As previously announced, Unraid OS licensing and upgrade pricing is changing.

As we finish testing and dialing in our new website and infrastructure, we aim to launch on Wednesday, March 27th, 2024. 

 

What this Means

You have until March 27th, 2024, to purchase our current Basic, Plus, and Pro licenses or to upgrade your license at the current prices. 

 

New License Types, Pricing, and Policies

We are introducing three new license types:

• Starter $49 - Supports up to 6 attached storage devices.
• Unleashed $109 - Supports an unlimited number of devices. 
• Annual Extension Fee for Starter and Unleashed: $36
• Lifetime $249 - Unlimited devices. No extension fee.

Starter and Unleashed licenses include one year of software updates with purchase. After one year, customers can pay an optional extension fee to make them eligible for an additional year of updates.

If you choose not to extend your license, no problem. You still own the license and have full access to the OS. 

If your license extension lapses (as in, you do not pay your annual fee), you can download patch releases within the same minor OS version that was available to you at the time of the lapse. Please review our FAQ section below for more on this security update policy.

 

Basic, Plus, and Pro Keys Will Become 'Legacy Keys'

These changes do not apply to current Basic, Plus, or Pro license holders. As promised, you can still access all updates for life and upgrade your Basic or Plus license. Once Starter, Unleashed, and Lifetime are available, Legacy licenses will no longer be sold.

 

Legacy License Upgrade Pricing Changes

Along with the new license types, we are increasing our Upgrade pricing for all legacy keys. Legacy key holders will also be able to move into the new system if they choose. The pricing will be as follows:  

• Basic to Plus: $59
• Basic to Pro: $99
• Basic to Unleashed: $49
• Plus to Pro: $69
• Plus to Unleashed: $19

 

FAQs

Please refer to our blog for a full list of FAQs

 

Seems fair to me.  I likely will  never have a need to change my current two pro and one plus licenses, but, at least I know what the path is should I choose to go that way.

 

Legacy users are protected and security updates within minor release will be available even to those with lapsed support.  I think this addresses most concerns and everyone has enough information to decide where they go with Unraid.

 

Change is often difficult, but, I feel this has been handled well and with more transparency than is often the case in these situations.

Plus License are not need any action or upgrade and became lifetime Updates ....?

Or are changed the actually Plus automatically to Lifetime?

18 minutes ago, Revan335 said:

Plus License are not need any action or upgrade and became lifetime Updates ....?

I believe this is the answer.  Just limited to 12 attached devices.

Is there any difference between Pro and the new Lifetime? 

 

Why not transfer all Pro to Lifetime and allow upgrade from Basic and Plus to Lifetime? 

Edited March 22, 20241 yr by Niklas

5 minutes ago, Niklas said:

Is there any difference between Pro and the new Lifetime? 

 

Why not transfer all Pro to Lifetime and allow upgrade from Basic and Plus to Lifetime? 

Price is different.
Accounting, analytics, a firm delineation of past and future to name a few. 

Just want to confirm: we can still buy current (Legacy) licences before 27 March at the prices shown, but that deadline doesn't apply to activation of the licence? In other words, I could buy the licence tomorrow and activate next year and not pay anything more.

10 minutes ago, sonofdbn said:

Just want to confirm: we can still buy current (Legacy) licences before 27 March at the prices shown, but that deadline doesn't apply to activation of the licence? In other words, I could buy the licence tomorrow and activate next year and not pay anything more.

yes. 

The one thing that surprised me was that the one year extension cost was the same regardless of whether you had the Starter or Unleashed licences since they are very different first year prices.   I would have thought something more like $29 and $39 might have been considered.   Probably a good reason why not but I wondered what it was?

@itimpi

 

Will this license change require you to have a unraid.net account with your licenses connected to update?

 

When i just updated my 2nd host it redirected to account.unraid.net for the update of my OS

Just now, Mirano said:

@itimpi

 

Will this license change require you to have a unraid.net account with your licenses connected to update?

 

When i just updated my 2nd host it redirected to account.unraid.net for the update of my OS

No idea - you will need to ask a Limetech representative about that.

1 minute ago, Mirano said:

@itimpi

 

Will this license change require you to have a unraid.net account with your licenses connected to update?

