Pricing and Licensing Model changes on Oct. 1st 2025

[Tomas]

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Hello everyone,

Today, we are announcing a change to our Pricing and Licensing Model, which will come into effect on October 1st 2025.

In this post we would like to outline these changes, and I would like to provide you, as openly and honestly as I can, with the "why" behind these changes, as well as some more background info and sneak-peeks of what's coming in the future.

Summary (the TL;DR version):

• We are increasing the pricing of Unimus subscriptions. The price increase is around 20%.
• The price increase takes effect on October 1st, and you can pre-purchase multi-year licenses until then to lock the current price.
• The Free Tier device limit will be increased from 5 to 10 devices.
• We are introducing 2 feature tiers - Unimus Standard and Unimus Advanced.
• Standard is the version of Unimus you are currently using; you are not losing any existing functionality and will continue to receive new features and updates.
• Our new "Config Compliance" and "Run-time State Compliance" features will be available in the Advanced tier.
• Support tiers are going away - the Advanced tier will include Extended support automatically.
• Sneak-peek at Compliance and other features coming soon

1) What is changing?

On October 1st 2025, we will be increasing the pricing for Unimus license subscriptions. The new pricing will be as follows:

Code: Select all

Unimus Standard Per-Device (SMB) USD: $ 6.90 / device / year
Unimus Advanced Per-Device (SMB) USD: $ 9.70 / device / year

Unimus Standard Unlimited (Enterprise) USD: $  9,900.00 / year
Unimus Advanced Unlimited (Enterprise) USD: $ 16,900.00 / year

Unimus Standard Per-Device (SMB) EUR: € 5,90 / device / year
Unimus Advanced Per-Device (SMB) EUR: € 8,70 / device / year

Unimus Standard Unlimited (Enterprise) EUR: €  8.900,00 / year
Unimus Advanced Unlimited (Enterprise) EUR: € 14.900,00 / year

As you can see above, the pricing increase is around 20% compared to the current Unimus pricing. We are also splitting Unimus licensing into a Standard and Advanced tier.

2) What will the difference between Standard and Advanced be?

Unimus Standard is what Unimus is at the moment - we are not taking away anything from Unimus as it is today with this change. There will be 3 differences between the Standard and Advanced versions going forward:

• Advanced will contain the new "Config Compliance" and "Run-time State Compliance" features
• Advanced will contain support for SAML, OpenID, OIDC and secure header auth
• Advanced will automatically contain Extended Support

Please note LDAP, Radius and MFA are staying in the Standard tier - we are not putting security behind a higher paywall. However, enterprise SSO support will only be in the Advanced tier.

Here is the full comparison between all license types:
(right-click > "Open Image in New Tab" for full resolution)

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If you buy an Extended Support license at the moment, it will be migrated to the Unimus Advanced tier on Oct. 1st. Existing Extended Support users will also automatically be migrated to the Advanced tier on Oct. 1st. This means you can pre-purchase the Advanced tier at a *significant* discount until Oct. 1st by buying the current Extended Support license.

3) Why will Compliance and SSO only be in the Advanced version - behind additional cost?

With the introduction of the Compliance features, Unimus will be moving partially into the cybersecurity field. We developed this feature both because many of you asked for it, as well because regulation is forcing many networks to have these tools, so we foresee more people asking for this in the future.

In particular, in the EU, a new cybersecurity regulation (NIS2) will come into effect in 2026, which will require tens of thousands of networks by law to adopt change management, config auditing and automated compliance checking in their infrastructure. Exactly things that Unimus does.

However, when we did our business and market research, we found out that most networks will rely on external parties (integrators, consultants, VARs) to implement a lot of these features for them. When we spoke with various integrators and consultants, one thing constantly stuck out - we were literally told "Unimus is too cheap" multiple times. Unimus was from the beginning designed to be accessible to everyone - with our pricing shaped by this principle. Cybersecurity is, however, not cheap - and a lot of integrators and consultants simply told us Unimus was not interesting to them, because there was not enough margin to consider using it with our current pricing.

So in this case - the affordable pricing of Unimus was actually hurting us. We had 2 options - either we find a way to adjust the pricing model, or miss a large adoption opportunity. To us this is not just about money - we trully believe Unimus is one of the best network management tools out there, and we want to get Unimus into the hands of as many network engineers as possible to make their lives easier.

In the end, this came to be a decision between increasing the baseline price of Unimus much higher (affecting everyone), or splitting cybersecurity features into a separate tier, and offer it at relevant pricing. We chose the latter - if you don't need Compliance, you won't have to pay a much higher price for Unimus.

4) Why are you also increasing pricing for the Standard tier?

