New Unraid OS License Pricing, Timeline, and FAQs

[MrCrispy]

17 minutes ago, HardwareHarry said:

My suspicion would be that this leads to the rise of OMV and Truenas and Unraid might beginn to struggle in 2-4 years but who am I to say

 

I certainly hope that never happens (I mean LT struggling part), in fact I hope it means they can grow and innovate more!

I am also worried the future may bring more licensing changes. And it does exclude the beginner user who doesn't have much money.

[trurl]

9 minutes ago, MrCrispy said:

even standard SATA has much higher write speeds. There are posts here where people have done plenty of tests and the conclusion was the smb and FUSE in unraid was to blame, without that they got much higher speeds, without using any cache.

Realtime parity updates are the reason writes to the array cannot be as fast as SATA or even HDD speeds.

 

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/storage-management/#array-write-modes

 

And also the reason Unraid can allow different sized disks in the array.

 

[HardwareHarry]

13 minutes ago, MrCrispy said:

 

I certainly hope that never happens (I mean LT struggling part), in fact I hope it means they can grow and innovate more!

I am also worried the future may bring more licensing changes. And it does exclude the beginner user who doesn't have much money.

 

I also hope that never happens, but given the structure of the members of this Community (= Customer base structure) I somehow doubt there will be many new users and I somehow doubt many of the current user would actually have choose this system as new users (including myself and a buddy of mine to whom I recommended Unraid (and who has 2 Plus licenses now).)  When I was thinking about it some time ago my limit was something about the psychological "199 USD "  limit and even that would be hard to swallow for me. But 250USD  ....would not be an option for me. For my server and backup server thats 500 USD !!! Even the 2 Pro Licenses I have bought is a lot of money but 500USD for 2 Lifetime. Yes I could do one lifetime one unleashed and updatd the backup only from time to time and so on but would I want to fiddle with something like that? No.

 

Given that I would predict LT will struggle with that model

Edited March 27 by HardwareHarry
updated

[MrCrispy]

1 minute ago, HardwareHarry said:

 

I also hope that never happens, but given the structure of the members of e.g. this Community in the forum I somehow doubt there will be many new users and I somehow doubt many of the current user would actually have choose this system as new users (including myself and a buddy of mine to whom I recommended Unraid (and who has 2 Plus licenses now).)  When I was thinking about it my limit was something about the psychological "199 USD "  limit and even that would be hard to swallow for me. But 250USD = ~230Eur. ....would not be an option for me. For my server and backup server thats 500 USD !!!

 

I agree with you. the price is a little too high. Unfortunately a lot of users here are long time users with massive servers, so are the youtubers, so for this segment even costing $500 would probably not be a problem as their disks/hw cost multipe thousands. And that is the most vocal segment of the community.

 

I wonder if LT have decided to target the higher end of the market as there's more money there?

[HardwareHarry]

3 minutes ago, MrCrispy said:

 

I wonder if LT have decided to target the higher end of the market as there's more money there?

In my understanding that is not what the sytem is designed for. Just use an old PC and throw in the disks you have. ANd there are not thousands of high end youtuber buying unraid- (most of then are not even high end ) They could also use OMV or Truenas or Proxmox  with different systems etc. 

I don't see that new customer base for unraid. 

 

First rule of the fight club sales: Know your customer base

[MrCrispy]

3 minutes ago, HardwareHarry said:

In my understanding that is not what the sytem is designed for. Just use an old PC and throw in the disks you have. ANd there are not thousands of high end youtuber buying unraid- (most of then are not even high end ) They could also use OMV or Truenas or Proxmox  with different systems etc. 

I don't see that new customer base for unraid. 

 

First rule of the fight club sales: Know your customer base

at the end of they day they are a business. I'm sure they have internal numbers and did the math for projected sales and growth.

 

one thing I did notice on reddit and other forums is they must've had a lot of sales in the last month as people scramble to get the legacy prices.

 

The prices have basically doubled. my thought is they are hoping a lot of users who choose the new starter/unleashed options, after using for a few years, will be tempted to upgrade to lifetime. you could end up paying a lot more than 250 too.

 

I'm not here to debate what the ideal price is. I feel like this will almost certainly exclude the lower end of the segment. Whenever someone recommends unraid, it will always be followed by 'but you should really pay for lifetime, its worth it'. another option is you but the cheaper one, and after a year you just keep using it and forget about upgrades. Even that leaves a bad taste as there will be very limited security updates.

[HardwareHarry]

11 minutes ago, MrCrispy said:

one thing I did notice on reddit and other forums is they must've had a lot of sales in the last month

But I'd also assume most from existing customers

 

11 minutes ago, MrCrispy said:

... I feel like this will almost certainly exclude the lower end of the segment. 

Exactly my point as this in my opinion is this is the big part of the base which is then no longer buying

 

[ddube]

37 minutes ago, MrCrispy said:

 

I agree with you. the price is a little too high. Unfortunately a lot of users here are long time users with massive servers, so are the youtubers, so for this segment even costing $500 would probably not be a problem as their disks/hw cost multipe thousands. And that is the most vocal segment of the community.

