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WTF?! Subscription based bullshit is cancer
It makes sense from the business’s perspective - they want a reliable way to keep funding development.
A flat fee made sense in the days when they “finished” software and then sold physical media in stores. They did the work. They’re done. They set a price and sold it in stores.
But now we’re in this weird hybrid scenario that I hate. I expect security updates for something I “bought” (especially if it’s something connected to the internet), and I understand developers need to get paid to do that. But at the same time, I just want the software I bought. I don’t really want to keep paying over and over because the developer wants to keep adding in features that weren’t there when I bought it.
So buy Unraid and keep it off the Internet. That’s the solution here. Like you said. Devs need to be paid.
I’m not so sure that’s what this is…at least at this time. The lower tiers according to the article are still a perpetual license but the support/updates will be an optional extra after 1 year. Current customers won’t be effected and they have a tier that completely avoids this.
I’m not thrilled by it, but in comparison Fusion360 went from 70 a month to 85 a month without any real reason and this doesn’t seem like the same can of bullshit.
It’s not a subscription… Yet. The nice thing is that you can just decide not to pay and you won’t lose access or anything. You just won’t get active development either.
Which I want to say sounds fair - but a lot of companies start with this premise and then it gets handed over to some MBA who decides the most long-term loyal customers are not being squeezed enough. Even just this week I recommended unraid to someone. Now though…
If they’re not offering security updates then it’s a subscription.
I’d say that’s up for debate. Subscription to me is that it’s required to continue using the product. We all know if you stop paying for Netflix you don’t get to stream anymore.
This is more akin to if Netflix said “If you stop paying us you can continue watching what is currently in our catalog, but you won’t be able to watch anything new that comes out until you resubscribe”.
This is more akin to “If you stop paying us, it’s a matter of time until your network gets hacked through some known vulnerability that was published a year ago.”
They haven’t said that necessarily and I’d like more explanation. Generally when companies go eol for things like this security patches are always included, but new features aren’t included. But I haven’t seen anything saying that, so yes that would be my worry
Yeah I just deployed an unraid server for someone so this isn’t fantastic news…but alternatives exist if/when shit happens.
Yeah I’ll be keeping a very weathered eye out on it from here on. We’ll see what changes, my average that I see is 4 years from the announcement like this to a full on subscription model. Hopefully enough time for the community to start making an open sourced distro…
Now I’m even happier that I moved to proxmox.
I never understood why people use unraid, mostly because I never understood the “parity” features, or honestly between you and me the lack of proper parity. But I have a Synology, so I can’t talk (price wise) and I have raid 5 everywhere so parity is a joke here too :p
You can use drives with different sizes and, if array fails, all the files are readable. Good luck with RAID5 and stripping.
For me, I use unraid because I have a consistent need to continue upgrade disks and I really need to be able to do it adhoc because I can’t afford to replace 24 disks at a time and don’t want to fight with multiple zfs pools. I was actually planning to go to a new unraid server with 36 disks and have a second pro license. I just finished removing all 8tb disks and will be replacing the 10 and 12tb with 22tb now.
Now I might have to use truenas or something as an intermediate so I can reuse my existing license.
Ugh…
Good to see existing licenses will be grandfathered in, would be lots of uproar if that wasn’t the case.
Also not surprising with how they have been growing and performing, just means probably won’t be my default rec when asked how to make a NAS/server
“The existing licenses will be active as long as current USB drive lives”
Not sure where you’re getting that or if it was in jest. Blog mentions nothing in relation to that and their docs are still up about migrating a license to a new flash drive.
It was a joke (I hope).
Yeah, but I’ve been promised that so many times before it’s just empty words to me now.
In fact just this week IFTTT “forgot” I was grandfathered into my “pay what you want” plan and “upgraded” me to their more expensive plan. Never trust grandfathered plans.
I was just searching around for others mentioning the change with IFTTT. Did you reach out to them about this? I’ve got an email from September 2020 saying “Set your price, forever. You spoke, we listened. No more confusion on the length of IFTTT Pro pricing. Set your price before October 7th and we’ll honor it, forever.”
Good timing, so they actually just responded to my request to cancel. They told me they would happily honor the price for a lowered Pro plan.
I told them to pound sand. That they wanted me to pay more for a product I was already promised by them. That they would offer me less features for a plan I already have. That it isn’t my fault they promised me a certain functionality for a certain price, forever.
I screen shotted the exact email your referring to in that reply.
