Update Policy

As our users know, we love to continually refine and improve our products. To date we have released countless free updates and will continue to do so.

Occasionally we release major updates requiring an upgrade fee.

Grace Period

For any paid update, we will offer a 9 month Grace Period (at least). Any user who purchased the previous version within the grace period will automatically receive a free upgrade.

Versions and Builds

From our point of view, the 'industry standard' approach to updates goes something a bit like this...

Company Y decides to update Plugin X to version 2.0, and switches all development resources to a new 2.0 codebase. As a result, for a year or so - everything goes silent - no more maintenance updates, improvements or new features are released. Known bugs remain unsolved and compatibility issues with the latest OS releases begin to stack up...

Eventually, many months overdue, Plugin X v2.0 is finally released. Some of the new features look useful so you take the plunge and upgrade, hoping those old bugs will be fixed too. However, soon after installing you discover the following...

  • (1) Your old projects still require version 1.x, meaning you have to keep both versions on your computer, and you can't use the new features in the projects you are currently working on.
  • (2) That bug you really need fixed is still there, and worse...
  • (3) The whole software feels like a 'dot zero' release, there are lots of new issues and it generally feels unpolished and less stable than before.

Over the next year or so, the 2.01 and 2.1 slowly arrive, addressing most of the issues introduced with the 2.0, and the product starts to feel solid again. You just wish that they would now take the time to tweak a few things and iron out those remaining irritations.

Instead, Company X announces version 3.0 is now in development, and the whole cycle starts again...

Sound familiar? Well, we pledge do things differently. Our policy is as follows:

We're doing things a bit different to the norm...

Even if you dont upgrade, you can still download, activate and use the latest release (be it 2.x, 3.x, or whatever) from the User Area as normal.

Where possible, the latest version will replace the old one, meaning there's only ever one active version installed on your system, and all your projects - old and new - will load the latest version. So regardless of whether you pay for the upgrade or not, you still benefit from all general maintenance, small refinements, cosmetic enhancements, bug fixes, O/S update compatibility fixes etc.

The only difference is that certain new features will be inaccessible until you upgrade.

Update frequency and pricing

Full version increments of a given product (i.e. v2.0, v3.0 etc) will occur at most once per-year (typically every few years) with free updates in-between as usual. Upgrades for major updates will typically be priced at 40-60% of the full product price.

Half version updates (e.g v1.5) are generally free, but in the case we release one as a paid update, the upgrade price will be 25% - 40% of the full product price.