 

I wonder if LT have decided to target the higher end of the market as there's more money there?

It doesn't matter. We all have our license, so they won't get any new money. It's the fresh users that will pass on the offering.

 

Will you buy the "subscription" license ? Will you buy a lifetime license that cost twice as much for the same thing ?

[LSG501]

2 hours ago, MrCrispy said:

 

one thing I did notice on reddit and other forums is they must've had a lot of sales in the last month as people scramble to get the legacy prices.

If I take my order numbers as literal number of purchases it's gone up 30,000 give or take on the order numbers in roughly the last 3 months.   

 

I did notice that in my case I had 2 'order numbers' generated for my first purchase when I assigned it to a drive so it's possible that the number is half that... even if assume lowest tier of $59 multiplied by 15000 that's over $800k (potentially higher).... not saying it's accurate, plus we're making assumptions on the orders but if that's even remotely close they've got that initial cash influx many of us have said about... the question now is will they actually get anymore from the new model and I'm not sure the sums will add up in future.

 

I've bought 2 more licences at the current price, one basic (just in case I do a mini server with left over bits) and one more pro for a backup server of my main server (plan is to basically clone current one).  I'm not going to buy anymore at the higher prices....

[HOLISTICAGENT]

Wait so what, I cant buy a licens for my server on the terms i accepted 25 days ago?

 

[trurl]

1 hour ago, HOLISTICAGENT said:

the terms i accepted 25 days ago

What terms? Did you already buy?

[xokia]

7 hours ago, MrCrispy said:

 

but this is not true. even standard SATA has much higher write speeds. There are posts here where people have done plenty of tests and the conclusion was the smb and FUSE in unraid was to blame, without that they got much higher speeds, without using any cache.

Might help if they implemented an actual cache drive.

 

For unraid with the new pricing structure folks are going to expect features JMO. Which to date they have been fairly slow at rolling out. Maybe that improves, but if they think it will business as usual I think they are in for a rude awakening. There are going to be the die hard fans that unraid can do no wrong. But if we are actually honest with ourselves new pricing is going to cause a serious eval of whether a home user thinks the features provided justify the added cost. It would be a no for me. And nothing against unraid its fairly decent software. The fragility of parity and no real cache drive support are concerns in my book that would have me weighing other options.

[Hoopster]

2 minutes ago, xokia said:

For unraid with the new pricing structure folks are going to expect features

I believe this is one of the stated reasons for the pricing change.  They need more reliable and steady income to hire more developers to provide new features quicker than they can now.  I may not be remembering that correctly, but, for some reason that sticks in my mind as a reason for the pricing changes.

[PhantombrainM]

I'm really excited to see how the new pricing model will work. But we'll probably never know.

All I can say is that I bought my first and only license last month after a friend brought Unraid to my attention in January.

He said it costs 49€ and I can try it out. When I found out it was already 89€ for my needs, I was already thinking about it for a few days, but I tested it.

If it had cost 129€ or 249€ (I hate subscriptions) like it does today, I wouldn't have even installed the trial, I would have just said to my friend: Yes, I've had a look. No, it's too expensive . And LT wouldn't even have gotten my 89€. So I'm curious to see how the new prices work. 

[Spec7re]

2 hours ago, Hoopster said:

I believe this is one of the stated reasons for the pricing change.  They need more reliable and steady income to hire more developers to provide new features quicker than they can now.  I may not be remembering that correctly, but, for some reason that sticks in my mind as a reason for the pricing changes.

Yes you are correct.

 

They talked about it during the most recent Uncast podcast. Hiring more developers and growing the team is the main driving factor for the pricing changes.

 

2 hours ago, PhantombrainM said:

If it had cost 129€ or 249€ (I hate subscriptions) like it does today, I wouldn't have even installed the trial, I would have just said to my friend: Yes, I've had a look. No, it's too expensive . And LT wouldn't even have gotten my 89€. So I'm curious to see how the new prices work. 

 

Time will tell if this is successful, or not for Lime Tech. Personally I hope they are successful and are able to grow the team to keep making Unraid better with each release. In terms of "value," it's going to be different for everyone. There will be many people that look at it (even with the changes in pricing) and still see good value, while others may not. Either way I guess we will have to wait and see what happens in the long term, hopefully it will be successful for them.

Edited March 28 by Spec7re

[MrCrispy]

3 hours ago, xokia said:

Might help if they implemented an actual cache drive.

 

For unraid with the new pricing structure folks are going to expect features JMO. Which to date they have been fairly slow at rolling out. Maybe that improves, but if they think it will business as usual I think they are in for a rude awakening. There are going to be the die hard fans that unraid can do no wrong. But if we are actually honest with ourselves new pricing is going to cause a serious eval of whether a home user thinks the features provided justify the added cost. It would be a no for me. And nothing against unraid its fairly decent software. The fragility of parity and no real cache drive support are concerns in my book that would have me weighing other options.

