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Licensing is lifetime version (again)

Rodolfo

⭐ Chevereto Godlike
Chevereto Staff
Administrator
Dear all,

With Chevereto V4 announcement I introduced yearly licensing which I'm taking back and returning to lifetime major version licensing. I'm doing this because for most users this was a deal breaker and too expensive, especially for those already running Chevereto.

This whole month has helped me to understand better what you need and how much you want to pay for it. Lucky here I made all the calls and not only I listen, I'm also answering. Renewable yearly licensing was introduced to sustain ongoing constant updates, it seems that for most that's not an urgency or even a need, it doesn't have to happen that fast. I don't have to kill myself working on it, we don't need the high expense. I can make it cheaper.

I'm cancelling the yearly renewal fee announced for V4. There won't be any time-based renewal fee, just a one time fee to upgrade from V3 to V4 ($25).

I'm also cancelling the planned Open Source merging and I'm cancelling any future Open Source release. I'm sorry Open Source community, I tried but I can't live out of downloads and repo stars.

I hope that these changes put us back on track, I'm really sorry for all those who felt betrayed and pushed over when I announced yearly renewals.
 
For me the issue was always about the price. A yearly renewal fee of ~$50 wouldn't be bad. Especially if the software worked without renewing (you just couldn't have updates and such). In fact, this is how most companies sell software like this. Even forums like vBulletin, Xenforo, and IP do this. But if the price was $100-200 for renewal that would have been too much for me. I think you could have a smaller renewal fee so you would have a recurring income stream without alienating most of your clientele. Say $15 for the renewal (since you only charge $15 for the Core product it wouldn't make sense to charge more to renew it than the product itself costs), and let people know that they can choose not to renew and still use the product they paid for.

If you want to get rid of the renewal fee entirely that works out better for me in the short-term, but if you can't afford to sustain this product because you don't have a consistent income stream then you charging a renewal fee would actually benefit me (and everyone else using this software) in the long-term.
 
I have no issue with yearly renewal as long as the subscription is reasonable. Lifetime license is not a way to go for long term development as we need to eat everyday, we can’t eat one time 😂
 
What happened here is that we had one model for pricing + development and I wanted to shift development. I prepared a plan for it and that when I got that done the price was too high for the existing user base and the market. In other words, the stuff that I planned to carry for the next 2 years is too expensive for the project, so I need to make it cheaper.
Lifetime license is not a way to go for long term development as we need to eat everyday, we can’t eat one time
Rather than going yearly renewal we will stick per major release renewal, we will keep guarantee access per major releases meaning that you don't risk stop getting updates for the major release you purchased. We got known for offering such deal, everybody is already used to it and the yearly renewal was a mistake as we could have easily solved the revenue issue by tweaking the version numbers.

I want to thank @mkerala for letting me know about this mistake and to find an easy path to get it fixed, some weeks ago he told me that this will happen and suggested what I just explained here.
 
$20 and $75 are very reasonable prices and should allow all those small sites running Chevereto to upgrade. This should also make the pricing simple with single on-time fee.
 
@Rodolfo please add a donation option in the forum and so we can contribute to you in some other way. As it is going to be a one-time fee.

And most licensing software has yearly renewal for updates and so development keeps going as the author have a life to live. When someone can host the website for 20USD a month or more, why cant they pay a renewal of 20USD or more for updates. All you need to do is one fee rather than a complex structure.

New purchase: 40USD
One time upgrade fee : 20USD
Yearly renewal: 20USD

It is damn cheap.
 
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@Rodolfo please add a donation option in the forum and so we can contribute to you in some other way. As it is going to be a one-time fee.
Besides donations what I'm really looking forward is to have crowfunded RFC add-ons but it is getting hard to find a system for it. I'm still looking.
 
Besides donations what I'm really looking forward is to have crowfunded RFC add-ons but it is getting hard to find a system for it. I'm still looking.
I believe you are bringing on the plugin option in V4, why not sell the plugins and so those who need will buy them. Because adding a plugin option will make more developers working on chevereto where you can sell your own as well revenue share for other work. This is one of the options.

Some xenforo addons : https://xenforo.com/community/resources/dbtech-dragonbyte-donate.5870/
 
I think what confused people the most was the escalation of pricing. The renewal fees is not sustainable and it's not the issue.

The issues are:
  1. People already own Chevereto.
  2. Chevereto Free is almost identical to Chevereto paid. Why pay?
  3. The release scheduled confused the HELL out of people. It should've been a FLAT price, not on this date it's going up to $$$. Keep in mind, most WEB DEVELOPERS have a VERY LIMITED English Undersanding, so you need to be a FLAT and DIRECT price, not a confusing matrix.
  4. Offer a discount to UPGRADE NOW and have the 1 year start at the v4 release date.
Until v4 has a release the amount of income will be minimal. maybe like?

VersionNewEarly BirdUpgrade from v3Yearly Renewal
Core
79​
29​
39​
35​
Network
169​
59​
69​
75​
 
Chevereto Free is almost identical to Chevereto paid. Why pay?
Most people just see for UI to determine if a system is better of worse, people really never pay attention to details. If UI changes == system changes, otherwise is the same stuff for most... That have been the hardest part of development for me, now to clarify what makes V3.20 better than Chevereto-Free:

Chevereto V3.20:
  • It provides native (real) support for containers and you can run it in all modern clouds
  • External storage support
  • Social features (followers, likes)
  • 2021 user interface, Chevereto-Free uses 3.16 design (old icons, buttons and fonts)
  • Software support (not working? it gets fixed)
  • 12 factor app (this alone worth a fortune)
Then when I announced that Chevereto-Free was about to merge to Chevereto I was surprised to see how I stopped making any money 🤡. I can't gift my work, neither I will get 100,000 install base to make donations work. Open Source just didn't work here, lets move forward.
 
You could keep it with a fee to upgrade to V4 to the users that already have v3. People that get into chev at version 4 you could make it yearly.

That's what BunnyCDN did when they upgraded to min $1 per month. New users minimum of $1 per month expenditure (even if they used less than $1 of bandwidth or storage, they get charged $1 monthly or more (if they use more)) and old users no minimum (if you use $0.25, that's all you gotta pay).
 
I have bought the Network version and as I was informed by mail I will receive the V4 version for free. But I do not know if it will be able to run on my QNAP, because it will have more requirements, 😟😟
 
I have bought the Network version and as I was informed by mail I will receive the V4 version for free. But I do not know if it will be able to run on my QNAP, because it will have more requirements, 😟😟
The software isn't designed for any specific hardware so long as you can provide your QNAP with the system requirements it will be feasible to run it. Also, for V4.0 the requirements won't be that different anyway (PHP 8 is the only big requirement) as I've to manage to suit the server market offering and this market is always slow to embrace new libraries and whatnot.

I've found the hard way (twice) that I can't push new stuff that sudden, so I really doubt that V4.0 will be any harder to run.
 
The software isn't designed for any specific hardware so long as you can provide your QNAP with the system requirements it will be feasible to run it. Also, for V4.0 the requirements won't be that different anyway (PHP 8 is the only big requirement) as I've to manage to suit the server market offering and this market is always slow to embrace new libraries and whatnot.

I've found the hard way (twice) that I can't push new stuff that sudden, so I really doubt that V4.0 will be any harder to run.

Thank you very much for your answer, I am looking forward to the release of the V4 version to try it out.:D
 
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