sobrenome

Matt, but if im not mistaken, the reason for the community support was not because of money, but to create "a living knowledge base to search for answers before even needing to ask."
In this case, it would be better for the cloud customers to also post their problems in the Community Support instead of going directly to a ticket.

Like i told yesterday, i have a small community without any kind of monitization. The site survives only with donations from the users.
So, i needed to told them the prices increased, because that will required more donations.
Basically after too much discussion, we reached 2 solutions. 
Move to a different bulletin software that is cheaper or even free Continue with IPS, but only get 1 year of updates and then 2 years without updates and so on. Basically paying the license once every 3 years Im inclined for this last one.
Now the wierd part. I have 1 active license and 1 inactive license. Till now i could just go to the inactive license and just pay the price to renew it and it was good.
Now if i go there, it won't let me renew it, and it will ask for support. I don't know why, but i have a feeling that we won't be able to pay only the renew price for an inactive license, but we will need to pay more, like the price of a new license or something like that.
Well, if that happens, it's the end of IPS for me.

Maybe it's time to get cracking and get something in place then? I mean, what's the alternative here?
You make a big deal of the marketplace in your marketing piece, you take a commission from sales from it and you're reliant on third party developers for its success. So, maybe don't take them for granted and work more in partnership with them? 
And, if you want an idea on how to implement a system for discounting or making the renewal free. Base it on volume of sales/downloads. It's maybe not the perfect solution but it's simple, and gives newer devs something to push for, particularly if you offer a sliding scale of discount dependent on those volumes. 
I'm sure there are other ways of doing it, but the one thing you really shouldn't be doing is nothing, and overthinking by looking for the ideal answer often leads to stasis. There's already been a drop in the number of devs working on marketplace items, you really ought not to be waiting for that trend to continue or accelerate. 

Hello!
Sorry for my translation, I use a translator. 🤗 But I can't help but speak out about the price increase.
I tried to use licensed software and therefore acquired a license, and all these years I paid for support, receiving updates, often not seeing any sense in them both for the community and for myself. My community is not a commercial one, we are a fishing community.
The news with an increase in prices hit us, the amount of $ 250 is not acceptable for us, given the number of support requests for the entire period of using the IPS.
But in the current circumstances, we most likely will not extend support, but perhaps we will start looking for an alternative engine. Or we will work as much as possible on the version that will be the last paid subscription for us.
Thanks to the developers for many years of work, but unfortunately, I will not be able to pay tribute to my habits in the future.

Wow...  spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.
Communication
Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way.  Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well.  In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive".  If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to.  Bring both the carrot AND the stick.   I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service.  I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades.  (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.)  However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal.  Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect.  This gives people time to adjust and prepare.  At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.   Support
I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket.  I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process.  One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion.  Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.   What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP?  One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created.  By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on.  I foresee the following situation playing out: I have a problem and come to the community asking for help.  Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.   If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information.  They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.   This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help. If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter.  If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful.  Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?  If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over.  I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help. Developers
Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful.  There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product.  So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me. Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc.  My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do....  offer a tiered developer program.  The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums.  The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc.  And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review.  You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs.  I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers.  This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community.  It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards.  (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?) I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen.  Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward.  Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest".   Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

It's not our fault that IPS chose to be competitive and not raise the prices in line with cost of inflation each year. I'm very grateful they didn't, but that's honestly on them. They just can't come along out of the blue and ramp up the costs for whatever reason is behind this and expect people to embrace it.
Whatever it is that's causing the company to dismiss the feedback of their loyal core community customer base and steadfastly refuse all requests for some reasonable compromise, like retaining 6 month renewals.
It's very difficult justifying the cost of IPS 4.6. Since we're paying over and over again for it, we lose all our investment if we our cancel renewals, but I'm not willing to pay a year up front. I couldn't do it anyway. It's been the most problematic buggy release for quite some time.
Honestly, I've been with you since Ikonboard and I've never felt so disillusioned.
I'm also so tired of the all the patronising 'Fam' and bizarre hump day rubbish, please grow up already especially if you're being so corporate. It's a shame to see what this forum community has become in the last year.

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.

There was a recent announcement that Zapier will be available for self-hosted customers as well.  Just FYI.
LOL....I was just asking because you said you were no longer going to support Gallery, and I assumed that LMS would be making some use of Gallery, seeing as (if I remember correctly) it involved Clubs, which in turn could involve Gallery.  Not to mention (potentially) Blogs.