This one is a bit more complex, but it all comes down to 2 things:
- we need more resources - more people
- we need to keep paying our people a market competitive rate

NetCore j.s.a. (the company behind Unimus) currently has 45 employees, and we are unable to keep up with demand. Pretty much every department (be that account management, technical pre-sales or support) is barely able to keep up with incoming requests. Our development Roadmap, in particular, is HUGE. We want Unimus to do so much more...

We are not a company that burns people out - we try as hard as we can to make sure our people are not overworked, have sufficient time off, and their workload is manageable. This means that if a department is running at capacity, we need to hire more people - which requires more financial resources. Normally this comes from the influx of new clients / users, but more users means each department has more work, and it becomes a vicious cycle. The only way out of it is to increase pricing to have more resources to be able to service the customer base.

Of course, inflation, cost of living and cost of energy constantly increasing here in the EU (where we are based) doesn't help this either. We need to be market competitive with our wages, and keep providing a fair salary for our people over time. This means to service the existing customer base, our costs are increasing every year. Due to basic economic principles, the only thing we can do to combat this is increase our pricing.

But the most critical issue is that we simply need more developers. Unimus is actually quite a large and complex codebase. It's been developed for 8 years now, and our feature set is large, complex and quite niche (the percentage of developers that have experience working on network config management and automation systems is microscopic). We have so much more we want Unimus to do, and we also constantly get feature and improvement requests from you. We genuinely want to do these, but we need more devs to be able to keep up with demand.

So what does this mean for you? We are increasing pricing for Unimus, but that means we can hire more devs and push out features faster, and we can keep raising the bar on the quality of support we can provide. We (and I personally) hope our track record over the last 8 years shows that we can consistently deliver new features and improvements (often large ones) - and we want to continue doing that for more years to come.

5) Security and security certifications are also costly

This section is a bit out of place here - but I don't think we announced it publicly anywhere, so I wanted to mention it here. NetCore j.s.a. (the company behind Unimus) was ISO 9001, ISO 22301 and ISO 27001 certified earlier this year. This was almost a full year of work across the whole company.

For some of you this may not matter at all, but I know that for many of you, you would not be able to use Unimus without this. We did this because you (our users... or your security teams) were asking for this. The fact we achieved these certifications is definitely a positive, and improves the quality and security of Unimus and us as a company. But these ISO certs introduce additional overhead (official processes, security handling and posture) which we need to handle. We don't take them lightly.

These all are also factors that add up and contribute to our resource shortages, and therefore play a factor in the pricing increase.

6) I can't / don't want to pay more. What are my options?

There are a few options:

• You can upgrade your current Unimus subscription to a multi-year subscription before the price increases on Oct. 1st. This way, you can purchase your license for multiple years in advance at the current (pre-increase) rate.
• If you buy an Extended Support license at the moment, it will be migrated to the Unimus Advanced tier on Oct. 1st. This way you can pre-purchase the Advanced tier at a *significant* discount.
• If you can't pay for a multi-year subscription 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. Your 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.

7) What are we working on right now?

See the post right below this one for a sneak-peek at Compliance, what’s coming in 2.7.1 and a few of the things we have planned for next year...

--

With appreciation for your support,

Tomas Kirnak
CEO of NetCore j.s.a. (Unimus)

[Tomas]

1) Compliance preview

Here is the first public look at Compliance:
(right-click > "Open Image in New Tab" for full resolution)

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And here is a full look at how Compliance will work:
(right-click > "Open Image in New Tab" for full resolution)

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2) 2.7.1 preview

2.7.1 is currently in active development, with a bunch of useful features:
(right-click > "Open Image in New Tab" for full resolution)

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3) A few very early previews of features planned for next year

These are still quite a ways off, but I wanted to show you just a few of the things we have planned for next year.

Notification rework - we know Notifications need some love. You will be able to create multiple Notification Senders and Notification Destinations, each with it's own setup:

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Change Stream / Change Log - see changes across your whole network (or a single Zone, or Tag) in a chronological stream:

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Dashboard and Job Log improvements:

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And so much more I can't talk publicly about yet... stay tuned

[StevenK]

Will this impact any of us who were early into your beta who got a perpetual/lifetime license?

[SeanCTS]

Please please please reconsider the paywall for OpenID.

My org and may others are not in the Azure/MS ecosystem and live in Google workspaces.

My org is small, and using radius without the appropriate Azure/MS resources, makes it such a pain point.

Today is my birthday, please give everyone the gift of free SSO.

[Tomas]

Will this impact any of us who were early into your beta who got a perpetual/lifetime license?

No - the Beta perpetual licenses will continue working as they have until now.
They will be treated as Unimus Standard licenses.

In other words - unless you need / want Compliance, you are not affected at all.
We promised those licenses would be perpetual, and we will keep that promise for as long as we can.

Please please please reconsider the paywall for OpenID.

My org and may others are not in the Azure/MS ecosystem and live in Google workspaces.

