Shawn RR

You're all good. This would not interfere with emails going out of your community. If you use our Invision Community mail sending feature, emails are not sent from your domain. If you use a third-party email service, you will need to keep those records in place in addition with any you add from Google.
With the above in mind, MX records are for email receiving, rather than sending.
We can assist you in adding those records to your DNS which is hosted here with us. Just simply submit a ticket 🙂 .

I have an export records application, but obviously you need to install the app on the site but that’s not the case:
 

I can see how you might look at it that way in terms of saving money. But we spent a lot of time, resources, and money in development of those 3 years of features and other clients have an expectation from us.
The only way to make self-hosted viable for the future is to ensure people are paying for the effort put into developing it. Otherwise we really should just get rid of it. If you are not willing to do that, there are cheap or low cost alternatives out there but you don't get the owners of the company replying to you and you most certainly do not get monthly updates and constant improvements. Look at literally any other community platform and you will see many are at worst dead and at best barely supported.
It is also very, very common. I'm not sure where you have been living in 30+ years of the software world. It's very normal for software to require a subscription fee or to require a re-purchase at major versions. I get emails all the time from software I own that says "new version pay up!"
We are not requiring people to re-purchase for v5 as other platforms would. The "catch up" renewals only apply to the monthly option as it is basically a finance version of the annual fee. You may wish to review the new terms in the client area as you seem incorrect here.
We are growing and, if you are actually serious about your community, a few more dollars a year to get a platform that is actually alive must be worth it. If having something that is actively developed is not worth it to you, then your community will probably suffer with another platform.
But, as has been said a lot already in this topic, you don't have to do anything. You can stick right where you are on your current terms.
 
TL;DR: We are committed to our clients using Classic, self-hosted who are committed to their communities being a success. It is a joint venture.
 
And to your examples:
1. Insurance companies actually do charge you more if you have a huge gap in coverage. They see you as a greater risk. Same idea here.
2. Microsoft does not do upgrade fees they just make you buy the new version outright. If you would prefer that, I would be HAPPY to do that as it would make our software cost way more.

I couldn't like this post enough and I completely agree 100% with the above.
Personally, I truly appreciate the way that Ips management keeps their customers in the loop, listens to us and interacts with us. 
You don't see this at other community platforms, where there is only silence from the management, and indeed, bad and barely support. 
Ips is and will remain the best and leading community platform in the market.

Unlike the final score at Hillsborough on a certain Thursday night in May, as a Posh fan. 😅

There is much more to a SaaS platform than just servers and services. There are micro-services that tie these services together. We believe it was a micro service that we have used for over four years that failed. Our investigation is ongoing with AWS.

As Lindy mentioned, please get in touch if you want to lodge a formal complaint and we will do our best to resolve it.
I want to underline again that we are proud of our platform stability, with 99.99% uptime over several years. Incidents like this are rare but we do not take them lightly and have implemented an audit of alert systems, uptime monitoring, service statuses, etc to ensure we do not have a repeat of this event again.

I had a post that was in that forum. It’s now in the Marketplace forum so I’m assuming that forum is now for both mass marketplace items as well as custom requests. 

Be sure to subscribe to our status page. We use that for updates during events.
https://status.invisioncommunity.com/

Hopefully to be the last, it is a crucial time for me to grow my forums competing in the space around a particular video game that is sunsetting their official forums for discord. I am actively in a bidding war trying to sell my site to new users who were unable to access the site for 6 hours, luckily its back at all and this wasn't a worse disaster. 
 
I have to ask, how was this page up and the rest of Invision was not accessible? Is there any information public from Amazon that I could look into? 

I would disable EVERYTHING (all third party applications and plugins), and switch to a default theme. While everything is off, in ACP visit the support section and clear the system cache. 

Then test… if it’s working, you know it’s something that is disabled. Turn things back on one by one till you find your culprit. 

There are no immediate plans to move customers off of your plan. However, there will likely come a date when this is needed and at that time, you will receive an email with information about what your options will be at that time.

Oh I mean I knew that but a higher level easy to use up and down voting like bungie.net's I shared would be cool too. 

I was recently browsing a couple well known moderniized forums. My favorite one that I regrettably do not participate on at all is Bungie.net's https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/ 
I think there is some value in organizing topics like this in a mix of Reddit and FAQ forum style, is this do-able for Invision? 

You could ask these two developers who current have in the marketplace items for discord and microsoft
 
The latter isn't compatible with 4.6 though and you need to pick a decent developer who is active and updates to the latest releases or else you will be stuck when you come to upgrade IPS if the mod is not compatible and the author has vanished 

In addition to contact privately the developers listed there, you can start a topic in this very same forum as well, outlining the project(s) that you want to get developed. You might get more takers that way.