Pricing changes/updates as of July 1, 2019 (No, we aren't raising our prices)

[DirectAdmin Sales]

So, if I understand this correctly, in the future I'll have to pay for updates for new lifetime licenses? It's not that I don't want to pay for them, but it can become a large cost quickly I think... I currently have two licenses (but this was planned to become four in the near future). So this would mean it would cost me an additional 198 dollar per year just to keep the new licenses running on the latest version?

If you order lifetime licenses now ($299), then that is correct, they will not come with upgrades forever. I know it's not pleasant, especially after being used to free unlimited, but it's basically asking the impossible to have a lifetime of development, upgrades, security patches, etc. for just one price.

There's also something else we are considering but it's just a thought at the moment. There's those users who really don't care for support, and almost never open support tickets. Something like a much cheaper one-shot upgrade fee that they can pay at any time to make the license current. I'm the type of customer who doesn't want support, just give me the lowest price upgrade possible. There's other problems with it though, does that mean we block support tickets from them? etc etc.

 

[DirectAdmin Sales]

Hi,

No issues with your annoucement, you took care to :
- talk with notice, and without final decision not negotiable
- not be greedy, and care of existing customers
- explain why some changes are necessary

I'm a new customer coming to you for many licenses, in coming months, and we prepare things.

I'm at OVH, and I can't buy anymore a monthly license for VPS being on IP failover, but for dedicated server yes.

Is this a technical issue at OVH, or there is a relation with your announcement ?

Thanks

I don't know of any problem with OVH , it might be best to ask them. They aren't affected by this announcement anyway, so it must be something else.

 

[factor]

I think the confusion for me is around updates as well.

So here is what I heard
No Lifetime DA license after Sept 1 at all for no one. Retail internal whatever. September 1 2019 gone gone gone...

License structure is Monthly, Quarterly or yearly. Price basis Monthly.

New type of license incoming as "Lite" not really defined but in works.

If you are a already existing customer as of today "I assume" "10:07 pm is not Business hours". You can buy Lifetime License until Sept 1
Else your a new customer and you can't buy Lifetime license at all.

Is the above correct..

now the confusion for me.

I have lifetime licenses' licenses currently.

we are not going to start charging for updates

For what License?

then you say

Optionally, you can pay a $99 fee to extend the support/updates for another year.

for what license?

So the word update is the confusion.. Are we charging for support or updates OR Both?

If both the post seems contradictory

 

[DirectAdmin Sales]

This is how you do a Price increase.. Open community. Thanks

My thoughts are this. I am a small business. I wouldn't even call me small medium..

I love the idea of a small limit license. The price has to be smail as well. I think allowing at least 6 accounts per licence would give you an advantage to selling more as both "Voldemort" and Plesk have 5. (had to use the Harry Potter reference, had to be first)

I like the idea of a DNS clustering or only licence as well. I would even pay a one time fee per license if it was a lifetime thing. Otherwise it fairly easy to set up "directslave"

I am not opposed to a support fee per year as long as it's optional and renewable at any time. If updates are going to be bound to it (which it dont think it should be). Security patches should alway be included. If you software has a bug or a issue that is not the License owners fault. In short we shouldn't have to pay for bad coding.

I also would like to thank openly @smtalk and @zetier for being ambassadors to the DA community. The community on the whole is awesome too. Which is something I prefer. If I can help you all in anyway going forward just add me to the list...

Thanks for the kind words. Definitely wanted to discuss, not do an Announce-And-Vanish

I agree, and as I mentioned earlier, we need to make some major license system changes to get the Lite version working, but it should also help us speed up the ability to make a DNS only license too. It removes a limitation that has prevented us from offering it before.

By 6 accounts, do you mean 6 domains? It will need to be some mix of users/domains, that would be the limited/lite aspect of it. Being a small/personal license, there shouldn't be lot of users/customers. If the price is going to be cheap cheap cheap, we want this ratio to be pretty low, almost to the point of inconvenience.

 

[factor]

By 6 accounts, do you mean 6 domains?

Well I am still learning the account structure of DA. Example:

In "Voldermort Panel"

You have it installed then you could as Root/Admin could add unlimited "user" accounts then those accounts could have unlimited domains in them (if the owner allows it). You could also add unlimited resellers. So in simple terms

For Lite in DA something like

1 Root/Admin 6 User accounts many domains

Now you may want to Limit the domains as well like to 6 each.

