What is the future for Legacy DirectAdmin License holders?

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Richard G said:
In that case.... for $5/month more (so for $15/month) you can upgrade your current lifetime license to a modern license. Special deal for lifetime license holders.
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I don't see an automated option for that in customer area, do you need to contact them for this "special deal"?
 
Thanks Richard, found it. Do you know for how long this option will be available? I have no hurry to start using it before it's needed.

$15 is acceptable although with a sour taste in my mouth, not for the price which is fine, but when you buy lifetime license, you expect the other side to respect the "contract" and not search for a loophole to get out of it. Deal is a deal, if you break the deal once, you will break it again.
 
Splet said:
Do you know for how long this option will be available?
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No at this moment it's not known yet. It might be several months, maybe more, maybe less, hard to say. Good chance DA will communicate on the forums once things will change for this offer.
If you have only 1 license it's probably affordable, but for people with more licenses it's very expensive as you have to keep paying for them even if they're not used. So some can profit from it, for others it's too expensive.
 
Richard G said:
No at this moment it's not known yet. It might be several months, maybe more, maybe less, hard to say. Good chance DA will communicate on the forums once things will change for this offer.
If you have only 1 license it's probably affordable, but for people with more licenses it's very expensive as you have to keep paying for them even if they're not used. So some can profit from it, for others it's too expensive.
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I have one license and it's too expensive. I'm not doing business or hosting websites for a price, I'm hosting a few of my own sites. So, tell me.. is it worth paying when I've already paid?
 
d.dobrev said:
I'm hosting a few of my own sites.
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In that case I wouldn't consider it anyway. You're just having a few of your own sites and having a full legacy license or a personal license?
Anyway, if I would only use some of my own sites I would keep going until 2026 when MariaDB 10.6 goes EOL. And then either keep using it for a bit or change to a personal plus license at that time, which is only $ 5/month.
 
d.dobrev said:
I have one license and it's too expensive. I'm not doing business or hosting websites for a price, I'm hosting a few of my own sites. So, tell me.. is it worth paying when I've already paid?
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I am in a similar situation. I mostly host my own domains but I do resell to a few friends. Basically my friends pay for the cost of the server and my domains are hosted for free. If I have to pay any more for the use of a "lifetime" hosting software I already purchased, then I will lose money every month. When MariaDB 10.6 is close to being EOL'd, I will start coding my own commands/control panel to perform the functions I use on a regular basis. There is nothing that DA does, that I couldn't do myself. They just made things easier by doing a lot of research and integrating the software for me. Now that everything is already integrated, installed and functioning, it is a lot easier to maintain things on my own, very similar to how I administrated servers before I retired from my main job as a software engineer/systems admin.
 
The only thing that troubles me is the lack of communication. I found out Maria 10.11 is included in lifetime licenses anymore through this forum. There is no mention of it in the changelog either.

It feels like this was not given the thought it deserves. Personally, I prefer to be notified by e-mail about such changes. In fact, that would give them the opportunity to upsell their lifetime licenses too. And we would do the same with our customers.
 
me: invests in company by buying fancy license
them: permanently gimps said license 3 years later to get me to fork over more money
me: surprised pikachu face

Seriously though. I understand DA needs to make more money. But a bait and switch was your best idea?
Ain't costing y'all a cent to provide the product to those who already paid for it. In fact, when your customers are happy with something, they tell their friends about it. Crazy, I know.

And just to clarify, "100 years of updates to a legacy product waah" isn't a valid answer. That's literally a problem that you made up by creating a legacy codebase lol.

Charge like $30/yr per license to renew them. I'd pay that without a peep. But you want $180/yr? Nah fam. I'll give Enhance my money.
 
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Right now I am focused on my VPS business which uses Virtualizor at $9.00/month/server. If I ever focus on shared hosting again where I need a DA type control panel I will probably use DA for a few servers. But if the price keeps going up then I will probably just write my own for my specific needs. I have done it before using Webmin as the backend. I had fully automated signups and provisioning. I can do it again. That is the advantage of learning how to do things the hard way first instead of simply relying on a control panel to do everything for you.
 
DirectAdmin Sales said:
Regarding the second point made:

We are certainly open to suggestions on solutions. Feel free to post them publicly! We have received many in private but most are lifetime license holders who say paying is not an option to them, so I suppose the solutions will need to be very creative? So far, our response has been that the solution for now is keeping things going and making the sacrifices needed to do it.
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As there is absolutely no feedback from DA Sales to this thread, I thought that I would reply to this and formulate a clear proposal, so other LLH could react and give feedback to DA Sale (like no-way / maybe / great / where do I sign) so they could maybe also give us some feedback.

