shiobi

Adriano is one of the best developers on the marketplace. Maby The best....
Dont loose him, that's just like kicking out Max Verstappen out of Red Bull F1 racing. These are the people we depend on.

Listen to what he is saying
 

Not my case. This is my only source of income for a couple of years or so (yes, I’m not crazy to have 200 resources for nothing) but honestly, this is becoming a pain more and more at every “new thing” IPS does.
IPS don’t listen. Just read. Try to justify things and that’s it. Nothing will change.
So for the rest (of us) stop wasting your time debating here. That’s how it will be from now on. 

You should know after so many years in this business that people DO NOT search. You will have repeated topics with same matters in same day/week.  People don’t like to waste time checking a huge list of topics.

Matt, either I was unclear or you missed my point entirely. I run a couple of non-profit, small communities for both sentimental reasons and for some loyalty to those who enjoy it. And when there are problems, one of the users will hit me up on Skype to let me know something is wrong. I confirm the issue and then login to the admin of the forum, click get support, describe the issue and then IPB looks after it (admin user for IPB is auto created, et al). Having direct support is why I kept an active IPB Subscription. And this was an efficient method as I am much too busy to deal with it.
What you are introducing is a "triage" step which requires users to first take time to come here, publicly justify they need a ticket, no doubt have it publicly disseminated asking to explain the problem first, do the back and forth, have it finally deemed worthy of a proper support ticket, then having to explain the issue. It's reminiscent of an call center before you get actual support. I just don't have the time to do it. I absolutely won't be posting support information for others to disseminate. When I request support, I expect it directly with the company, and only the company, with whom I have a business relationship.
The price increase will not affect me, and in fact it's something I understand. But the method of support all but ensures I will be looking for alternatives.
Like I said, I wish you well. I followed you over from Iko, and have been with IPB through it's various iterations. And throughout that time there's always been a means of direct support. I'm just too busy to have to justify getting a ticket.
Prices attract customers. Support keeps them. It's been a good run. I wish you well in future.

You have 27,256 active paying clients and only 15 staff (that we know of). Let's not pretend you're struggling here.
Just for fun... Let's assume all 27,256 (All clients who have renewed in the past 6 months) are paying the lowest possible, self hosted, forum license only. $80 a year / 12 equals $6.66 a month x 27,256 equals $181,524.96 a month and $2,178.299.52 a year before expenses. Enough to give 21 employees a 6 figure salary a year.
This of course is the lowest possible income for all current clients and assumes all of them only have a single license. I am pretty confident your income is twice, if not triple that.

I learn by the years when IPS setup something, they never change it, only Matt here to explain their view that all, then Charles will reply later 🙂 
Which is a good thing tho.
Also Matt offer to help with customers to pay 6 month, that also good thing as well.
I am not here regarding the price, support is the most important, since that gone, software gone as well (Please Matt do not reply and explain more about forum support, since I reject that "simply that me").
Good thing this happens now and my renew still 2 months away, that give me time see what best software to switch too.
All in all, it was a good run for more than 20 years 🙂

Three of the most active third party devs have been active on this very discussion. At least two of them clearly stating this would impact their future projects.
Honestly, how many active devs is there ? what would-it cost to give free licenses to developper having more than xx downloads/intalls of their apps/themes/plugins ?

@Matt  You may have removed the online user limit for cloud hosting, but I see that you replaced it with a limit on page impressions instead. Why are you guys determined to force people to limit their traffic or get charged up the arse with fees? You make it seem like you did everyone a favor, but all you did was slap some lipstick on the pig. 
Also, it’s $54/m. Let’s be real about the fact that a lot of those responding aren’t going to pay annually based on their feedback. 

I don't get it. Those of us who are self hosted are self hosted for a reason. We don't need you to "manage the internals." We want to host in our own, secured environment, that we have 100% total control of. Not create an external point of failure subject to downtime and potential for compromises.
Sure, all of the shortcomings of cloud hosting could happen to self hosting, but I'd rather go out in my own terms. 😉
You're advertising to the wrong crowd. If we wanted cloud hosting, we wouldn't have chose IPS.

In all seriousness Matt. If you / the rest of the management at invision think that sort of timescale is acceptable when communicating such a big jump in price, then I really do recommend you hire someone with more knowledge and skills in communication and customer care. You needed to be weeks ahead of this, to give people reasonable notice. 