I just heard back today. They’re upgrading me to a “Pro+” account for the same price I had always paid. Honestly surprised.
That doesn’t mean they’re okay in my book by a longshot. If I have this argument again next year I’m out.
However, it does mean that you should press them on it. They know they’re fucking liars and did their community really wrong. Make sure they know how pissed you are.
Thank you so much. I honestly only use the service for like two or three things that aren’t mission critical - just little conveniences. It seems like it’s time to seek an alternative or just give up on convenience.
Really, I’m tired of wasting my time and money and relying on technology and humans (CEOs, developers) to do things for me. Firmware updates, sudden price increases, and IPOs continue to get in the way of daily progress for the average person.
It’s frustrating to no end but I’m actually finding I have more time and less stress after cutting myself off from so many subscriptions and devices that sell themselves as benefits when they’re actually detriments.
That’s a good mindset to be in. Subscriptions are built to keep us hooked and feel like we’re trapped. It’s no surprise that once it’s cancelled it feels like you’re free.
Push on them for your price. If you don’t get it, honestly home assistant does pretty much everything now for you. Only thing it doesn’t for me are third party online things like social media. IFTTT was good at that.
I’ll be honest I was also a bit disappointed they honored the price, I was ready to cancel but I made such a big deal out of it I gotta kinda go with it lol
They’ve grandfathered me into Pro+ for $1.99.
This gives me a little more time to find a free maybe self-hosted alternative or come to terms with just eliminating the function from my lifestyle. I’m mostly using it for saving things from one place to another - like YouTube Likes to Raindrop.io and some other stuff to Day One Journal.
@oxjox @scrubbles I have a question. When you say they “grandfathered” you into Pro+, do you mean they accepted you to upgrade to the Pro+ tier for that one-time payment, “for life”? I am genuinely unaware of the meaning because English in not my native language and some phrases do escape my grasp sometimes.
My OpenMediaVault is on a grandfathered plan from 2007 and still kicking
Glad to be grandfathered in, but now it’s time to take a serious look at alternatives. Do people still like FreeNAS? I currently rely on the use of mixed drive sizes (5x 4TB + 2x16TB) so it would be really annoying to switch to a RAID5 solution, but I should probably have enough time to let these smaller drives die/be replaced before switching.
I’ll be watching too. I’ll be tentatively moving forward, but if they start demanding an actual subscription, even so much as $5/year, I’ll be moving to something else. Not even that that’d be unreasonable in terms of pricing, it’s the principal of companies getting tired of honoring their own word.
So far, this change is fine with me, but we’ll see what the next change would be.
Yeah, it’s an early warning sign for sure. Hope it’s a false positive.
I’m running both Unraid and Truenas (freenas rebranded). Truenas is absolutely my preferred choice IF you either buy all your drives in one go, or can expand drives in batches. The performance difference between Unraid and truenas is pretty large. Which is especially noticeable when using a 2.5g+ connection.
You do, however lose the ability to just throw in a bunch of random drives like Unraid. This is the primary reason one of my systems is running it.
The app/VM experience is better on Unraid, but Truenas (scale) isn’t too far behind. For the average plexarr stack both work just fine.
How is it as a hypervisor? My usage has been evolving from “NAS” to “homelab” so I’m getting the feeling I should probably go with Proxmox
If you have an HBA I would indeed suggest running truenas in proxmox and passing through the HBA to the VM. Truenas/ZFS really likes raw disk access and passing through an HBA is the easiest way to guarantee that. If everything is connected to motherboard sata ports you’re probably better of running truenas scale on bare metal instead.
Truenas has a hypervisor (KVM, just like proxmox). For a VM or two it’s perfect and it even supports GPU passthrough as a gui option, but anything over that and I’d rather use the proxmox management layer instead.
Thanks. This is helpful context to have in mind as I change the hardware and use cases going forward.
Tried it after unRAID. Hated it. Erased it.
I’m totally OK with this, but having 2 pro licenses I may be biased.
It’s no different from other vendors that offer a year of upgrades with a license and you need to pay afterwards.
As long as it never moves to a “pay periodically or your entire license becomes inactive” (like Adobe), I have no issue with it.
They need to have a gentle way to handle upgrades after the included “timeframe” that also isn’t just “buy a new license if you decide to skip updating for a period of time” for whatever reason. If you stop updating for hardware or personal reasons for a few years, getting back up to date should still be competitive vs buying a new license.
UnRAID is absolutely worth it. Definitely the best computing investment I’ve made in the last 2 decades.
