NZyan

Generally speaking, after so many years I feel I can say that invision is a company that thinks well about the choices it makes. But this time, as others have already written, I am very concerned about the collapse of the Marketplace. It is quite clear to me that the new pricing policy and the type of support offered for a fee is aimed exclusively at the business sector. This means that hundreds of hobby forums will be looking for alternative software solutions and this also means less appeal for me and many other developers to develop app and plugins.
Although I don't know the reasons for a series of "blows" thrown at the customer at the same time, I find some of the choices made by Invision risky.
Even if I accept the price increase, which is something I can live with, I think it was a mistake to remove the possibility to pay every 6 months. This has disoriented customers even more, even giving a perception of a heavier increase than it really is.
Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that one of invision's greatest assets has always been its ticket support. 
In short, I'm a bit worried, I'm sure I'll be one of the last to abandon ship... I've been here for 20 years... but I confess that I've been looking for alternatives for the first time in many years.
The problem is not the price, I am more concerned about the choice to let the hobby communities go.
Unfortunately I don't think the the fresh new green buttons can turn this into good news.

Let's see, I understand that even the pandemic period is not the best but let's try to give confidence to Invision as Jordan asks. Instead I would ask invision to review at least the possibility of returning to payment every six months, not for me, but I think it would help many.

I understand every business needs to make money and pay their employees however the way this was rolled out to the community today was just insanity, some notice should have been given for the increase to give people a chance to renew or do what they needed to do, even the support system i somewhat get but again no details.
For months the marketplace change has really bothered me and i'm sure others here but no change was made it's still the same.
One last thing that i find off is the sale or trade of a licence, I know IPS was burned in the past with charge backs however if the customer pays the fees and terms are final whats the issue? papal would read the terms of the charge back and deny payment, maybe consider customers that have been with you for some time.
As for the few remaining Dev,s you have here try and support them and give them a license with every app you have,they are making you dollars and bringing customer in here to spend even more cash.
Takes money to make money.

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. 

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?

And to add to this, the payment will be processed on Sep 23rd or 24th based on previous renewals. So actually, I have LESS THAN 9 days notice to prepare for a payment that is more than twice my anticipated renewal costs.  100% unacceptable!

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.

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. 
 
 

Hello,
I just got up, read this email and I am absolutely furious.
I am told that I will get a "small" increase of 90$ every 6 months, that is 180$ per year, which is more than a 30% increase, but it is a small increase! 
Also, no more support by ticket, but by the forum, a good way to tell your customers to take care of themselves, but on the other hand, they can pay to open a ticket.
But frankly, are you kidding us? Is this a joke? And you justify this with "We feel that Invision Community offers exceptional value for money with its rich functionality and power at your fingertips." ? No, we use Ipboard out of habit, nowadays there are other solutions.
Moreover, I'm still waiting for a proper integration of Webp with conversation, an update of elasticsearch, a real mobile application, a real mobile optimization (IPB is completely lacking in this area), an evolution of the api, and that for years! 
Oh and I forgot, the ponpon, features that are not present on our self-hosted versions but on your versions that we don't want!
We are users and contributors of mediawiki and they have a real update tracker, yet it is an open-source solution (like Discourse, Phpbb, SMF, etc...) and we almost get a faster response from them than by opening a "ticket".
Frankly, what advantage do you think you have today? I tell you, none, we pay a licence (and other users too I think) for the convenience, but we will clearly review our strategy, especially as we are informed at the last moment.
 
 

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.

"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. 
 
 

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.

Finally, can't wait! Will be purchasing this as soon as it goes live in the marketplace!
Thanks for the hard work @InvisionHQ!

2.2.1 is pending approval in the marketplace with:
FIXED upgrade from 1.3.1 to 2.2.x (duplicate column) @NZyan
FIXED long titles display issue (css) @leonovich_J
FIXED classifieds submenu active items bug @numis
ADDED a new setting has been added to make buyer selection mandatory(or not) when completing an ad @leonovich_J

We've been operating forum software for 15 years with post counts and we don't have any problem and most importantly our users like it.

There are only about 10 or 15 members of the site team – whereas there are getting on for half a million ordinary members. Because of this, I don't find that the argument that the numbers reviewed by moderators are different from the numbers reviewed by the half a million members to be at all compelling.

We prioritise the interests of our users and as I say, we've never had a problem. Most other platforms have post numbers. We've used post numbers with Invision now using a plug-in which unfortunately doesn't work any more with the latest version of Invision.

I don't see what is wrong with choice. Invision is a pretty good platform and well supported but one thing I find quite unpleasant about it is that the Invision team seem to consider that they should make choices for us and deprive us of choice.

We are all adults – I don't have an option to use post numbers which I can either switch off or switch on. It's also not beyond the wit of someone with the right technical ability to have the member Post number in the corner and then to the left of it in a slightly different colour moderator post number.

Problem solved. People don't like it can switch it off. People who like it can switch it on.

Problem solved – what's not to like?

 

I would like to see the API supported just like the sendgrid one is. Maybe sendinblue.com as well.

Then it will need updating. I was talking about the latest 4.4.10, sorry.
Since there is no seperate release thread on top of the forums I didn't even know 4.5.x was out yet.

not working for me on 4.5.2 tried default theme and still does not show

Fosters, is this being updated for Invision 4.5?

Well, just add them via PMA and edit one of them in the ACP. It should populate this file with all links. 🙂
 

No problem. 😉

Hm. OK. Works.
Looks as if I was thinking to complicated...
Thanks a lot!
Andreas

Great app – I'm just about to add a lot of links via SQL statement to the database.
Is there a way to update the datastore in one go? Until now I have to visit each entry via admin panel and save it again.
TIA
Andreas

Your apology will not return the lost money and time.
Tell me better what will change in customer notification policy (consider, i may not open ACP for weeks). 

Two of my forums were abused by this security hole.
Since Tuesday (March 17th) 
a spammer has sent out about 1.4 million spam mails (1,400,000) which results in a direct loss of about 800$ and counting (payment to Sendgrid) and a damaged sender reputation for my forum Now I realize that
you are aware of this problem for weeks you have a patch ready since Tuesday and you didn't tell your paying customers a word We need to talk. I am not amused.
Andreas

I don't think so but I have no explanation – so I expect one from IPBoard.
I appreciate IPBoard as a great software partner with great support.
In my book a good and reliable partnership includes transparency and open talk if a problem exists and damage is done.
So that's what I expect now.
Andreas