No, at least not yet. For now I removed Blogs and Gallery from my license, which means I won’t support these apps anymore. Next is Pages, which I only use for a Tracker but I’m developing my own, so it’ll be the end of the road for it too… soon.
So I’ll support Core, Forums, Downloads and Commerce from now on.

@Adriano Faria Is leaving? If it true then it total lost indeed. He is one of the well trusted few dev's here, he help even not related to his work, good friend indeed.

Sadly I bet cloud customers get email support......

Several observations as a new customer.
Since moving to IPS there seems to be a lack or foresight on major issue like the one that's being discussed. No support for Zapier for self hosted comes straight to mind. It also feels to me that self hosted customers are being treated second rate which is sad. I've noticed many questions regarding self hosting being skipped over and ignored.
I've got zero issue with a price hike as long as I'm getting value for money. Compared to its competitors IPS is by far the best and I've tried them all (Troll as some might). I'm sorry but trying to blame IPS for your lack of traffic or ability to sustain your site is wrong. Social media is the real enemy to the traditional forum.
Hopefully the IPS team sit down and think hard before making announcements like this in the future. I can understand peoples anger having this dumped on them with little to no warning.
 
 

I have been a big fan of IPB all growing up, I was an admin on many forums using it in the past, and when I was younger and wanted my own sites (without being able to afford enterprise software), I even opted for InvisionFree.  With that being said, when my community moved away from MyBB in 2019, Invision Community was the obvious choice for me; we're entirely ran on donations, but I was willing to save up and pay for the price out of pocket because I was looking forward to an enterprise solution.
I talked up Invision Community on my forums, and while we were a bit bitter over losing BBCode (we're still dealing with posts with formatting issues in my community after all this time), we sucked up and made the migration (which unfortunately didn't go smoothly due to a bug with the MyBB conversion system, but a support ticket pulled through!).
I'm not upset about the price increase, though I think it could have been dealt with better tact (read on), but I'm pretty upset about the loss of opening support tickets.  Most of my tickets that I opened were legitimate bugs that had to be escalated to the devs, and some of them involved bugs that could have been security issues (e.g. seeing topics and posts in feeds under specific circumstances that were meant for only staff).  One of my biggest talking points to the community, and one of the biggest brags that I've done post IC was "The benefit of enterprise level software is enterprise level support!"  I could tell my community when something went wrong "I opened a ticket".  I can't do that now, and raising the price while removing that feels less premium.  Less enterprise level support.
Regarding Devs....  I'm presently terrified that this is going to lose people like @Adriano Faria.  @Matt I hope you're listening, because Andriano Faria is the reason we choose Invision Community.  Due to some specific nature of my community, being able to post between multiple accounts was vital, and without their Linked Accounts plugin, we would not have chosen this platform.  If it breaks, we won't be able to continue using it, as it was one of two mandatory requirements for a community platform (even Youtube allows me to switch between pre-selected linked accounts from a user interface, many people support this out of the box):
 
 I would pay for this 20 times over if it stayed (just not all at once!)
@Matt, earlier you listed a fair bit of features that were pushed in the last couple years; however, there's so many missing features that should be de-facto (and they are in other free solutions, e.g. MyBB, SMF, etc.) but have either been removed or haven't been included and require a plugin and some of these plugins are holding the software up.  People have been asking for night mode since 2019 for the main site (ACP is appreciated but only admins can see that), profile-specific permissions prevent 1-post spambots from joining and putting things in the website field (again, we needed Adriano Faria's plugin), searching reported content is pretty important for larger communities (plugin), bookmarks (plugin...still can't use it in the latest version), post number in thread ( @All Astronauts's Kitchen Sink took up that mantle when Tom Irons' left).  You cannot lose any more of these individuals; hire them to implement these things into the main suite if you have too, because it feels like these common sense features are simply not there when they should be.
As for the marketplace, it has burned me a couple times now, specifically with themes.  After upgrading my site's main third party, purchased, theme (which I only needed because Invision Community doesn't support dark theme natively), I shortly realized that there was a critical bug in it.  The author was prompt in giving me an updated xml with the fix, but since I already had linked the theme to Invision Community, I couldn't just upload the XML, and waiting for the theme to be approved was not immediate; my only choice was to create a brand new theme from that XML, which sucked because the theme in question was heavily customized 😞
The second time is still ongoing, since y'all rejected @Fosters' recent bookmark update (I understand that you're aiming for quality control here, but from what I've heard it can take weeks for the plugin to be in review).
As for as how this all could have been handled, it's unreasonable to never increase the price for existing users, and only introduce it for those coming.  However, it is also unreasonable to drop it on us with no prior report.  I remember when Flickr changed their pricing structure, and while it got some pushback, they not only provided a warning, but also allowed current customers to prepay another 1-3 years at the current rate before they did.  The result?  I bought 3 years worth at the old rate, and I think a lot of people did.
I think a better approach to this would be to give existing customers an additional year of the old pricing (or even just 2 more billing cycles), while bringing new ones in, but in this case even the controversial way that Flickr handled their increase I feel was more graceful than Invision Community's.
As others have said, there's still time to make this right; find a way to remedy this to show the community that you're still acting in good faith.  Let us open tickets if something is broken, but perhaps still allow "how do I do xyz" to be topics.
And please, I don't want to tell my members that we need to switch to yet another platform after arguing for this software for the past 2 years because you pushed away the developers... find a way to lesson the blow to them, or just hire them outright so they can bring these much-needed features to Invision Community (see above).
 
