Announcing New Unraid OS License Keys

[darkside40]

I can understand such subscription models from a economical pov, no question.

 

But i am really glad that i have bought a lifetime License of unRaid long ago. If it would have been subscription based from the start i would never have taken that route. Instead i would have been gone for a full open source product like OMV, or have use something like Proxmox which offer a Community Edition for private installations and make their money with Service Subscriptions for Enterprises.

 

When it comes to support. I found a serious issue some time ago which didnt get any attention by the team:

 

or i made a suggestion for saving energy and helping the environment which also didnt get any positiv feedback.

 

Instead features like VPN get added to a storage box.

 

But hey maybe the subscriptions fee's make it possible to add some of that in the future.

I really hope that the claim that the lifetime licenses are really lifetime are true.

 

I have recommended unRaid for many years to many persons, dont know if i do that in the future.

[CD_1]

will there be security updates even if you dont renew licence?

how much more will be the new unlimited lifetime licence price be?

will the price be same for current upgrades to basic>pro or use the new price?

 

 

 

[MrCrispy]

When does this take effect? If I want another key, can I purchase the Pro key now and be guaranteed it will be for lifetime, even if I don't activate it for a few months?

[Mihle]

If I currently have a basic licence, will I be able to upgrade to a plus, after the change has happened, or would I be forced to stay on basic/upgrade all the way to pro?

[Pete0]

16 minutes ago, Mihle said:

If I currently have a basic licence, will I be able to upgrade to a plus, after the change has happened, or would I be forced to stay on basic/upgrade all the way to pro?

Is answered in the blog post.

[JorgeB]

29 minutes ago, MrCrispy said:

When does this take effect?

I guess that because they had to announce earlier than expected, there may still not be a firm date for the change, any keys bough now will be under the current model, including activation keys, and they can be activated later.

 

16 minutes ago, Mihle said:

If I currently have a basic licence, will I be able to upgrade to a plus, after the change has happened

Yes, that's answered in the first post.

 

[isvein]

Is LT on pareon or something similar?
I mean, if I can throw money to SI1/Ed or any other contributor of Unraid every month, why can`t I throw money at LT every month too?

[IlTossico]

It's amazing the amount of people that can't read. 

[Ridg]

Would it right to assume any licenses bought between now and the change would be grandfathered e.g. there could be a rush for people to buy before the change?

[YoHoNoMo]

Thank you for the way you are handling the change and keep honouring the lifetime licenses in a user-friendly way!

 

My server has six drives and while I initially bought the Plus license I soon upgraded to the Pro license even though I will probably never need it –– Just because I have been so happy with my purchase.

 

I'm planning to build an Unraid server as a gift for my father this year and had to snatch another lifetime license after reading the announcement. I don't want another subscription in my life, I'm sorry. 🥺 😁

 

Thank you for allowing users to still buy the old license type, store them for later use and keeping an upgrade path open!

Edited February 20 by YoHoNoMo

[Hostile_18]

I went from a trial to a pro licence, this morning. 

 

I do wonder though, how many new users will be put off by paying yearly. Something like security dosn't feel very optional. If I had started again I may have used something else vs a subscription, so growth may not be as expected.

 

Still investments in the platform are exciting. Personally I'd like anything that makes the OS easier to use, as it was quite a learning curve coming from windows. I might be speaking from lack of understanding as its still early days, but things like file exploring directorys and editing files requiring an app seems a bit more complicated than windows left click edit. A guided tutorial for setting up a reverse proxy would have been nice as it took me about 10 hours of research to get all parts working for example (lol).

 

Still over all I'm very postive about my experience, just i did need a bit of time on my hands to get to this level.

[McWetty]

I had been planning on jumping from Basic to Plus this holiday season (BF/CM discounts) as I'm going to butt up against my current 6 device limit by the end of the year... but this announcement kind of forces my hand as now I want to jump to pro and I did not want to stretch my budget that far this early in the year. I'm happy to support Lime, but I'm operating on thin margins (photographer building a business). 

 

1.) Is there a coupon code for a discount to jump from Basic to Pro now?

2.) Can I wait until BF/CM to upgrade from Basic to Pro at the current price delta?

 

I know it's only $10-20 discount, but like I said... thin margins and struggling artists.

[sonofdbn]

I like saving money as much as anyone else, but where I am, the current Pro licence is roughly the cost of an 8TB hard drive. If I want to avoid subscription/extension fees and go for a new Pro/Lifetime licence, I'm guessing it will cost less than a 16TB hard drive (I currently have four in one array, two in another).

 

Of course unRAID isn't perfect (I absolutely hate the clickfest Alerts/Warnings/Notices system in the GUI), not all my queries here get answered and I will never understand the difference between macvlans and ipvlans, but me and unRAID have come a long way since I wrestled with PATA drives and thought a 400GB drive was huge.

 

I was going to say I'm not a fanboi, but actually I think I am 😀

[IronBeardKnight]

As very long user of unraid and someone who has brought on many customers with home servers I think its great your looking at ways to bring money back into your company to increase your feature profile and the stability of the product.

I don't however believe that charging customers for security updates of which many are in fact bug fixes should be in any part of an update or subscription based model and that to me should be simply protested out of existence, however if your introducing a completely now way of doing security or an implementation that increases security giving features and benefits not just fixing the bugs you missed in your previous release then this may be ok.

Example:

Ok to pay: 
Introduced new version of docker and have take some of those features and created new unraid unique features

NOT OK TO PAY
The community has raised an issue with the you that for example the docker driver your using has been implemented incorrectly and to fix it you should make a default config change. That in my opinion is not something you should be allowed to charge your community for.


We as Unraiders never want to be put in a position where we feel like we are being charged to be the beta testers for your product.