 

When i just updated my 2nd host it redirected to account.unraid.net for the update of my OS

@limetech

 

Could you perhaps shed light on this?

 

Page that loads when you press : Update OS

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Mirano said:

Could you perhaps shed light on this?

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/151008-new-improved-update-os-tool/

 

Thanks for grandfathering current users

I understand keeping old legacy Pro and Lifetime users separate, for metrics and measuring etc. but it still leaves the door open for future changes that differentiate between the two. It would've been nicer if there's a single Lifetime license type, and current users seamlessly get upgraded to it.

2 hours ago, MrCrispy said:

I understand keeping old legacy Pro and Lifetime users separate, for metrics and measuring etc. but it still leaves the door open for future changes that differentiate between the two. It would've been nicer if there's a single Lifetime license type, and current users seamlessly get upgraded to it.

I suspect the reason that has not been done is that would leave the existing Basic and Plus licences in a category of their own so probably easier to handle any 'legacy' licences at all levels automatically being entitled to new releases.

This is all very good and very fair IMHO!

 

The recent FAQ addresses a lot of the concerns that were brought forth. I am happy that they are providing a solution to those who do not wish to pay the annual fee each year, by offering fixes and security updates for a period of time after their licence as expired. As I've said in the other thread, I don't think it's fair and/or practical to expect them to maintain every version of Unraid forever. At at some point they have to move on and you either have to renew you licence, or just simply pay for the (still available) lifetime licence...which is still priced fairly IMHO.

 

I also like that they up'd the starter from 4 to 6 devices, so it give those users a bit more flexibility with their builds.

So in preparation for this move I wanted to grab an extra key but I've also been toying around with upgrading one of my existing licenses.  I went ahead and just bought a new pro key, is there an easy way to move my whole config over to the new license/bootusb and basically keep my existing one as my backup key?

I know that sounded confusing.  Basically I have a machine running Plus, instead of upgrading that license to Pro and then buying another Plus key I just bought a Pro key and want to apply that to my existing installation and "bank" my Plus key for a future build.

53 minutes ago, CowboyPilot said:

is there an easy way to move my whole config over to the new license/bootusb

The config folder on the current USB flash drive contains all the information you need to retain your current configuration.  Of course, you don't need the Plus.key file as that is your reserve plus key and the new Pro.key file will be on the new USB drive.  Copy the entire config folder (minus the Plus.key) to your new Pro license USB flash drive.

That is quite a substantial jump in price... it's basically doubled in a best case scenario and for all intense purposes it makes, imo, no real financial sense to buy anything but the lifetime license if you intend to use a server for more than 5 years....pretty common for a home server I would have thought..... which kind of makes me think you should have just increased all the prices instead of going down the yearly payment approach on lower tiers.

 

I wasn't sure about the changes being a good idea before but I'm even more sure it's not a great proposition compared with other options now - I would not pick unraid at these new prices, so I'm lucky to be grandfathered in.  I will likely jump on another copy now for a second server, bet I won't be the only one doing that or grabbing the upgrade now - so part of the 'quick influx of cash' before the change which might end up bringing in less long term.  I hope I'm wrong because the long term health of unraid is dependent on enticing new users but hmm....

 

Don't like the bit about security updates being the active minor release, and only for 1 minor release (it stops at x.x.0 of the second minor release), not to mention there's no mention of 'bug fixes' that may need a whole new minor release to fully fix them either... no actual timeline for release updates means a minor release could be months or years etc as well, I'd rather have a defined amount of time here, bit like android updates.

 

I also thought we were supposed to be getting an email about this change as a heads up, I haven't had one....

 

I still think this is fundamentally a subscription model on the lower tiers, it's not a subscription for the software, it's a subscription to stay bug free and secure and I HATE subscriptions and things that act the same way.  You can disagree or try and say otherwise but it won't change my opinion on this now I've see all the info that's been put out. 

54 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

The config folder on the current USB flash drive contains all the information you need to retain your current configuration.  Of course, you don't need the Plus.key file as that is your reserve plus key and the new Pro.key file will be on the new USB drive.  Copy the entire config folder (minus the Plus.key) to your new Pro license USB flash drive.

Perfect, I suspected that would work but wasn't certain, ha ha.  Thanks, I'll give it a shot!  Is it going to spaz out when the GUIDs don't match up?