Anyway, it's been some time that IPB pushes us to leave them (you plan to stop your activity?), they have absolutely no understanding of the current markets, the big boxes are moving more and more only to alternative solutions like Discord, facebook, ect ... to discuss with their community (the proof, even Bethesda closed its forums recently!)
The premium argument would be funny if it was a joke, but it seems that @Mattis serious.
Ipboard has nothing premium, it is behind in all the fields and does not evolve any more since years, it is especially about correction of bug, on the contrary, it even tends to lose functionalities!
Ipchat -> abandoned without notice. Mobile application -> abandoned without notice. No, the annual renewal has no more sense, it is a total nonsense, because precisely we have no roadmap on what is planned, on the contrary, we go from bad surprise to bad surprise with your communication completely off the mark.
Especially since @Jordan response indicating to reload our accounts 6 months before to keep this period is for me a new proof of total contempt for your customers.
 
Lol is a joke ? We should also pay you for each "major" version? So we would have to pay for the software + a renewal for security updates + an additional fee for upgrades? You're definitely missing the point! 
 
The truth is that for a few years, nothing has been added on IPB, except the club function, the rest is bug fixes! 
You put forward the webp as a novelty, no sorry, the addition of two lines of codes to accept this file extension which is already supported by the majority of CMS for a few years is not a novelty.
The addition of zapier is not a novelty either, it is above all a proof of laziness on your part to really integrate these functionalities in IPB, because if tomorrow Zapier closes, or decides like you to increase its prices of 30%, we are taken hostage! 
I will start by believing that you get a com for each request sent by an IPBoard installation.
What's the next step, suppressing the sending of mail outside the provider? By the way, why didn't you take AWS which is the most common ?
When I read that on this subject, it confirms me even more in what I think, you try to do as little as possible today to rehash as much as possible.
You want me to pay 30% more and once a year? 
Ok, start by listening to your community, work on your software so that it respects today's web standards and that it gets the best possible score on pagespeed especially on mobile, offer us a real integration of wepb, discord, private messages in instant, do your job when you validate an extension on the market to make sure it works properly and then I would accept to pay more.
 

Speaking of that: There seem so be another change, causing entry-level cloud customers to loose the ability to even install resources which are not from the Marketplace. From a developer’s perspective, that makes offering products outside of the Marketplace even less appealing. 

He most likely can but you won't get the positive answer you want.
I've had time to sleep on this and my conclusion is this:
You say you haven't increased prices in a decade. Who's fault is this?  A small annual increase is easier to swallow than a massive increase in one fell swoop.
Such a large increase for your corporate clients will be less than chicken feed and they will most likely offset this against tax. Us hobbyists can't do that and such an increase of these proportions is ridiculous if expect us to buy into it.
In a declining hobbyist market you would be best placed to split your business into two - one catering for corporates who you can charge whatever big bucks they're willing to part with, and one more affordable option for hobbyists; the two are mutually incompatible and you can't expect hobbyists to pay corporate prices.
You need to take a look at what your competition is charging and price yourselves competitively.  You can argue that you have the better product, but when priced way above competitors it doesn't look so attractive from the ground up.
A small number of your clients who are used to being on this (and I say this loosely) community platform have probably voiced the concerns of many and who are now leaving the fold.  How big a number do you have to lose, silently, before you realise you made a huge blunder? A number 'we' will never know.
It's like you have taken a big stick and beaten us with it and then in come the pacifiers with, "well, you know" as though that is some kind of ointment to soothe the pain.
I just bought my second licence this year, that was bought with faith and trust in you as business, which incidentally has grown because of the grassroots support of your hobbyist clients over many years; that has flown the nest with this latest announcement.
So you should be aware that whilst your costs are rising, just the same as ours, your income is about to take a dive.
I am fully aware that prices rise constantly and it's a pain we all have to bear, but imagine if you went into your local grocery store and when you get through the checkout and have to pay the bill, you find that it's 50% more than last year.  How happy would you be with that?
Small increases over a period of time hurt less and it's YOUR fault that you didn't do this over the last decade and now you want us to swallow the sob story - no way.  Am I angry, you bet - I wasted good money buying that second licence and there's no way I'm throwing any more at it. Your loss, my gain.
You may be great at developing software, but you suck as looking after your clients, especially those who have walked this path with you since the beginning.

The announcement of a price hike combined with no more ticket support is reason enough for me to reconsider my business strategy.

