Paul2020

@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?

The higher prices will have a big impact on the Marketplace too.
- Many ppl will leave IPS -> less sales in the MP.
- The ones that don't leave won't invest as much as before in addons.
- Less addon sales will make devs switch to other platforms.
- Less and bad supported addons will frighten new customers
(that and the high prices for the basic backage of course).

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.

Pourquoi je vais payer 110$, alors que je n’ai jamais ouvert un ticket! Faites plutôt payer les tickets...
En plus il y a de moins en moins de choses, et moi les clubs, il me serve à rien.
De plus si en 2005/2006 je faisais 1.800.000 de pages vues par mois, aujourd’hui à cause des réseaux sociaux je dépasse à peine les 10.000.
J’ai de la chance d’avoir un forum de passionnés par le foot, car l’autre que j’avais sur ma ville, lui je suis passé de 1.800.000 par mois à moins de 1.000 pages vues par mois, donc je n’ai aucune raison de payer si cher, un service qui n’intéresse plus les internautes.
Du coup, ça me donne l’occasion de tout arrêter et passer à 100% sur les réseaux sociaux 100% gratuits.
Et je finirais par dire, heureusement, que Microsoft ne facture pas toutes ses mises à jour majeures ou de sécurités, voilà une entreprise qui pense différemment et à trouver des ressources ailleurs que de couper la tête à ses clients.
En 2005/2006 j’aurais accepté l’augmentation, en 2021, non !
Why am I going to pay $ 110, when I have never opened a ticket! Rather, charge the tickets ...
In addition there are less and less things, and me the clubs, it serves me for nothing.
In addition, if in 2005/2006 I had 1,800,000 page views per month, today because of social networks I barely exceed 10,000.
I'm lucky to have a forum of football enthusiasts, because the other one I had in my city, I went from 1,800,000 per month to less than 1,000 page views per month, so I have no reason to pay so much, a service that no longer interests Internet users.
Suddenly, it gives me the opportunity to stop everything and go 100% on social networks 100% free.
And I would end up saying, thankfully, that Microsoft doesn't charge for all of its major or security updates, this is a company that thinks differently and finds resources somewhere other than chopping off its customers.
In 2005/2006 I would have accepted the increase, in 2021, no!

In addition to the price increase, we did not like your support. When we identified the error, you did not unsubscribe soon and said that it was not an error 😅 We corrected it ourselves

BTW, regarding hobby project vs a business can swallow the costs easily:
My most expensive Invision license now has a renew price of $310 per year.
I have a few dozen websites that we intended to convert to Invision (some Xenforo, some Wordpress). If you multiply say 20 sites by $310 thats a maximum of $6.200 per year. Even if we dont need every component and try to minimize the costs, for a small business thats a considerable amount of money.
Technically, Invision is superior over other solutions like Xenforo, that was the reason for our project, but now has come the time to reevaluate if the few tech benefits outweigh the money and how we should deal with the lowered trust we now have.

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.
 

We absolutely care about our customers. I will be replying to as many posts as I can today. The email was queued up days ago. We had some issues with the changeover so I paused the email until we were clear they had been resolved. The email went out 4 hours after the site was put back on, which we felt was a priority so customers could get support, download updates and so on.

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.

QFT – This is a serious point.
I can handle the price increases (10 years is a long time without one, absolutely) but the way they were communicated and implemented has been... poor.
Que Sera
One other note, as mentioned above, more recent PR and community management has come across as rather shallow and insincere.
We are not children.
Some of us have dealt with death on a daily basis and are not 'funky teenagers'. If you are a business, with business prices, please endeavour to keep it business-like, with a business-like respect for your customers' intelligence.
Thank you.

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.

Perso, j'abandonne 110$ x2 pour 2 forums qui ne me rapportent rien + 300€ d'hébergement çà commence à faire lourd, pour quelques mises à jour, je vais donc arrêter les frais là! Merci ! Déjà que je trouvais que Netflix abusé avec 3x 2€ en 2 ans, mais là on passe de 70$ à 110$ vous pensez que je fais pousser l'argent sur les arbres ?! après on s'étonne que les gens choisissent les versions pirates! 😞
Ce n'est plus une augmentation, c'est carrément du racket !

Personally, I'm giving up $ 110 x2 for 2 forums that don't bring me anything + € 300 hosting it's starting to get heavy, for a few updates, so I'm going to stop the costs there! Thank you ! Already I found that Netflix abused with 3x 2 € in 2 years, but now we go from $ 70 to $ 110 you think I'm growing money on trees ?! then we are surprised that people choose the pirate versions! 😞
It's no longer an increase, it's downright racketeering!

Thanks for the feedback. I realise the annual change is a lot to digest but once we get past the first renewal, I feel an annual renewal makes more sense. It's less to think about, fewer invoices, and fewer payments to make.
I understand the shock of seeing $25 every 6 months to $80 a year. It's a big leap in numbers. The truth is that the $25 renewal fee that was set in 2005 was just barely covering a single ticket, let alone development time. Keeping in mind that we do not charge a new license fee for every major release, even $80 a year (or to go back to 6-month thinking $40 every 6 months) is still good value when you consider that you are getting a market leading platform that gets new functionality added very regularly. Broken down monthly, it's $6.66 a month for a market leading platform with rapid support when you need it.
We should have increased the price annually to keep track with inflation - which has eroded nearly 30% from the dollar value over the past 15 years or so. Simply put, that $25 renewal is worth 30% less just because the cost of living (and thus our running costs) have increased.
We haven't removed support. As above, we will keep your ticket access until Jan 1st 2022 (or if your current license renewal expires later, then when your renewal expires). The support forum is now staffed and your request will be triaged to get you the best help in the fastest way.

I was shocked to read the email about the increase and it was like a slap in the face!
I can understand a price increase, but the prices here are going up extremely in one fell swoop. Corona has already caused a sharp drop in income and now we are supposed to pay the price increase? I can almost no longer afford that for my hobby forum. 
The price increase is even higher because the e-mail support is no longer available. Community support can be provided for freeware, but not for expensive licensed software!
Thank goodness I recently renewed for 6 months at the old price. I will now definitely look for an alternative and move my forum to another system if they don't reconsider the decision here...