Hello,
On Perch's 10th anniversary Perch v4 was announced. The announcement also mentioned how the current license model has become unsustainable and that a new license model was proposed:
To make sure we can dedicate developer time to supporting and updating the software, Perch 4 will be a charged upgrade and will include 12 months of support and updates. After those 12 months, if you wish to continue to receive updates and support, you’ll need to renew that contract at an additional cost, just as you’d renew your web hosting.
In case it is not clear, to paraphrase:
- You purchase a v4 license
- You get support and updates for 12 months
- After 12 months, if you still want updates for this license, you can pay for another 12 months worth of updates. If you don't need the updates, you can keep using the license with the last Perch version that was released within the 12 months in (2).
The announcement post discusses the reasons the current license model has become unsustainable, one of which is the fact that many older licenses are being reused for newer projects.
With the new proposed model you would most likely pay for an additional 12 months worth of updates for a license if:
- the project requires on-going development/maintenance and you want to keep using the latest version of Perch
- you want to re-use an old license with a much newer Perch version (e.g. a project build on v4.1 (latest at the time). The project no longer exists a year later and you want to re-use the same license but with v4.5 which got released 12 months after v4.1)
A lot of the Perchology Slack group members thought this was reasonable, but we recently found out that the proposed model got a lot of push back:
QuoteWhat about Perch 4?
When we announced the upcoming Perch 4, one of the significant changes we outlined was to the way Perch is licensed. Since then we've had a lot of feedback from our customers that a subscription model isn't something that will fly with their clients. We're listening, of course, and are currently investigating ways to move forward with Perch 4.
So I created this thread for us customers to discuss the proposed license model here publicly.