I understand that you have decided to charge lifetime premium members to use the new premium plus features. First of all, I think this is a very unfair thing to do. In the earlier days of moviebase, you offered the option for a one-time premium price. The advantage for you was that we who chose that option provided additional funding to help sustain your early development. We took the risk that the product might not succeed, and we might lose most of out investment. We took that risk both to give you a better chance to succeed and to give us a possible future saving if the product were successful. Changing the rules now is a violation of the trust we had in your offering. We naturally had every expectation that lifetime meant lifetime. You stopped offering that option some time ago, and that is perfectly fair. What is not fair is to change the rules for those of us with whom you made that bargain.
Now, given where things are, when I try to select one of the new features on my phone, I am prompted to purchase the premium plus option, but if I select the option to go do that, I see a page that is asking me to sign up for premium, which I already have. This is confusing and poorly done.
Screen captures are below, showing what I am seeing.
Nobody can work without covering at least the costs. If we want to go this way, there will be no further features released. The one-time payment was clearly bound to the feature set. You still have lifetime access to the features at the point of the purchase
Of course I agree with that. Actually I think you should much more than break even. You should earn a good return for all your excellent work - and it is excellent. My point is that I feel you made a bargain with the early lifetime premium purchasers that should be kept. You haven’t offered that option for a while now, so all who have signed up since and who sign up later are not eligible for it and should pay whatever the current pricing is. That’s fair. That doesn’t mean you have to break the bargain with lifetime premium purchasers to cover your costs.
Clearly you have decided this is the way to go, and I will not leave the product because of it, and I will undoubtedly pay the additional money in the future. I am just disappointed that this is the route you chose.
I have bought several lifetime licenses on various products in the past for which the products disappeared, and the purchase was not a good bargain. That’s the risk we take when we go that way. But I think we should be eligible for the expected benefit when the product continues to succeed. Offering a lifetime premium option in the early life of a product is a reasonable approach to raising much needed early capital. But if lifetime really doesn’t mean lifetime, the obvious implication is that none of us should pay the premium price for a lifetime option.
As I have always said, you have an excellent product. Your work is first rate, and your support is outstanding. I will continue to support you and use the product despite this change. I just felt the need to state my disappointment in the change in policy regarding early adopters.
Thank you, Chris, for being open to hearing our perspective. Now, is there a place we can go to make a contribution to help with future development? That would be a nice option to have.
Thank you. If you are interested, I will publish a promotional news about your program on my news site. But you need to correct the Ukrainian language in the application.
