Matt

Thank you for your thoughtful reply Ilya. I take onboard your point with the wording of the email. You're right, price increases are never fun. It's easy to imagine a negative future but I've learned that you can never predict the future. All I can say is that we will still be putting our energy and focus into Invision Community and hope that you all stick with us through this wild ride. There are more cost effective options out there for sure, but it's not cheap to develop and maintain software and I wonder how sustainable it is for those low cost options and whether lower costs means fewer staff which means slower updates and development of the platform. I guess we'll see. 🙂 *Raises hand* I search. I accept your point. I agree, a simple search box will not be enough, but I have some thoughts on how we can make it work.

I appreciate your feedback and I'm sorry to hear that you're leaving. Our aim for a support community is not just a ticket system in public, but rather a living knowledge base. We would consider putting in a "problem search" feature in the Admin Panel so you can quickly see if your issue has already been resolved before needing to submit a ticket.

You can pay into your account credits head of the invoice if that helps your budgeting. I asked our staff if they'd be OK not getting paid if we stopped all renewal periods and they weren't overly keen on that idea.😬 I know you said to not say that support hasn't gone - but, and I apologise in advance.... but support hasn't gone. You retain ticket access until Jan 2022, after that you will use our staffed support area within our community and sensitive or complex issues will be triaged into a ticket for you.

It's something that has come up in the past. The trouble is making it a fair system. If you're a developer who is making regular sales, would they deserve a free license at this point over someone who is trying to publish their first app? if you say that any developer can have a free license, how do they develop before they get a free license? If we say you get free renewals, where is the threshold? A developer who spends 8 hours a day, 5 days a week making apps and looking after customers or someone who gets a basic plug-in published? Where is the line? It's a system that need a lot of thought should be implement it.

Because we have to pay for things too? And those things are billed based on usage too. 🙂 $54/month is not a lot when you consider a decent VPS is almost that on its own. But I accept that everyone has different needs and comfort levels. All we can offer is options. I can't speak on behalf of the third-party developers. I also have not been contacted by a single third-party developer here, or in our shared Slack channel to be told they are leaving. So I can't really say that I agree with the view that we are facing a mass exodus of developers because I'm just not seeing it.

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

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.

The renewal cost also gets you updates (including major features) as well as support. However, as you have rightly stated, there are free tools to build a community on too.

To whom do you speak for? Who is "we"?

Some customers won't have renewals until well into 2022, we have to draw a line somewhere unfortunately.

NSFW is NSFW. I can't give you an answer without knowing more about the site, and I assumed you wouldn't want to discuss it publicly?

The simple reason is that if you choose to not renew, then you cannot upgrade. If you do not upgrade then you are likely to be on an outdated version of Invision Community which may not be compatible with the latest releases of the third party applications. Say you're on 4.3 and you go and buy an app written for 4.5, it likely won't work. It's not a hostage situation, more of a sensible precaution. But I'm serious about the pizza. I can look into your issues if you'd like? We're actually increasing support costs as we'll be hiring new people to ensure good coverage on the support forums. We are serious about wanting to create a comprehensive well staffed support community.

It wasn't my intention, just reminding that our entry level package is $49 which may be suitable. It's hard for me to know without seeing your site and its needs. 🙂

Jordan posted about some new functionality coming in the next release. I also just added stock replies and I'm working through some achievement refinements. Those are in the pipeline over the next 3-4 weeks.

Drop us a message and we can discuss it in more detail.

Appreciate the feedback and I'm sorry we weren't able to resolve your issue for you.

I'm sorry to hear that Paul. Feel free to DM me if you need help with anything. You could try our starter package, which is $49/month. You won't need to manage the internals, we do all that for you. It'll be one less thing to worry about so you can focus all your attention to growing and leading your community.

Ticket support still exists! We simply ask that you post your issues in the staffed forum and then they will be either resolved, or triaged into tickets. We are moving to a monthly release schedule to deliver bug fixes and features more regularly. We are not holding you hostage, but if we were, I'd ask for two helicopters and pizza with pineapple on.

Oh, you snuck in the roadmap debate! Respect for getting that in. 😄 Yes, I understand that customers are concerned about what this change means to them. I can only listen (well, read), understand and do my best to address those concerns.

That goes directly to our ticket system. It won't have to fight spam or pre-sales questions. The tickets are staffed and you will get a reply. Wedding Crashers? Great movie, one of my favourites.

You can, but really we would urge you to keep your software up to date. We often release security updates or improvements that would benefit your community. We are looking to increase the speed of releases to a monthly release schedule so everyone gets bug fixes and new features regularly. It is not true at all. Self hosted customers still get access to the marketplace, and can upload their own modifications outside of the marketplace as normal. Nothing has changed there. It might be that our cloud option is a better fit when you take into account hosting costs and the hassle of maintaining PHP and MySQL updates, etc. Our infrastructure leverages many tools to improve performance of your site. But we're not forcing a move. This has not changed with this update, to be clear.

A fair point.

Yes. I think the changes to support will be beneficial in the longer term. I truly do. More complex issues will be moved to tickets by our team.

Ok, so if your Invision Community license expires, you can: - Update any marketplace apps that are still active but only until they expire. If you want to renewal an app, or buy new apps you need to renew your license (and if you have missed upgrades due to not having an active license, go ahead and upgrade to the latest version). Many things were updated yesterday, the site, the self hosting prices, and we launched a new range of cloud packages which offer huge increases in media storage, and we dropped the online user limit.

You do not need to give us $1000 to get support. Our peer-to-peer community-led support forums still exist. We have created new support forums which are staffed. What you experienced in the past from 'unofficial' forum support will not be representative of what support you will get now. Oh boy, I think it's only fair to tell you that I've only just reached Checkpoint 3 with Duolingo. If you need a meal ordering, or a hotel reservation booking, I can do that. But for this, I'm going to have to rely on Google translate. 😄 Ok, well - I think you're expressing your thoughts and opinions which I respect. I know Zapier isn't free but it's a popular app that can really help plug in your community to your existing workflows.