 

the question is what features? from all the blog posts and what was said in the interview, as well as the last few releases, their main focus seems to be ZFS. Which to me goes completely against home users. But it attracts the enterprise guys - those who do this at work and want the same systems at home, and they also have the $$$.

 

LT have also said they won't publish a roadmap. And the general feeling among most users seems to be that its perfect as it is, there isn't much traction when lack of features/speed is discussed. e.g improving parity.

 

I would like much more transparency from the official devs about what we can expect.

[isvein]

Just to put things into perspective, the new lifetime licence of 250USD = 1x8TB HDD here in Norway

[Niklas]

Is this correct? Going from Plus to Pro seem to give less functions compared to go from Plus to Unleached? Maybe I misundarstad but it looks like Unleashed gives access to more features compared to legacy Pro?

 

Edited March 28 by Niklas

[Hoopster]

10 minutes ago, Niklas said:

it looks like Unleashed gives access to more features compared to legacy Pro?

All licenses provide all Unraid features.  The only difference is the number of storage devices that can be attached to the server when the array is started.

 

There is no difference between the Unleashed license and the Pro license other than the fact that Unleashed now has an annual update/maintenance fee.  The Lifetime license is just Unleashed with lifetime updates/maintenance.

[HOLISTICAGENT]

9 hours ago, trurl said:

What terms? Did you already buy?

I started the trial, checking the prices, set everything up, its working ok, went to buy the licenses now before the trial ends and they are all changed to much more expensive.

So I feel like the time I invested ~25 days ago to setup everything and test it. now im forced to buy something more expensive to keep using what Ive setup.

So will look at other options now, sad.

 

License key type

Trial

Trial expiration

Expires in 3 days 16 hours 3 minutes

Registered to

Trial User

Registered on

Fri, 2024-03-01

Edited March 28 by HOLISTICAGENT

[enJOyIT]

1 hour ago, HOLISTICAGENT said:

I started the trial, checking the prices, set everything up, its working ok, went to buy the licenses now before the trial ends and they are all changed to much more expensive.

So I feel like the time I invested ~25 days ago to setup everything and test it. now im forced to buy something more expensive to keep using what Ive setup.

So will look at other options now, sad.

 

License key type

Trial

Trial expiration

Expires in 3 days 16 hours 3 minutes

Registered to

Trial User

Registered on

Fri, 2024-03-01

 

You should have received an email informing you of the upcoming price change.

Edited March 28 by enJOyIT

[Lolight]

8 hours ago, PhantombrainM said:

If it had cost 129€ or 249€ (I hate subscriptions) like it does today, I wouldn't have even installed the trial, I would have just said to my friend: Yes, I've had a look. No, it's too expensive . And LT wouldn't even have gotten my 89€. So I'm curious to see how the new prices work. 

But then again, what would you get as an alternative in this hypothetical situation?

Everyone is going through this exact process while "shopping" around and in the end gets something that meets one's needs.

And as it's already been stated here before, there's a reason why so many people were/are choosing to pay for Unraid instead of getting a free alternative.

[HOLISTICAGENT]

30 minutes ago, enJOyIT said:

 

You should have received an email informing you of the upcoming price change.

 

I have atm 25.000 unread emails, not everyone have time to read everthing that get sent to you, my time is spent careing for my lifelong sick daughter and a wife that has the big C. So im tierd, I spent time to set unraid up to save memory photos, movies from the kids growing up.

 

So the time spent was time I didnt have in the first place. And money is important factor when you are the only income and spent most of your time in hospital anyways.

 

Sorry if it sounds depressing.

 

 

[Lolight]

1 hour ago, HOLISTICAGENT said:

I started the trial, checking the prices, set everything up, its working ok, went to buy the licenses now before the trial ends and they are all changed to much more expensive.

So I feel like the time I invested ~25 days ago to setup everything and test it. now im forced to buy something more expensive to keep using what Ive setup.

I'm not quite sure but I think I've heard somewhere that LimeTech would allow you to purchase the legacy license in this situation.

@SpencerJ is that correct?

[enJOyIT]

4 minutes ago, HOLISTICAGENT said:

 

I have atm 25.000 unread emails, not everyone have time to read everthing that get sent to you, my time is spent careing for my lifelong sick daughter and a wife that has the big C. So im tierd, I spent time to set unraid up to save memory photos, movies from the kids growing up.

 

So the time spent was time I didnt have in the first place. And money is important factor when you are the only income and spent most of your time in hospital anyways.

 

Sorry if it sounds depressing.

 

 

 

I'm sorry to hear that. But you shouldn't blame limetech for your unread E-Mails.

 

Maybe there is a possibility in your special case to make an exception. You should try to contact @SpencerJ. Maybe he can help you out.

Edited March 28 by enJOyIT