I rarely need ticket support, I usually solve the problems myself. But having no ticket support for a software is simply a no-go for me. And having a newsletter that tries to sell a drastically price hike from $50 to $80 as "increase of $2.50/month" is more cynicism than I need from a provider. If I need cynicism or sales speech I will do that myself.

I worked for more than 20 years as a developer, team leader and divisional head in the software industry and I think I have a sixth sense for software companies and how they work and think internally. In the last year I have got too many bad signals from Invision: maybe in the future cloud only? Zapier not until protests? Price hike. No more ticket support.

I'm in the process of converting a bunch of Xenforo and Wordpress sites to Invision and today I've halted the process. Final decision how to proceed until end of the year. In the end, its all about trust.

Hmm so my 6 monthly fee of $60 has now gone to an annual fee of $235.  $5 short of doubling in cost. 
I've been here since moving across from Ikon and supported IPS in early days financially, paid for lifetime licences which I've begrudgingly accepted would not help IPS survive further down the line. 
My boss will be on me like a ton of bricks with that increase and with no email support (are you kidding me?) - I am, after 19 years, having to think can we continue.   I've always had first rate support from IPS, coupled with a friendly relationship with Matt who's helped me out plenty of times, but I've also let them use my server to test MSSQL drivers and IIS issues when they hosted/worked with the likes of AMD.  To turn around to that degree is a proper kick in the nuts.
I understand they have to pay the bills, but we all do.
A doubling of my licence fee would be a hard one to take on its own but the removal of email support as well?  That is not just a small issue. 

Sorry, but "support" from the community on forums is inherent in free software. When a client pays money, he wants to have a private communication with the support (there can be many reasons for this).

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.

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 must renew in 2-3 days (Sep17) for 40$ with Pages... Now 125$
Make an offer and take last renew with old price please for one time...
Or please remove PAGES for me.
Thanks...
in France my salary isn't increased 15% in ten last year and now with Covid situation, work life is very hard...

Again, change comes very slow, and often we get things we never asked for.  "Pay us lots of money and wait to see what you get..."  I don't think so.
I am not a happy customer at this time and still feel this was done to suit the big customers.
Moving to your online plan is not an option for me.
Like others have said, we have options, and it looks like many of us will exercise those options.

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. 
 
 

I've gone from $85.00, to $250.00 / year?

Sorry. I can't afford that. Again, like others I only run hobby websites in my spare time (for fun).
I really think, that's me done with Invision. 20 years later. I fear, we will just all drop like flies...

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!

We need "Custom No Permission Error" like in forums setting in order not to mislead members whenever a group has no permission

 
Specially after they see only this.

 
 

For many years I've been using a customised badge/award plugin to assign badges to my community's users (for things like participating in community events), and with the new Achievements feature I'm considering migrating my old awards over to the built-in system. I have a few small suggestions that would really help out admins that want to lean more on custom badges rather than the Rules-based badge approach.
1. Custom Descriptions
It would help a lot if admins were allowed to write unique descriptions for manually-made badges. At the moment there is no such feature and it kind of looks strange when you see manual badges alongside rule-based badges (which do include a description). For example:

Notice how the top badge doesn't include a description? This could be added via the AdminCP > Achievements > Badges page by adding an extra option in the Edit Badge dialog. I'd like to be able to tell users exactly how they earned a particular badge, and it's a little awkward to have to do that in the Badge Name. Something like the below...

 
2. Multi-User Awarding
As far as I can see, the only way to manually award a user a badge is by searching for their username in AdminCP > Members, clicking 'Manage' within the Badges dialog, and then click 'Add Badge'. It's quite monotonous, if you have many users that you want to award a single badge to manually. There should be an option to award members directly from the 'Badges' section of the ACP. A dropdown can replace the current 'delete' option, or an 'award' option can be positioned next to it. I made a crude mockup of what I mean, below.

A dialog box could appear upon clicking 'Award to Member' which can allow you to type the usernames of multiple users.

 
3. Backdating / Custom Award Dates
Another really useful enhancement would be the ability to set custom dates when awarding badges manually. Using the example above, you could include an optional date field within the award member dialog (either on the Badges ACP page or when managing badges on a User profile via ACP). As a lot of the badges I've previously awarded users date back as far back as 2014, it would be great to be able to add a 'legacy' badge to a user's profile and identify exactly when they received it, instead of relying on the moment it was specifically added to the user's account.