1) DirectAdmin can change his business model but they have to propose a decent solution for LLH holders other than what is available today.
I proposed a 49$/year / licence fee to switch it to a normal/supported licence without restiction. At our side this would be ok.
We are coming from poeple who paid 49 / 99 / 299 one time, for a "full lifetime" product, the current ~180$/year option to bring it back to a supported fully functional product is still hard to swallow.
We have customers that pay 9$/month for their licence, there is no way we can bump them to 30$/month, even at 15$it is a long shot. (and we would make no margin).
It's software, every sale the you don't do is money that you waste

2) Once LLH issue is sorted out, you can stop the two different codebases.

3) Propose a discount scheme that would allow poeple holding many licences to get an important discount allowing datacenters, vps and dedicated services providers to sell your licences and still make any margin.
(again we used to price 9$/month for a full licence, if old LLH are 49/year and if we can buy more licences at something close to 49$, maybe higher like 69$, everyone can make a profit and push the product.
Because if we find a solution with our Legacy Lifetime Licences and cannot get more licences at a reasonable price, we are still stuck. (and unhappy :D)
Max discount tier that I know of is 40%, 180$/licence/year, still too much.

To compensate, you can eventually adapt the conditions on these licences so that support has to go trough the reseller and that support tickets opened at DirectAdmin will be charged. (100 licences active, 15 years a customer, must have opened less than 20 tickets over the years if you exclude licences commercial and technical issues), so I don't mind paying for them and it encourages poeple to find solutions on their own and on this very helpful forum).
This would bring back affordable licences in the market, would boost sales without extra support and maybe kill some competition.
 
I understand it may be better for them to sell monthly license types in the long term, so I'm okay to buy new monthly licenses when I need new licenses, but why are you punishing the people who already invested in your company in the past?
 
Looking at the silence of the DirectAdmin team, it seems like they are not listening to our feedback, nor do they care about any issues. They are just going their own way, following what looks good to them only. What they previously stated on forums now contradicts their current actions, indicating that they may follow the path cPanel/WHM took in the future. It's been almost four months since this thread was opened, and the DirectAdmin team is completely silent at this point, which is not a good sign. It seems like those who initially supported DirectAdmin are being abandoned and our feedback does not matter to them.
 
Lampard said:
and the DirectAdmin team is completely silent at this point,
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Not really. I know for a fact that they are reading this thread and also looking if any new idea's are posted and also they are talking with various party's via the ticket system. So they are silent here, but they are interested in the feedback.
So your feedback does matter when containing idea's. They are aware that pricing is a very important issue.
 
Attached is the screenshot of the life time pricing. I, like many others, have an external license. It's not an internal license and I paid nearly USD$300 for it. At that time I thought it was a good deal, as I will be getting a lifetime upgrade, even though the skin was ugly as hell and cPanel was a much popular choice (It's still is). I'm okay for not getting direct technical support from them, because this cost them $ and I get that. I'm okay to use this forum and google if I need help.

And now, after they took our money, they decided to move all life-time license to "legacy" and we will be getting minimal update??!! And we will be sticking with MariaDB 10.6 without an upgrade??

DA support, if you are reading this, please understand that this is not okay. We support you by paying the more-expensive lifetime license and granting us the "pro pack" license won't cost you a dime and it's the only right thing to do.
 

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Pro pack is new development, not updates. So strictly seen we did not pay for new development and features.
I (like a lot of others with external licenses) would already be pleased if we just would be able to get what was promised us at the time of the lifetime selling. So just the default software and updates, which ofcourse includes new MariaDB versions.
 
Splet said:
$15 is acceptable although with a sour taste in my mouth, not for the price which is fine, but when you buy lifetime license, you expect the other side to respect the "contract" and not search for a loophole to get out of it. Deal is a deal, if you break the deal once, you will break it again.
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So you agree that they're breaking the deal, and you know they will do it again some day. but for some reason, you are still willing to pay 15$/m.
well, now I understand DA approach.
 
I have 3 lifetime licenses. I'm moving off to another control panel when I upgrade instances. Directadmin offers good value but their lack of a response is a response in itself. They've ignored messages while licenses holders pound sand but in the end, you pay or you don't. I came across this after a search and the message is loud and clear. I tried to do a different license after upgrading to arm64 and decided to just move forward with something else.

This decision was a calculated business decision on their end. Keep in mind, they are not responding after they made the decision. You pay $15/mo or you can use the legacy version. They have bills to pay, we paid them once, they still have bills and continued development cost. This was their decision as a business. They were once good for us smaller players but have repositioned their business.
 
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