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 (106.9 KiB) Viewed 72372 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 Ukraine 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.
