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.
While I was initially skeptical about the pricing changes, the more I learned about it the more I was okay with it. I think part of the initial problem was the talk of annual subscriptions, when in fact it’s much closer to paying for version upgrades. Their new standard licenses have come down in cost from the old perpetual licensing and the price of a version upgrade is only $36.
Yeah this seems like a really reasonable way to make this change. You also don’t lose access to Starter or Unleashed if you don’t pay that version upgrade fee, they will let you keep downloading the version you’d paid up until. Having it be a unified upgrade fee for both is nice too. I think it makes clear that it’s to cover ongoing development and support in a way that’s more transparent than a lot of software subscriptions.
They also still allow you to buy a lifetime license, even if it’s more expensive. Considering Broadcom’s VMware just removed all of their perpetual options, it’s nice to see a different company going against that trend.
I would like to see them offering lifetime upgrades at the end of your first year with Unleashed though. Paying $140 to upgrade to that rather than $36 for a year makes a lot of sense at that point. If it’s a new customer they might not want to commit upfront.
Edit:
There you go, you absolutely can, and they only charge $9 for the privilege of doing it later on. That seems good to me.