Edit: Nm, I am confusing two things.  Keep the GUID with the appropriate key and should be g2g I imagine.

 

Edited March 23, 20241 yr by CowboyPilot

3 minutes ago, CowboyPilot said:

Edit: Nm, I am confusing two things.  Keep the GUID with the appropriate key and should be g2g I imagine.

Yes, you are fine.  The license key is associated with the GUID of the flash drive to which it was registered. Since your new Pro key is registered with the new flash drive GUID, there are no issues in transferring over the config folder from the "backup" flash drive to the new one.

2 hours ago, LSG501 said:

That is quite a substantial jump in price... it's basically doubled in a best case scenario and for all intense purposes it makes, imo, no real financial sense to buy anything but the lifetime license if you intend to use a server for more than 5 years....pretty common for a home server I would have thought..... which kind of makes me think you should have just increased all the prices instead of going down the yearly payment approach on lower tiers.

 

I wasn't sure about the changes being a good idea before but I'm even more sure it's not a great proposition compared with other options now - I would not pick unraid at these new prices, so I'm lucky to be grandfathered in.  I will likely jump on another copy now for a second server, bet I won't be the only one doing that or grabbing the upgrade now - so part of the 'quick influx of cash' before the change which might end up bringing in less long term.  I hope I'm wrong because the long term health of unraid is dependent on enticing new users but hmm....

 

Don't like the bit about security updates being the active minor release, and only for 1 minor release (it stops at x.x.0 of the second minor release), not to mention there's no mention of 'bug fixes' that may need a whole new minor release to fully fix them either... no actual timeline for release updates means a minor release could be months or years etc as well, I'd rather have a defined amount of time here, bit like android updates.

 

I also thought we were supposed to be getting an email about this change as a heads up, I haven't had one....

 

I still think this is fundamentally a subscription model on the lower tiers, it's not a subscription for the software, it's a subscription to stay bug free and secure and I HATE subscriptions and things that act the same way.  You can disagree or try and say otherwise but it won't change my opinion on this now I've see all the info that's been put out. 

 

I get that and I am also not a fan of subscriptions...

 

However... I have been using unraid for years and years and years... And you cannot expect Limetech to just keep supporting for free and only make money by adding users constantly...

1 hour ago, Helmonder said:

 

I get that and I am also not a fan of subscriptions...

 

However... I have been using unraid for years and years and years... And you cannot expect Limetech to just keep supporting for free and only make money by adding users constantly...

There are other ways to make money than just trying to sell the core product and/or subscriptions.... feature or service add ons which are not part of the standard product, branded merch, linking with an oem/company and making some actual nas/servers like truenas have done (that one on kickstarter was pretty popular after all), trying to court the small/medium/enterprize size business market with features which they can sell such as ongoing tech support or similar (they've kind of dipped into this), selling pre config setups for common use case scenarios for those that are less tech savvy. (to be fair they could also make a slightly more user friendly front end for first time config in general imo). 

 

Hell there's basically a store in unraid now, they could allow devs to sell their products and take a cut from them when they're purchased etc, benefits the ecosystem and the devs.....

 

What they've done here has the potential to actually lower their current income because less people will buy it etc because it looks too expensive compared to some highly regarded alternatives.

There are other ways to make money than just trying to sell the core product and/or subscriptions.... feature or service add ons which are not part of the standard product, branded merch, linking with an oem/company and making some actual nas/servers like truenas have done (that one on kickstarter was pretty popular after all), trying to court the small/medium/enterprize size business market with features which they can sell such as ongoing tech support or similar (they've kind of dipped into this), selling pre config setups for common use case scenarios for those that are less tech savvy. (to be fair they could also make a slightly more user friendly front end for first time config in general imo). 
 
Hell there's basically a store in unraid now, they could allow devs to sell their products and take a cut from them when they're purchased etc, benefits the ecosystem and the devs.....
 
What they've done here has the potential to actually lower their current income because less people will buy it etc because it looks too expensive compared to some highly regarded alternatives.

It could… I agree..

But I will defend unraid till the end of times… it has solved so many of my issues ans gave me so much fun stuff to nerd out on…

So yeah…. Kind of a fanboy..


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