Licensing and Pricing changes on Oct. 1st 2022

Official news and announcements
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Tomas
Posts: 1206
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:33 pm

Mon Sep 05, 2022 2:53 pm

We are making changes to the Unimus Subscription model starting on October 1st 2022. In this post, we would like to outline these changes, and provide more background information as to why these changes are happening.

TL;DR version:
- We are increasing the price of Unimus subscriptions starting on October 1st.
- We are adding support for multi-year subscriptions.
- We are adding the option of purchasing the Phone Support tier for the SMB License type.
- We are also adding support for full Offline Mode (air-gapped networks) in Unimus.

1) What is changing?
On October 1st 2022, we will be increasing the pricing for Unimus license subscriptions. The new pricing will be as follows:

Per device USD (email support) $ 5.90
Per device EUR (email support) € 4.90

Per device USD (8/5 phone support) $ 7.90
Per device EUR (8/5 phone support) € 6.90

Unlimited USD (8/5 phone support) $ 8,500.00
Unlimited EUR (8/5 phone support) € 7,500.00

Unlimited USD (24/7 phone support) $ 13,900.00
Unlimited EUR (24/7 phone support) € 12,900.00

As you can see above, we are also introducing phone support for the per-device licensing tier. We have been asked for the option of upgraded support with the per-device tier many times in the past, so we added it.

Additionally, we are also adding the possibility to purchase multi-year Unimus subscriptions, also due to many of you asking for this option. The prices above are for a single year, simply multiply by the number of years to get multi-year pricing.

Here is how the purchase screen now looks like (with the current / old pricing) in the Portal:
Portal-Unimus-purchase.png
Portal-Unimus-purchase.png (106.9 KiB) Viewed 59111 times

2) I can't / don't want to pay more. What are my options?
- You can upgrade your current Unimus subscription to a multi-year subscription before the price increases on Oct. 1st. This way, you will purchase you license for multiple years in advance at the current (pre-increase) rate.
- If you can't pay for a multi-year sub before the pricing increase deadline, please contact us. Our sales team will be happy to provide alternative options for you.
- You can cancel your Unimus subscription. You Unimus instance will continue functioning as expected until the end of your current licensing term. We will be very sad to see you go, but we understand the pricing increase may drive some customers away.

3) Why is the license sub price increasing?
As you can see, the price increase comes to about 30% yearly. In this section, I want to be as transparent and as open with the "why" as possible. This section will be a little long, so please bear with me.

There are 2 main factors contributing to why we need to increase our pricing. The biggest factor is the extreme rate of software developer wage increases in Slovakia over the last 3 years. The 2nd factor is the exponentially growing operating expense cost growth in the last half a year (which includes energy prices, rent and other prices) in Europe.

Let's look into the wage aspect first. As most of you know, we are a Slovakian (central Europe) company. Historically (and luckily for us), Slovakia has been rating in the top 5 in Europe for quality of software developers for the last 10 years. Together with (when compared to US) lower wages, this meant you could run a software company in Slovakia for about 1/3 of the expenses you would have in the US. This allowed us to aggressively price our software and still pay our people very decent (compared locally) wages. This however changed massively with COVID.

When COVID hit, remote work became a new standard. And as soon as systems and processes were in place to work from home, suddenly it didn't matter if that home was in the US, EU or Asia. What this caused was a massive hiring spree for software development talent in "cheaper" markets, since location no longer matters. For us specifically, many companies from the US, UK and Germany started massive hiring campaigns in our local market to "save" on software developer wages. This of course caused the local wages to sky-rocket.

As a company, we must stay wage competitive, or risk losing our developers. In the last 3 years alone, our average per-employee expenses have grown between 10-20% each year due to wage increases necessary to keep up with the job market. This year it's going to be even more, since this trend has not slowed down at all, and there are now also other market forces increasing our expenses.

This brings us to the 2nd factor affecting our expenses - inflation and the current situation in Europe. I am sure all of you have heard enough about inflation in the last few months, so I will not get into it here. I am also sure pretty much all of you know what has been happening in Europe since February as well. What is perhaps less known is the massive impact on the energy price market in Europe. All energy prices in the EU are currently 400% higher that a year ago. As a software company, the massive growth in price of electricity in the recent months hits us particularly hard.

