Unraid has come out with their new pricing plan.
I have mistakenly said in some comments here before that they were doing away with their lifetime plan. They still have it, but it is just more expensive. They have introduced a couple of cheaper annual subscription plans.
If anyone is still on the fence about buying Unraid, you have a week until the new pricing plan comes into affect.
After seeing so many examples of companies really screwing up their pricing changes, it is refreshing to see Unraid do this so well.
There’s no enshitification happening if the product hasn’t gotten any worse. It’s just a pricing change. In fact, if the pricing change does in fact lead to a better product then this is the complete opposite of enshitification.
You also, no matter the tier, still get a perpetual license. If you don’t pay the upgrade, you keep your current version and can download and install it forever. This is just a more streamlined version of the same business model software has been using forever.
It’s the same model JetBrains has for their IDEs. You pay for a year, you get a perpetual fallback license. You pay again, get another year of updates.
JetBrains (accurately) still calls it a subscription though.
Can I update every second or third year? Will the previous versions receive security updates?
Go read the link, I’m not a TL;DR bot mate.
No worries.
For those who were wondering:
On the security updates:
Yes they’ll provide some security updates for some time even out of contract. No time frame given, only in relative release numbers:
Version -2 of currently released minor version goes EOL. The cadence is not explicitly provided
On not renewing or renewing later:
Yes, jump in any time.
Fewer people will get into unraid. Natural churn will happen. The OS will slowly die, and as it dies usability will get worse.
Not many people are going to choose the subscription Linux over a free Linux.