this is possible. So I'll keep Cloud Hosted until such time that it changes, hopefully it will not.
 

The new support option via forum could even be a better system if the support team is picking up urgent issues as quick as known from the ticket support. Especially when my forum has an outage because of upgrade errors or other issues. A knowledge base of known issues is something I miss hardly. So, take this chance and convince us. Thanks for this open discussion Matt. And please consider the benefits for devs in your next meeting. 

We use the term “drinking our own champagne” at work. Something much easier to swallow (literally)! 🤣

Appreciate the response 🙏 One cool thing about asking questions in the forum (generally speaking) is that it's likely going to also help someone in the future. Not to get meta, but it's paying it forward in a way. 🥲 

Ok Matt, i think i understand what you explained, but i will need to test it first to give feedback. Fortunately, i don't have any issues right now, so i don't have the need to test. 
I still don't feel comfortable enough to share all the issues i might have with my implementation with the public. 
Imagine i create this ticket:

"If someone goes to this link on my site, it will break my webserver until i restart it"

Im basically telling everyone how to ddos my site.
This is my main issue. I understand Invision have not raised the prices for more than a decade, but the reason behind that it's because your competition did not also raised their prices.
In my point of view, Invision needs to be on the same market level of prices as their competitors. You can argue with me that Invision is much better, but we know in reality that at the end, the diferences are very small.
Good decision 👍

Oh, I am not discounting the knowledge of the community. I'm all for a peer-to-peer community. But I expect my products and services to be supported by the company I have the relationship with -- and only the company. All the open forum stuff does is add an extra layer, a hurdle, to doing it via my admin and having it dealt with directly and efficiently. I have no interest in searching or hanging out in a community. I have enough to do during the day (though you'd never know it from the number of replies I've made in this thread). But that's the gist of it. And with Cloud Hosted, I apparently get proper support. I'm good.

I believe that's due to our change back to the 6-month renewal cycle, so half the old value would be correct.. 

Of course, just drop us a message via ticket or via the contact us form and we'll take care of that for you.

Yesterday when I requested to remove Blogs and Gallery from my license they were $30 renewal each. Now I see they’re $15 each. 

If it’s right and if it’s possible to do, I would like to return Blogs and Gallery to my license so I keep supporting them.

Agree to disagree 😇  Our support isn't disappearing, it's shifting from private tickets to the community. We are still very much going to be offering support. 
Curious, why request that people from the community not weigh in? There are lots of brilliant people here. 😁 Yes, you technically have a business relationship with us, but you are also part of this community where we all lean on each other.

This was not meant negative. Just an example how urgent help topic can look like.
Me, personally, I hate ticket support in most cases 😄 I like community support:
Searching before ticket can give a fix within minutes. Writing down and waiting for support can take hours. See if the issue is a known bug. When a support thread becomes hot or there are many similar threads, I can see that the issue is a bug and just wait for solution instead of ... you know, writing down 😄 Get several ideas, brainstorming. While waiting for solution, I get answers from community, that probably do not contain a solution, but kepp me busy (I hate waiting).  Just browsing through threads a while. It's a kind of permanent knowledge update for me.  1 and 2 save IPS support time that is (hopefully!) invested into developing new features 😉
Even if I can understand the reasons, why others would like ticket support, I am happier with community support.

I really feel like there are four issues at play in all of this. 
The price rise
Personally, this is the one which, although I can understand the issues it's causing for some, is in my opinion, the least controversial of all that's gone on over the last few days. Things get more expensive, the product is very different to what it was since the last increase in price, and so personally I have no problem with it. As long it goes hand in hand with a discernible and ongoing improvement in the quality of the product. There's work to be doing, rough edges to smooth and features which need adding. I do see why this may cause people to move away from Invision though - everything has its price and there are (and always have been) cheaper (and even free) alternatives. 
The support change
On the face of it, this looks terrible. But in a way it's all in the telling as it's not really a big change, assuming it works as Invision are saying - eg things that need a ticket will end up in one. For me it's one of those that needs to be given a chance to see if it works as advertised or not - if it ends up being poor then it'll need addressing/reverting to tickets urgently. 
Communication
This leans into everything else really. Had the price rise been communicated in advance, then that may have mitigated a lot of the upset it's caused. If the support changes had been communicated more clearly, that would also have stopped so many people assuming various different versions of what it is that Invision are apparently planning to do. It's an ongoing weak point with Invision in my view. There's no doubt that Invision make us feel less valued as paying customers than anyone else we spend our money with, sadly.
Does Invision care?
This is often about communication and the perception that it gives. I mean how many times can you screw it up so royally that you leave your customers confused or angry or both? With Invision it's frequent, it's frustrating and it's entirely avoidable. If you refuse to learn, refuse to take it seriously and don't change the way you do things after so many years and so many occasions, why should your paying customers keep giving you the benefit of the doubt?
It's not enough to say you care as you're picking up the pieces of another mess, or arriving back onto the scene of another feature left on the shelf for months with zero communication (think mobile app, as one example). You need to show you care, and you need to step up and own the problems that are of your own making by showing some flexibility.  EG - maybe look at a longer period of 6 month invoicing for existing customers who request it, offer a discount code for those with renewals within 3 months or something - just do something, anything to show it's not all pr style fake 'regret' just to play for time until everyone calms down or gives up. It's very little effort on your side in the great scheme of things, but could make a massive difference to the customers you're doing it for.
Oh, and finally (long post, sorry), look after your third party developers - you need them, so show some gratitude and a spirit of partnership by working with them.