So that would be

1 Root/Admin 6 User accounts with 6 domain each. I theory would be 36 total domain

But maybe what you are thinking is

Up to 6 users and 6 domains which could be
1 user with 6 domains
2 users with 3 domain each
6 users with 1 domain

Also only domain.com should count

if I have domain.com
and in that i have brent.domain.com
fred.domain.com
ethel.domain.com
That is still one domain for counting.

Does that help?

 

[Active8]

Thank you for your reply but:

1. The only lifetime left is our new $299 lifetime. It will never expire (you can always login and manage your server), but the software updates and support only last a year.

This software updates, is that DA panel software only or all kind of updates like we are doing with Custombuild ?

thanks

 

[zEitEr]

CustomBuild is a pure bash script. Hardly they will encode it or rewrite it in order to limit anybody from upgrading stuff like Apache, PHP, etc.

So I'm sure they say only about DirectAdmin panel version.

Thank you for your reply but:


This software updates, is that DA panel software only or all kind of updates like we are doing with Custombuild ?

thanks

 

[nservices]

Hi,
I love DirectAdmin as Panel and not only Because of the price, as customers, we totally understand the need to get ongoing payment for ongoing work

but, as you said, this should not affect the existing licenses that was based on our existing business model
anyway, my suggestions:
1. separate support and updates, as you may feel, support needed lot more resources (and time) that provide auto updates to existing licenses
so it's will be make sense to ask money for Future support, but continue to give access to updates
in my opinion, ongoing updates are not optional, they are mandatory (Security, bugs, the technological progress)


2. about the IPs / illegal reselling, you can get list of ranges of IPs for clients and allow to change IPs from this ranges only, it's just option
you can maybe set auto change IP from the ranges of customers and manual confirmation for out of range IPs

3. maybe consider also set licenses per domains, if someone have 10 or less domains the value (and needed support) is not like panel with 1000 Sites+

Thanks again for your advance notice, It shows a good relationship with the customers and show that your customers are importent for you.

Regards,

 

[zEitEr]

I do remember security updates once they were critical were published by DirectAdmin support for the OS's already EOL'ed. So I believe they will consider this too. See the post #41

 

[ditto]

@DirectAdmin Sales, Regarding customers that have not renewed license for updates/support or customers with the old licenses that do not include support anymore: I think it is a good idea to only not allow them support help, but still allow them to open bug report tickets. For example a dropdown box at tickets.directadmin.com for "bug report", wich anyone can submit ticket to even they have license that include support or not.

Edit: You might even add a red text saying that bug reports from license withouit active updates/support is only read and acted on, but never answered/replied to. So that only bug reports from users with active support/updates get replies. But the important thing, in my opinion, is to allow everyone to submit bug reports.

 

[twhiting9275]

I honestly feel that this is a much more effective way to handle 'lifetime' licenses anyways, and supports you and the customer going forward. Brilliant move.

 

[Nickske00]

If you order lifetime licenses now ($299), then that is correct, they will not come with upgrades forever. I know it's not pleasant, especially after being used to free unlimited, but it's basically asking the impossible to have a lifetime of development, upgrades, security patches, etc. for just one price.

There's also something else we are considering but it's just a thought at the moment. There's those users who really don't care for support, and almost never open support tickets. Something like a much cheaper one-shot upgrade fee that they can pay at any time to make the license current. I'm the type of customer who doesn't want support, just give me the lowest price upgrade possible. There's other problems with it though, does that mean we block support tickets from them? etc etc.

Thanks for the reply!

I'm one of the customers that doesn't really need support. I opened one ticket, (in all the years I've been using DA), and it turned out to be a bug with the dnssec (https://www.directadmin.com/features.php?id=2144 , remember? ). So I hope you find some solution for the updates. Like I said, I don't mind paying for them, at all; but paying 1/3 of the price just for updates seems a bit much for me...

Or maybe something like you said, a one time update, like for (low) xx you get updated one time to the latest version. This would just bump you to the latest version and stop there. Then it would be possible to update one or two times a year. But then you would also have to refuse support tickets from those customers, maybe ask a support fee then? (I would have paid for my dnssec fix! )

I hope you get this all figured out!

 

[ditto]

@Nickske00, But because you are a existing customer, you will be able to buy new Life time licenses until Sept. 1, and they will be like before, with updates included for the lifetime.

 

[Active8]

@Nickske00, But because you are a existing customer, you will be able to buy new Life time licenses until Sept. 1, and they will be like before, with updates included for the lifetime.

