Unraid has come out with their new pricing plan.
I have mistakenly said in some comments here before that they were doing away with their lifetime plan. They still have it, but it is just more expensive. They have introduced a couple of cheaper annual subscription plans.
If anyone is still on the fence about buying Unraid, you have a week until the new pricing plan comes into affect.
After seeing so many examples of companies really screwing up their pricing changes, it is refreshing to see Unraid do this so well.
They have all the right in the world to do so, but I have a lot of trouble with them insisting that this is “not a subscription”. Let’s call a spade a spade. It’s a subscription to get updates, with a perpetual fallback license. The only difference with JetBrains’ model, which offers the same for their IDEs (which everyone calls subscriptions, themselves included), is that Unraid still offer a lifetime tier on top. But the lower tiers absolutely are subscriptions. If it was really a “version upgrade” thing, they’d tie the payment to major versions, not a time period. It’s a time based payment in which you get something in exchange during the payment period, therefore, a subscription. The word may have connotations for them to want to avoid it so much, I won’t pretend it’s not what it is…
Otherwise, for what I actually use Unraid for, they just put themselves out of my price range and it probably won’t be my next NAS’ OS. Outside the “use any disk size” RAID-like solution, there isn’t much keeping me on the OS, and I guess I can deal with setting up MergeFS/Snapraid…
I’m inclined to agree, but it’s really just semantic differences. If they really wanted to, they could just release a new major version upgrade every year, tie the license to that version, and still get an effective annual subscription.
I get your point, but if it’s just about semantics, why would they be so defensive about it not being one?
Jetbrains moved away from the purchase version model and to an actual monthly/yearly subscription model a very long time ago. I don’t even think you can buy their products anymore, they’re literally subscription models, no longer buy versions then get updates for a year sort of thing. You either pay them and have access or don’t and lose it.
You get a perpetual fallback license even if you stop payin, which is what I was referring to. It’s pretty much functionally equivalent to what Unraid is proposing here. You pay for a first year, get a license to use that version, then need to pay again to get an additional of updates.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-a-perpetual-fallback-license
Huh, I did not know that. Wild.
I do see an advantage to tie it to a time period for the customer. If it was just tied to a major version then Unraid would have to make a decision about if a feature belongs in version 8 or version 9. Essentially locking that feature behind a paid upgrade. By making the upgrade tied to a time period they have no incentive to hold features back for the next major version.
The incentive is still there, it just presents itself differently. Nothing prevents them from withholding major changes so they happen every 13 months either. If anything, I would at least expect yearly major versions to have large changes, while they can technically do whatever they want during the year I pay for, including not pushing any updates whatsoever.
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