Now DA don't earn any money on lifetime license so:
In all cases mentioned, if LLH's move to another panel, those customers loose way more money than converting to a 50% normal license. Which by the way, not a single other professional panel offers. DA was also the very first introducing a cheap license, the personal (plus), which forced the others doing kind of the same, so hobbyists and developpers could have a cheap license.
If they were in for the money only, they wouldn't have done this. But everything has to generate a certain amount of resource to pay for development.
As you might know... cPanel and Plesk (same company) are again raising their prices as per januari 1st. And it's a vast raise!
So why should they listen/answer to the questions/frustrations of the lifetime license holders, they have nothing to loose. We are just a pain in the a*s
Maybe then you should talk to them directly. Indeed it's a big problem dat LLH's don't generate income, which is definately needed to keep developing.
When the wave of ex cPanel customers came over, it was also expected that this would raise money due to new subscribtions, but that seems way less the case than should be expected. How is that possible?
If I understand correctly, the big problem is not the LLH's, but the illegal (re)selling of those licenses (or accounts), which prevents the required income. And that seems to be a very big problem.
You're also a long time customer here. So you should know that DA is not out to get us. In the contrary. They warned us even half year ahead before stopping selling LL's. Also at least since I was a customer, there was 0 price raising. So at least 15 years no price raising. If they were out there for the money, there would have been raises multiple times.
For the normal customers (non LLH) this is even making prices cheaper, as they don't even have to pay for the yearly global price inflation, there was never a price raise. Even those raises were never done!
DA staff is still reading this thread and I'm sure there will be some statement, but it can take a couple of months maybe. Give them the time, because what they will say, will be definate for all LLH's for years to come, so that is not easy.
Because
@DirectAdmin Support wouldn't have asked to talk to them and bring up idea's, if the last word was already told about this.
They would like to provide us till as far as possible for free, but at this moment it's not possible anymore. They can't afford to loose money, so no they are not going to make choices which will loose them more money.
But they are trying to make choices which can offer the best for LLH as far as possible, they are not asking for idea's and to contact them personally for no reason.
And people don't require MariaDB 10.11 right away and all things are still running and updated as before. Next to that... they will be required to make extra efforts because MariaDB decided to go from a Mysql addon to a seperate database system. Difference are becoming huge now.
At this point I don't know if Mysql 9 (if it will come) will be supported for LLH's or not, just to be clear.
I'm also still very annoyed that this is happening, but I rather try to think with them and try to see if there is anything to fix, then just say (like a whole bunch out there do, especially internal LLH's) "it's lifetime free I will never pay anything anymore". Because will bring way more the risk for DA saying that current lifetime will be lifetime "as is". You can use it as long as you want with the current OS and apps and updates but no new version updaets. And then it's also lifetime, but not the way anybody would be pleased with.
I don't like it either, but try to think from their perspective. What if your company gets to a point that resources are starting to get too less to keep on going the same way, also for a great deal because of illegale LL reselling? What would you do?
Only keep raising prices for monthley subscribers is not an option. And they started with the 50% deal for LLH's, which is already something no other company would do.