P.S. Also please don't make this software become another Discourse-like platform, another reason I love IPB is because it's always had the forums feel; I don't want to lose the bulletin board look.

Hold up.
It's still horrifically slow on your infrastructure.
There is a penalty to all of your customers from the latency, shifting, and time to paint. This needs to be a very high priority, and is an item which requires consideration and planning over a stretch of time. When did/will you start that 6-12 month epic?
Occam's razor and all would suggest that planning and consideration may not be organizational or leadership strong suits (as opposed to the notion that there exists meticulous planning practices behind the scenes and the screw it we'll do it live approach what could possibly go wrong on the public facing side of things). Investments in human capital with strengths in these areas may be a good idea.

What is the diference between the current support system, with the new community support system and the new Premium support system?
Is the new Premium support system the same thing as the current support system?

Same here. Original pricing was fine for my hobby sites, but this new pricing model with support as a premium add on no longer fits the bill.

I didn't even noticed this one in the email.
So, for us to have the normal ticket system back, we just need to pay even more. Ok...

If you really do care @Matt (which I believe you do, but maybe your hands are tied) and the rest of the team @Lindy and @Charles then you should rethink your strategy and listen to your clients who are feeling like they have had their faces pushed into the mud.  What can you say?  Well, perhaps 'we were wrong to do this so we have decided to roll out these price increases incrementally' which will give people some breathing space and allow them to recover from the shock.  I'm sure that the right move now would be to roll back this mad decision and get onboard with your clients to retain their business and ensure that your business continues to flourish, impress and be known for great customer service, which it has been for the most part.  Caring means thoughtfulness, consideration and being supportive towards the people who contribute to your cash pot.  Listen to the cry of anguish that is felt throughout the whole of this topic and do something positive to reassure and re engage with your clients instead of looking for an ointment for every sore that doesn't exist and responding with meaningless soundbites that just do not justify what has occurred.
I really do not want to leave, but I am being forced out (whether you believe that or not) because of this price hike.  Had I known that this was coming I would not have bought a second license.  Heaven knows what some of my ex-clients will be thinking after my recommending your software and they have gone on to buy licenses.
This has been the mother of all cock-ups and it needn't have been that way if there was more warning, more transparency and a softer approach to upping prices with consideration given to whether it was something that your clients could digest more easily without all the horror that this topic has produced.

You can make me reconsider, in fact, it would be quite easy for you to do so, just reduce the price increase to a 'reasonable' amount and still let me pay 6 monthly.
If you had increased your prices by 5-10%, then I would have grumbled a little, moved on, and would still be a loyal IPS customer. But this is a 48% price rise and you're removing Email support to boot. Sorry, that is a game changer for me, especially with all the other price rises I have from my hosting company and WHM/Cpanel recently.
So with that $220 saved, I can put that towards Xenforo, add another $50 and get access to Downloads and Gallery at the same time, and still pay less for my yearly subscription going forward.  Sure my users will probably miss some features, but they will get used to them eventually.

Till now i was paying 25$ per 6 months. With that i would pay more for only half the time.
Perfect... 

I think the main reason is that the search facility is crap. When they dropped specific forums per app, it made finding solutions to say Pages very difficult.
This is another reason I've said for years there should be a FAQ and Knowledgebase.
Lately I've been using and learning about the REST API lately to import Invision Gallery into Wordpress Media Library and the documentation examples are almost nonexistent. I got it working by a mix of consulting Stackoverflow and the Wordpress docs, where users post some handy tips and code snippets.
PS. Kudos to Matt for weathering the storm blowback today. He must need a cold beer this evening. And whatever happened to that Lindy chap? 