Are you sure about this because I asked the same question ad DA sales answered:

2. Old lifetime license updates forever, with no more cost.

Old Lifetime: Expiry: Forever Updates: Forever
New Lifetime: Expiry: Forever Updates: 1 year, add more only if you want

I'm am an old customer with an lifetime license already purchased, can someone from sales confirm this ? really confused now

 

[ditto]

@Active8, Yes, I am 100% sure of this. It is clearly written in the main post in this thread: https://forum.directadmin.com/showthread.php?t=58091

Existing Accounts:

We realize that your business/licensing model may depend on these licenses, so we are phasing them out over 60 days, to ensure there is plenty of notice. It would be unfair & disrespectful to simply remove these licenses without warning or explanation.

You have until September 1 to keep ordering lifetime licenses. To prevent abuse (hoarding), new purchases will be throttled automatically by our system. You will be able to purchase new licenses at the same general rate/quantities you normally order at. It's automated throttling with a personal touch.

 

[DirectAdmin Sales]

Hello, I apologize for some of the confusion. I failed to consider, not everybody realizes there is a different between public/retail/external licenses, and the licenses that datacenters use. The pricing on our main page is the public, end-user licensing. For example, $29/month license. This is the type of license you buy if you want the license in your own name, to use on any server in the future, and get support directly from us. It is your license. You can take it with you, anywhere you go.

Now, there is also internal (datacenter) licenses. If you rent a server from OVH, they will offer DirectAdmin for a small fee. Much less than $29/month. But this isn't your license, it is theirs. You don't own it, you don't take it with you when you leave OVH, and OVH is the only who can offer you technical support on it. Because of these restrictions, and because they purchase in large quantities, they get way better pricing than $29/month you see on our page. And they pass the savings along to you, offering a license cheaper than we do.

The confusion comes from the fact that, this announcement affects both groups.

Regular, public license used to be $299 with lifetime for everything. Now it is $299 with lifetime expiry, but not lifetime updates. The buying opportunities and limits to Sept 1 do not apply to this one.

Datacenter (internal) licenses, however, are such high quantity that businesses depend on them in their pricing models. They cannot handle a sudden change, they need time to adapt. For this reason, they are being given until Sept 1 to adapt. In the meantime, they can keep ordering their special lifetime licenses (within limits) so their business isn't interrupted.

I hope this is a little more clear. The one bad part about this clarification is, the $299 type was changed with no notice. So we are more than willing to give the same amount of time for anyone to purchase one more, assuming they are an existing customer (that means, you must have one already). Remember, it cannot be purchased as an investment, because we are no longer allowing license moving between accounts.

 

[DirectAdmin Sales]

For the next post I want to explain why new customers cannot have the same offer, by way of analogy/story. It will help me address some of the complaints that we are using the cPanel situation to deprive new customers of the best prices.

 

[ditto]

@DirectAdmin Sales, Sorry, now you are confusing me. So you are saying I misunderstand when I understood it so that existing customers could continue to buy the regular Lifetime licenses for 299 USD until Sept. 1 and still receive lifetime updates? I ordered one Lifetime license today and beleived it would receive lifetime updates. Was I wrong? It says "Updates until Jan 18 2038" on the license, so it looks like I was not wrong. It is license ID 195713 that I bough today. Please confirm that I will recieve lifetime updates on that license?

 

[DirectAdmin Sales]

@DirectAdmin Sales, Sorry, now you are confusing me. So you are saying I misunderstand when I understood it so that existing customers could continue to buy the regular Lifetime licenses for 299 USD until Sept. 1 and still receive lifetime updates? I ordered one Lifetime license today and beleived it would receive lifetime updates. Was I wrong? It says "Updates until Jan 18 2038" on the license, so it looks like I was not wrong. It is license ID 195713 that I bough today. Please confirm that I will recieve lifetime updates on that license?

You are fine. You got a full traditional license. You are right, this is too confusing and it's my fault. All of us here are working on maybe 4 hours of sleep per night.

To clarify as of this moment: The Sep 1 deadline will apply for existing customers of regular $299 licenses, and data centers with their various options for lifetime pricing.

Instead of posting a long story, I'll just explain the reason why new accounts can't. First of all, they have never done business with us and nobody relies on ("NEEDS") a lifetime license that they have never owned yet. Second, it would backfire and we'd have a ton of new accounts created under aliases just to mass-order these.

A new customer can certainly feel bad they missed a good deal, but they aren't hurt in the same way as a customer who is already using licenses regularly as their business model, and needs some time to adjust to the announcement, for the sake of their business.

 

[Active8]

This isnt making easy for us but for the last time:

If we buy as existing customer (with an regular license) NOW, then the ( regular) lifetime license we buy will be lifetime and get all the program updates till 2038 ?

When confirmed we will buy one