All together, we have now come to the point where we must increase our pricing to keep up with the expense growth to stay wage-competitive and cover our operating expenses. We wish this was not the case, but if we want Unimus to continue to grow, this is the only option we have.

4) What will the increase in revenue be used for?
The revenue increase will go directly into salary increases for our developers (and other team-members), and to cover increases in company operating expenses. Anything left-over after this will be used to hire new talent into the team.

5) Offline Mode (air-gapped support).
Finally, we are officially announcing support for full Offline Mode in Unimus. Up until today, all Unimus instances needed to talk to our Licensing Server in order to properly validate their license. We understand this was not acceptable in some high-security environments, but we only know of exactly 16 cases (reported across the Forums and the Support Tickets), where this was a complete deal-breaker (out of thousands of deployed Unimus instances).

We do however understand the benefits of supporting a fully air-gapped deploys, and starting with 2.3.0, this will be fully supported. This was a large development time investment on our end to enable this, and required extensive rewrites across many Unimus subsystems. Please note Offline Mode will only be available with the Unlimited License tier. If you are interested in switching to Offline Mode, please contact our Support.
Mannins79
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Nov 19, 2021 12:43 pm

Tue Sep 06, 2022 3:46 pm

Hi Tomas,
thanks for being so transparent. Big companies should take example...
gholthaus
Posts: 16
Joined: Fri Jun 12, 2020 6:58 pm

Tue Sep 06, 2022 3:53 pm

Really appreciate the heads up and explanation Tomas!
Faisal
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Oct 10, 2021 6:24 pm

Tue Sep 06, 2022 10:05 pm

Got to do what you got to do.... Keep up the good work, and yes everyone needs to be able to live :)
Thank you for being transparent.
Confab
Posts: 22
Joined: Thu Sep 14, 2017 7:08 pm

Wed Sep 07, 2022 3:41 pm

Mannins79 wrote:
Tue Sep 06, 2022 3:46 pm
Hi Tomas,
thanks for being so transparent. Big companies should take example...
Completely agree!
bhesterberg
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Aug 12, 2018 4:29 pm

Thu Sep 29, 2022 5:46 pm

I've had nothing but troubles with the licensing part of Unimus for months without any resolution from you guys. Seeing that the standalone version(air-gapped) is only for unlimited devices is very frustrating. I love this product, when it's working correctly, but this should be available for everyone.
cbwecomm
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2022 7:56 pm

Thu Sep 29, 2022 8:00 pm

Initially, I was quite frustrated with the price increases (they're coming from every vendor, they're usually a huge % jump, and typically it feels like a greedy move) but due to your transparency (I had no idea where you all were located, or the specific details of energy increases), I realized that the increase is not only justified, but I fully support you in this.

We don't need it and wont likely ever use it, but to help support you and your team we will be upgrading to the phone support option to ensure your employees are taken care of.

Thanks for all that you do.
User avatar
Tomas
Posts: 1206
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:33 pm

Thu Sep 29, 2022 8:48 pm

bhesterberg wrote:
Thu Sep 29, 2022 5:46 pm
Seeing that the standalone version(air-gapped) is only for unlimited devices is very frustrating. I love this product, when it's working correctly, but this should be available for everyone.
Perhaps this is a good opportunity to explain why the offline support is available only to Unlimited licenses:

Is is impossible to enforce per-device licensing in an offline environment. Consider the following situation: you purchase a 100 device offline license. You deploy 4 instances of Unimus. Since Unimus is heavily focused on automation (automatic device discovery, Import / NMS sync for devices, etc.), this can be done in about 15 minutes. Since our offline implementation is truly fully offline, there is no way for us to enforce the 100 device limit - in the above example 400 devices would be managed by using a 100 device license.

To put it simply - device count limitations are not feasible with offline licensing. Since we already have Unlimited licenses, the only solution to keep our business model intact (and be able to enforce it) was to offer offline to Unlimited only.
bhesterberg wrote:
Thu Sep 29, 2022 5:46 pm
I've had nothing but troubles with the licensing part of Unimus for months without any resolution from you guys.
I have checked into your ticket. From what I can see, Vik has asked for debugging data but we did not receive those, or a reply from you. Did you receive the last 2 emails from Vik? We have thousands of Unimus instances working without issues all around the world - and we will do everything in our power to fix yours too - please get back to Vik and we will make it happen.
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