As a long time user of approaching 20 years who has been a customer since the Ikonboard days and has a first recorded invoice here in 2005 for "Purchase: Invision Power Board Perpetual License".
For what it is worth, here is my feedback on the e-mail I received about the price hike and reduction in support levels.
Six years ago you contacted me as a "lifetime" member to tell me that the lifetime agreement I signed up for, which helped set the the financial foundation of these forums, was to be replaced with an annual fee. It was nice to get a little credit on account by way of apology, however, I bought a lifetime licence and it should have been for lifetime. Offering a lifetime licence is a marketing incentive, and not something that should be reneged on further down the line once a company has reaped the benefits of the marketing drive. Telling customers its one payment for lifetime access, then changing the goal posts to an annual fee is not the type of thing that reflects well.  
Onto the new e-mail....
Forums: was $50, now $80 (increase of $2.50/month) The marketing team really earned their wage this campaign as $2.50 doesn't sound like much, however this represents a 60% price hike from $50 to $80.
A 60% price hike needs to be backed up with some serious upsides.... however...
For most customers, support is simply “how do I do this?” and these questions tend to be quite similar. Rarely, support questions are “this went wrong” Not my experience. My support experience is basically the same every year - my forums go offline with errors every time I do an upgrade. It fills me with dread every year or so, and true enough I need to submit a ticket to try and get the forums back online. To think that that base line support for a quick turnaround on outages is either now reliant on an additional payment for a support plan, or posting in publicly accessible forums is not a sustainable proposition for me.
Creating a strong support community backed by our support technicians will result in a more detailed and richer set of answers For "how to I customise this" or "how does this feature work", the above statement is true. For critical board offline situations, the above sets alarm bells ringing loudly. Critical issues need a formal support ticketing system - which is included in the licence fee. Come to think of it, no other service I use has separate support and licence fees.
For those that wish to retain ticket support longer term, we will be unveiling a premium support option soon. No, just no.
 
I already discontinued my other IPB forums as the cost/benefit ratio slid off the scale.
A 60% price hike means I will now have to look at other options for my final licence, it would be easier if I felt any degree of trust or loyalty to Invision as I would just pony up and pay the money, however - and sadly for such a long time customer, this is far from the case. I cannot trust you as evidenced through the lifetime licence fiasco, and I feel absolutely no loyalty due to this 60% price while reducing access to critical support.
Very disappointed.
What I would like to see?
Cancel premium support plans and retain this as part and parcel of customers licences. Maintain current pricing plans for existing customers and roll out new price structure for new customers.  
 

Here in lies a pretty controversial policy.
You make a professional grade product, we choose it over free software like SMF because it's more secure and coded by professional certified developers, but we don't buy it, we never own it, it's still yours and we pay a license to make use of it.
Then the inevitable security flaws are identified and we must ensure we renew our licences to obtain the fix for what are problems that weren't created by us, if only to conform with GDPR and other legislation to keep our members data and personal information secure, never mind the inconvenience of cleaning and recovering from hacked sites.
So really we have no choice, once a self hosted forum community is installed, put aside anti-spam, IP lookups, forget Marketplace niceties, forget new feature temptations and nice to haves, the only 100% real reason is because of this.
Charging for access to security patches is just plain wrong. They should be free for at least 5 years if only as a mark of quality and pride.
Can you imagine if Microsoft charged for ongoing access to Windows security fixes and flaws?
 
UPDATED to add:
"We are looking to increase the speed of releases to a monthly release schedule so everyone gets bug fixes and new features regularly."
This a bad news for theme and app developers. More work. More time consuming localdev updates. Please improve the process of updating localdev installs so they are more robust.

I have put up expiry notices on both my licenced sites and have already found one alternative at a one-time price of $59 with six months support and I can increase this to 18 months for an extra $20.25.  I'm considering another alternative for my other site which is less expensive but has the same features, again for a price considerably less than the new IPS prices.
I'm no penny pincher, but I am retired and living on a pension, I have rent and utilities to pay for so my hobby money is limited.  I understand about the price increase, just not the way it blitzkrieged its way into our lives with no alternative payment options other than annually (with a not so generous offer of a one-time split bi-annually).
I find some of the comments mildly amusing and often disturbing from IPS:
Short and sweet and couldn't care less - definitely not good customer relations. This is not a 'Hump Day' it's a 'Sad Day'.