A very clear and in dept explanation per update is going to have to be given in your change logs to justify update price but charging a heavy fee for something like a docker or some other third party applications hard work is not something ill ever pay for and would probably end up moving to a different software.

 

In this example I understand that work may need to be done to integrate with a new system but for me to pay for it I would like to know what I'm truly paying for.

In a digital world where security is of upmost importance and I think if your going to truly tackle security issues and even ones other third party companies or containers that have been neglected for so long and you can justify that then sure the price may be right.

I personally would love to seen docker image inspection features like what wiz or Prisma do obviously not as advanced but stuff that lets me know if the dockers i'm running are vulnerable or have out of date libraries being used or trigger CVE's and give me a runtime option to fix these issues. That is the type of security features I expect to see for upgrade prices not just other peoples hard work.

Otherwise where this goes remains to be seen and I can only hope this leads a product I love to even greater heights.

[trurl]

8 minutes ago, sonofdbn said:

hate the clickfest Alerts/Warnings/Notices system

Don't know what you mean there. You can disable browser notifications.

 

And better to not rely on actually looking at the webUI to find out you have a serious problem.

 

I only get notifications in email and only for certain things.

 

Just go to Notification Settings.

[sonofdbn]

23 minutes ago, trurl said:

Just go to Notification Settings.

 

Did I mention the great support in the forums? Now let me find something else to complain about.

[trurl]

57 minutes ago, trurl said:

You can disable browser notifications.

But if you did have a "clickfest" it makes me wonder if you don't have some problems that need attention. Start a new thread in General Support, etc.

[NettoHikari]

Thanks for the news. I really hope that you'll keep your word and that I'll be able to use my pro key for lifetime. There have been instances where other companies announced exactly this and then broke their word in one way or another... That's actually one of the reasons why I usually only use FOSS and free (as in beer) software. I only recently decided to switch to Unraid and if this would happen, that'd be the last time I bought a piece of software.

[ConnerVT]

I've read through all of the pages of this thread, the blog post, etc.  There is one question I haven't seen asked or answered:

 

What exactly qualifies as an Unraid "software update"?

 

Would going from 6.12.8 to 6.12.9?  6.12.8 to 6.13?

It would be nice if @SpencerJ or someone from the LT team would answer this.

[limetech]

21 minutes ago, ConnerVT said:

I've read through all of the pages of this thread, the blog post, etc.  There is one question I haven't seen asked or answered:

 

What exactly qualifies as an Unraid "software update"?

 

Would going from 6.12.8 to 6.12.9?  6.12.8 to 6.13?

It would be nice if @SpencerJ or someone from the LT team would answer this.

 

It's any publicly published version of Unraid OS, including "major" version updates, eg, from v6 to v7.  We're also not going to play any games like coming up with "NewUnraid OS" where all of a sudden your key won't work or we start charging an extra fee to keep using.

Edited February 20 by limetech
Clarify: no extra fees to run future versions of Unraid OS

[NettoHikari]

18 minutes ago, limetech said:

 

It's any publicly published version of Unraid OS, including "major" version updates, eg, from v6 to v7.  We're also not going to play any games like coming up with "NewUnraid OS" where all of a sudden your key won't work or we start charging an extra fee to keep using.

Thanks so much! That's reassuring! *screenshot*

[PyCoder]

I just read this on the news and just my 2 cents...
I bought years ago the pro key, which I don't use anymore, so I don't really care but...

I get it if you had a professional branch and a community like TrueNAS, but Unraid is mostly used by home users, so a annually subscription will probably only push people towards TrueNAS Scale, OMV.

There is no real advantage anymore over TrueNAS Scale, especially with raidz@expansion and a professional branch with professional support doesn't exist sooooo....

 

[ConnerVT]

39 minutes ago, limetech said:

 

It's any publicly published version of Unraid OS, including "major" version updates, eg, from v6 to v7.  We're also not going to play any games like coming up with "NewUnraid OS" where all of a sudden your key won't work or we start charging an extra fee to keep using.

 

If I understand you correctly (and I may be mistaken), I would see this as potentially an issue.

 

Most of the x.xx.Y releases recently (the past few 6.xx releases) have been mostly bug fixes to correct issues not identified by LT in the 6.xx release.  There will be some unfortunate Unraid users whose subscription expires shortly after updating to a new major release, only to find there is some major bug impacting their server.

 

I would understand if you need be subscribed to receive an update such as 6.12.x to 6.13, as these releases generally have new or enhanced features, thus justifying the development costs.

 

Also, a bit disappointed you did not directly answer my question as I posted, even after I clearly identified examples that drove me to ask it in the first place.

[SpencerJ]

9 minutes ago, ConnerVT said:

Also, a bit disappointed you did not directly answer my question as I posted, even after I clearly identified examples that drove me to ask it in the first place.

 

I'm not understanding what part wasn't answered. Please advise

[ConnerVT]

1 hour ago, ConnerVT said:

What exactly qualifies as an Unraid "software update"?

 

Would going from 6.12.8 to 6.12.9?  6.12.8 to 6.13?

 

1 hour ago, limetech said:

It's any publicly published version of Unraid OS, including "major" version updates, eg, from v6 to v7. 

 

The LT response gave an answer that was obvious, going from v6 to v7.  Even the dimmest user could figure that out, and seems a little bit like spin in what seems to be a thread attempting transparency.

 

My concern is more about going from minor updates, such as 6.12.8 to 6.12.9, which are generally are more for bug fixes than feature enhancement.  Looks as that is also to be defined as a "software update" which doesn't seem to be to anyone's benefit - Unraid user or Limetech.

Edited February 20 by ConnerVT