Miss_B

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.

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.

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.

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've done an new guide just for this process, if anyone needs extra guidance on this
 

Thank you for the clarification. Personally I think that this is a pretty good/favourable deal.

Thank you for the clarification. Personally I think that this is a pretty good/favourable deal.

Yes, you will get all the apps.

@Dreadknux and @Miss_B If you click the "switch" button in the client area on your license, it will show you a lot of information on your options. It does not actually switch you over until you approve it.

We did an analysis of all our customers to work out the average renewal cost and buying habits. We made sure that the renewal price point was as close to the average as possible (we actually went under).
We discussed the pricing at length and shared it with a handful of customers in a focus group to get thoughts and feedback, and tweaked accordingly.
We have been as fair as we possibly can throughout this process. Undoubtably some may need to pay a bit more to unlock all that new functionality, but most will pay a bit less. We've found a pricing model that ensures the self-hosting version is viable for years to come.
Invision Community v5 is the start of the next evolution for our community platform bringing in many features to help publish content, monetise the community and more. Just selling a forum app is a market in a serious decline.
But you do not have to do anything. You can stick with your v4 license for as long as you wish. This is not a choice you need to make now, or even this year. Wait until v5 is out and then decide what is right for you. If it's not right for you, then be assured that v4 will remain supported for years to come.

Actually, several clients were invited to a private feedback group and have been giving us feedback for the past several months on how best to re-approach Invision Community Classic. Our goal was to make self-hosting viable for the future.

We're not. Not only are we not FORCING you to do anything, we are not even ASKING you to 🙂 
We launched these new pricing options days ago and nothing changed then and, now that you have noticed, still nothing has changed. Right now, this literally only impacts new purchases. For existing clients, do nothing unless you want to. For some clients it's a really good deal and they save money but it's up to you.

Correct. So you would pay $199/year instead of $300.
Edit: Or $19/month. You can choose your option.
It should also give you credit for your history with your current license type and offer you at least a few months free 🙂
Yes, that's been fixed.
 
Those were greyed-out but I can see how that would be confusing.
 
For those of you asking about your current license or v5: you can keep your current license as is and v5 does not yet exist so nothing to report on that just yet.

☀️ Welcome to this week's Invision Community Insight! ☀️
Thank you for checking out this quick, round up post. I hope you have had a lovely week.
 
Super brief update today - Version 5 has been a big focus for our team so far this year and we are making great progress! We will begin sharing non-technical updates soon and once we do, I'll share those here.
 
Changelog
With that said, changes for version 4 are limited for now but for those that like to see what we are up to line by line, here is the changelog for the week for version 4. 
 

If you havent done anything to fix it, as I mentioned, files are not up to date. You need to upload a fresh set of files and run the upgrader from /admin/upgrade

It's hard to give dates, but we have a fairly aggressive timeline to meet and we're on track. I would say we should be in a position to showcase Invision Community 5 in some way during Q4 this year.
I hope this doesn't become a "coming weeks" moment for me. 😅

Keep an eye out for the UIExtension news coming soon for form fields. 

As a cloud customer, there is no access to the underlying files or database, as this is an SAAS (softeware as a service) product 

You cannot customise the ID (the number), as its an ID. If you are looking to add CSS to a group name, you can actually do that directly within the software. If you go to Members>Groups and edit any group, you will see 'group formatting' where you can choose a color. However if you wish to do more than this, such as wrap it in span tags so you can style that way or even add a CSS class, you can do this by selecting 'Use HTML' at the side of that setting.

Probably not. Things like read only classes are nice to haves, but we'd need to rework some stuff to use them. We tend to just start using new PHP for newer features and any major re-working of existing code.

The first blog is out now: 
Keep in mind that it's a 10,000 foot overview, there's much more detail to follow in subsequent blogs.
 

Many thanks to all of Ips 's Team Members for their hard work, and for keeping us in the loop too. Personally, I truly appreciate it. I wish all of you a very nice weekend.

All excellent points. Let me run through them.
1) Agree, that restriction will be lifted in 5.
2) I'll check to see if we have an easier solution for this in 5.
3) Easier in v5.
4) Easier in v5.
5) Will check to see if we have a solution for this in 5.
6) Fixed in v5.

Would recommend using the Alert system for this. It can be for all users, group(s), or member(s).