My org is small, and using radius without the appropriate Azure/MS resources, makes it such a pain point.

Today is my birthday, please give everyone the gift of free SSO.

We actually had quite a few discussions on this topic internally. We don't like putting security behind a paywall (that's why the existing "SSO" / AAA implementations and MFA are staying in Standard).

The problem with SAML / OpenID / OIDC is that we want to keep it in Advanced Unlimited. The Unlimited license pricing is hard because for large corporations - Unimus Unlimited pricing is a rounding error in their IT budgets. But for example for ISPs, with large device counts, Unlimited is required and their budgets are very different from enterprises.

So for us, this has always been a conflict of how to allow access to the Unlimited tier for price-sensitive industries, while also being able to properly bill large enterprises. SSO is a differentiator here, hence why we really want to keep it to Advanced Unlimited.

Now back to SMB licensing - it would be quite strange to have SSO in Standard SMB, but NOT in Standard Unlimited. The pricing difference for small companies is also quite negligible. The difference between Standard and Advanced SMB is $2.80 per year. So for example at 50 devices, the difference is $140 per year - or $11.67 per month. I know this is still a paywall - but the reality is you probably pay more for every single user monthly in Google Workspace.

[StevenK]

Thank you for clarification. We use it lightly only for under 100 devices. Nothing for compliance. Thank you.

[thobias]

Will this impact any of us who were early into your beta who got a perpetual/lifetime license?

No - the Beta perpetual licenses will continue working as they have until now.
They will be treated as Unimus Standard licenses.

So if I have 100 perpetual licenses can I buy 10 advanced and use those on devices that need compliance and still use the 100 standard on the ones that dont?

Is it enough to buy a single advanced license to get SSO?

Would be strange if I cannot mix license types.

[df04440]

I registered an account just to say that your product is by far the best I’ve used for what it does in my almost 20 years in IT/Cybersecurity. A 20% increase feels justified given the value you already deliver.

That said, I admittedly manage a relatively small network, and I can see how organizations with thousands, or tends of thousands of devices might feel this increase more than I will. Even so, if you look at similar apps, some costing even 3x-4x more, even with the increase, in my eyes at least, its still worth the cost.

Keep up the good work guys.

[Tomas]

No - the Beta perpetual licenses will continue working as they have until now.
They will be treated as Unimus Standard licenses.

So if I have 100 perpetual licenses can I buy 10 advanced and use those on devices that need compliance and still use the 100 standard on the ones that dont?

Is it enough to buy a single advanced license to get SSO?

If you have Beta Lifetime licenses, since they are counted as Unimus Standard, you will need to pay the difference between Standard and Advanced. As an example:

You have 100 Beta Lifetime licenses - now considered Unimus Standard.
You want to upgrade to Advanced. The price difference between Standard and Advanced is $2.80 per year.

So to keep your Unimus License on Advanced, this would be $280 per year (equivalent to $23.33 per month).

How the licensing tiers work is that the whole License needs to be Standard or Advanced.

Would be strange if I cannot mix license types.

Indeed, mixing license tiers is not possible. This would just be very messy - and the issues and hassle of managing which device is "Standard" vs. "Advanced" would become problematic fast.

As an example:
- you create a Compliance preset based on a Tag target
- this can bring as many devices into the Compliance feature as there are on the Tag
- this can of course change over time, or even automatically by API, NMS Syncs, etc. (as devices are Tagged / Untagged)

How would you decide which devices are on Standard vs. Advanced. How would you automate always having sufficient number of Advanced licenses? How would license charging, upgrades and downgrades work. You can also have multiple License Keys (and therefore multiple instances) on a single License (Portal account).

I am not saying it's impossible to create a system that would solve all that. But it would be quite complicated and very opaque to you as a user. We have always strived for our licensing system to be as simple and as transparent as possible - you should know how much Unimus will cost you easily. Having dynamic price changes based on features used (or number of devices using a feature) would be everything but that.

In the end, we decided for the new tiers to work just like support tiers worked until now - the License (account) is either Standard or Advanced, and then you have your desired number of device seats. That can then be distributed through License Keys as needed - with each of those keys being the same tier as the License (the account) itself. We do realize there are some edge cases ("what if I want Compliance only on half of my devices"), but we think the simplicity and transparency of the licensing model overweights the cons.

[Tomas]

I registered an account just to say that your product is by far the best I’ve used for what it does in my almost 20 years in IT/Cybersecurity. A 20% increase feels justified given the value you already deliver.

That said, I admittedly manage a relatively small network, and I can see how organizations with thousands, or tends of thousands of devices might feel this increase more than I will. Even so, if you look at similar apps, some costing even 3x-4x more, even with the increase, in my eyes at least, its still worth the cost.

Keep up the good work guys.

Thank you very much for the kind words.