Paul2020

Yes. We have already decided to leave and not renew the licenses. 6 projects.

Yes. We have already decided to leave and not renew the licenses. 6 projects.

@Matt
I have been in development for more than 20 years. I remember the story of how Vbulletin died. I was only engaged in forums. One mistake can really cost you a crash. Now you have a choice: leave it as it is or offer a decent solution. As one of the options that I suggested to you.
Please answer in front of everyone - Are you ready to offer us my version? Give the opportunity to renew the license at the old prices for 1 year?
If not, why not?

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.

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 ?

We never wanted to be the cheapest, just the best. 🙂 

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.

What strange email I got today from @Matt 
First the subject was somehow give the idea my account license had problem, then they are good news to start with as price rise? Good news for whom? Yes for IPS indeed not for customers.
I and other whom been with IPS from start been with this, no problem, if that will lead for better support, but:
Now with this price rise you drop the support (no matters how you explain it, it very clear you drop your support) and force me to use the community for it, or of Couse pay as well for support.
My records show I always goes and supporting IPS, but this time, the term for support is not acceptable at all.
I hope you reconsider you support term again, thanks.
 

I honestly think I'm done here.

This is kind of a bummer for me today. Just last week I was so excited to convert over from Xenforo. I thought man I really like this community and the route that they are going with their products. I wanted to join this platform so bad. Was so excited to see what the future holds. I really liked the way all the developers interreacted with the members here. I am ok with a slight price increase for a better product. I think the biggest disappointment is the lack of support coming. I am paying for a product, if I run into a problem with that product as long as I have active support I would like help with it. It's like purchasing insurance. Might not ever need it but it's nice to know that it's there. I even thought about paying for the premium support here recently. For $100 even if I never needed it I thought it's not to bad of a price, now mine shows $1250 for that same support. I thought this morning after checking out the new site design, that this was all just a mess up with the prices from the new site design. But after reading all day it seems real. No one will go with the addons purchases anymore unless you are a big forum because of the price increase. Then it will start a chain reaction and won't have developers anymore for addons since people will be bailing. Now I am stuck with two choices either pay the high prices or now I have to convert everything back over to Xenforo after being back with IPS for only a week. Kind of depresses me. 

This, to me, is the worst thing - I'm unaffected, I can plan for February, I can cover things.
But when you have someone who suddenly sees a "slight" rise in what they have to pay in a few days compared to what they had previously budgeted for? That's not on.

Thanks for support us / me the last years... But now it's time for me to check new possibilities.
310 $ a year are bad news. 

No no no. Come on. You weren't minutes late, you're weeks late. You have clients who have renewals at the new price due in days (maybe hours), which due to the change to annual pricing and the increase will mean an outlay of more than double what they were expecting. Can you not see how giving a reasonable amount of notice is the least you should have done?

Just got the email. It starts funny, I must say:
”Don’t worry, it’s not bad news, but there is a price increase”
Yes, it’s bad!

It's waffle, Jordan. It's the equivalent of "Look at this shiny thing over here while we sh*t on your doorstep" in internet terms. I've kept schtum about things on here for years, but this is getting to be the final straw.
And don't reply to me with the "I feel you" waffle, please.
 

I don't understand this at all. What do you mean there was no great way to communicate this?
From: IPS Community
To: CoffeeCake <coffeecake@mmmcoffee.cake>
Date: September 1, 2021 9:00 am
Subject: Upcoming changes to your subscription
Dear community administrator,
Effective December 1, 2021, we will be making the following adjustments....
<insert changes here>

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?

There are some parts of the site now really slow, is this known too?

1. You chose to update your website and the price that your existing customers pay before emailing them. It's not really about what is posted on here. And you make it sound like emailing 'thousands' of clients is a difficult or time consuming process. Which of course it isn't, beyond writing the email, which could have been done weeks ago, unless you made the prices up on the spot this morning.
2. You're probably going to have to drop the 'barely any clients use this forum' line to justify the lack of reasonable communication on offer, now you're only offering support through it to the majority of your clients.
I'm broadly supportive of the price rise, but can you not just admit that the way it's been communicated has been poor and stop spinning it. It would be so much easier to believe the 'we want to be transparent' pr type guff then.

I don't have any kind of monetization on my forum, so it survives with donations from my users.
I already told them that the price increased, and the overall reaction from them was: "It's possible to migrate to another forum software?"
Just to let you guys know that many people will have this kind of reaction, because we are talking about an increase of 60% just in the forums app.
I don't want to tell names, but your biggest competitor costs 55$ for the forum app, which is now a lot less than the 80$ from IPS.

@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 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. 
 
 

It's natural to assume that everyone thinks alike, but it's rarely the case.

The expectation is now that you buy a service, and not a product. Downloading zips, inflating zips, uploading files, setting up MySQL databases and so on will likely die with Gen x (of which I am, and likely my death is now wished to be expedited 😅)
I understand your POV and I'm not mocking you or anyone else.
It's not usually wise to make knee-jerk promises. I've found this out the hard way.

I know I've contributed well enough to this thread, so I'll end on this note. You're very clearly out of touch with your customer base. If you think we're just going to "get over it" while you're mocking us by advertising cloud hosting, you're mistaken.
You're going to lose the majority of clients that kept the marketplace alive, and following that the developers you've repeatedly hurt by your radical changes to the marketplace over the last several months.
I hope it was worth it.
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