I think this distinction is very hard to make.
My site is a hobby in the sense that i don't exepct to live or even earn money from it. Yet it has advertsiement revenue that i use to pay for hosting, licenses and web developpement (and accounting...).
Where would you put it ? my accountant costs 10 times what IPS is costing, the price increase is around what a corporate credit card costs, it is definitely not a problem per se.

That's putting words in my mouth and cherrypicking at its finest Matt, and is beneath you to do so.
I am your customer. I pay for your product. I have a business relationship with you, no one else. If you want to extrapolate non-identifying information and use it as part of your knowledgebase, then fine.
I have an expectation of support from IPB, and ONLY IPB, to support the product I am paying for, and to do so properly. No one else.
I think an expectation of proper ticket support is hardly outrageous.

I've already canceled the self-hosted license because of the open forum support policy. The ONLY reason I have not canceled my Cloud license is proper ticket support is continuing.
For me it's basic principle. I pay for a product. I expect proper, private support for that product from the company with whom I have a business relationship. No one else. It is not my responsibility to create a living knowledge base, nor contribute to it. I have no interest in being part of a "community". I am a customer. That's it. That's the end of the relationship I want, and need, with IPB.
It's crazy that I've posted more times in this thread than I have in 17 years.
Suffice it to say, should ticket support end with Cloud, so will my license for it.

Sorry, but I find that very hard to believe. Then again, most of what has been said by IPS staff in this thread is pretty unrealistic. Moral of the story is, this is a tactical push to evolve completely into a SaaS service. Might even save you some time and money just to refund all of the self license purchases and get rid of it entirely.
I'm pretty disappointed you haven't realized this was a huge mistake, and haven't taken steps to accommodate anyone you've blatantly hurt by these, I'll say it, malicious changes.
It's clear this was not a "communication" issue, rather a stunt to prevent anyone from renewing prior to the price hike. It's also clear the changes to self hosting prices had nothing to do with betterment of the software, rather an excuse to push people to cloud hosting. It's also clear the reason for yearly renewals was to prevent customers from selectively renewing only when they actually need to. Not because "it would confuse customers."
Yeah, confuse customers with the same model you've had for the past 10 years... We aren't that gullible. I'll stick around, but I'm not going to renew until there's drastic changes, and I'll avoid using the marketplace from now on and work directly with 3rd party developers to make sure they're being taken care of.
I can't express enough how disappointed I am.

I haven't had the time yet to properly calculate what the new price increase means for my communities and weigh the different pros and cons of both the new changes and existing features and so on. But it isn't looking good. I'll probably start looking for alternatives which is sad because IPS is a splendid community software. But it's getting harder and harder to justify its cost.

I've slept on the email and on the first 14pages of this topic.  WOW!
12 month billing industry standard? Almost all of the services I use are per hour, per month, most offer an annual discount. Those that only have annual, TBH, they have something to fear to lock you in. Even microsoft do monthly 😉  who/what is a standard?  Be better by differentiating and offering your customers what they need.
Silver linings: I'm assuming search will be getting a really good overhaul, elastic 7? If we're to search for issues first. TBH I still just use `site:domain.tld` in google here and on my own sites. 
I can actually stand the price increases. But I'm not impressed at all, at how it's been done. Trust was a word used before, I'll reiterate that and add reputation. Now I don't want to renew on the principal of it, and to support those who had this foisted upon them. 
I understand the support changes too. As a developer of 25+years and engineering manager for many, I see my peers on support, their productivity is far lower. £ for £ I get more from my non-support folk. However, they tear through bugs, keep paying customers happy with super quick response times & prompt fixes. Sure we have the odd customer who is a 'burden' but we see it, if we can make it work for them, then 80% of the others won't bother us. Now if I could offload support to customers... win. #fail If multiple similar questions asked, add it to a knowledgebase, dev or customer led, #win.

Could also get rid of the annoying config/server queries by bumping the price up to a bearable, but mostly prohibitive figure? ...win. #fail Ultimately at $1250, that's an hour work a month I'd expect in return. Or one serious forum offline help me get it back. If I was raising that level of support queries, IPS isn't the best. I'd pay $100 per serious issue escalation or guaranteed resolution, not a sort it yourself as your not cloud hosted...

I didn't have premium support before, didn't feel I needed it, support was great; ok, mostly ok, a little difficult as self hosted, no sftp, 2fa etc for the dozen tickets or so over a decade. Had one bad upgrade, 4.5 to 4.6.6 yesterday ironically.
Community support no sla? That in essence, and at worst is, no support, a suggestion that breaks more than it fixes, an escalation to a ticket at some point/trigger?, or premium support! Well let's try it for a quarter, nowt to lose now.
I'd save a big chunk of my monthly going to your cloud offering, except I'd rather eat my own notebook. I choose to self host, I enjoy it and I can optimise it, tune it, debug it. Ican upgrade when it's not a buggy .0/.1 release.  I pay for an sla with service providers and pay for more with many companies whom I trust... who are open, transparent and fair. Who reward their evangelists and support the 3rd party community. 
not bad news... just wow.