Pricing of Kirby 3 in the future

Hello,

can we get some information about the pricing of Kirby 3 in the future, please? I’m asking because in my situation 99 € + 19 % VAT (117,81 €) is fine for one license but we have to get a license for each project most of the time (if not any of the free license arguments fit). I assume most of us have at least 2 projects so we talk about quite some cash. Right now, this is about the maximum I would spend for a Kirby license so if this will rise again in the future, I will have some license cost problems because I’m not using Kirby 3 for projects which earn money. I’m a bit uncertain due to the big price increase between Kirby 2 and Kirby 3. What’s the expected support span for Kirby 3: Do we talk about the same level as Kirby 2 (7 years) or will Kirby 4, 5, […] come quicker and thus you have to buy license upgrades earlier than in the past, which means additional costs for the customer? I’m missing some planning security about this topic.

Best Regards

Your direct question is easy to answer. The pricing of Kirby 3 will not change. We never made price jumps between versions so far and even state in our license text that minor upgrades will always be free.

Your other questions are almost impossible to answer though. We can’t tell yet how long Kirby 3 will be around. We can only say that we will keep it around for as long as possible. Kirby 1 was available from 2012 to 2014. Kirby 2 was available from 2014 to 2019.

Our current plan is to invest in small iterative minor versions for the next years. Major upgrades are a huge effort for us – and of course also for our customers. v2 and v3 have both been necessary steps at a time, when we reached a dead-end with our pervious code base.

The web moves so fast that we really can’t tell what is needed to keep Kirby fresh and successful in 3, 5 or 10 years from now.

We have always moved with the wishes and feedback from our users, not because we thought it’s cool to release a new major version.

With over five years of v2 and two years of development for v3, I don’t agree with you on the price jump. We increased the price from 79 € to 99 €. That’s a jump of 20 € after five years. I think it will be very hard to find any software out there – that’s not free - with a similar stability in its price over so many years after an upgrade with so many new features. To be honest, most projects that I followed in the last years don’t even exist after five years anymore.

We increased the license price with every major release to keep up with increasing effort to maintain and develop Kirby. Our team grew from 1 to 5 people. We do this to keep healthy as a small company, not as a way to get rich. It’s our way of building a future for Kirby and for us.

We also decided to keep our one-off pricing model and not switch to subscriptions, like so many software companies do. We did this, because we think it’s a more customer-friendly way of selling software. Subscriptions would be a lot more profitable for us. But we don’t want to force our users into updates or into renewals. If you decide to stay on an old version, that’s your decision. You bought the license for it. It’s yours.

If you are talking mainly about personal sites, I understand that the switch from v2 to v3 was more substantial. The personal licenses didn’t work out for us. They were sadly abused over and over again for commercial projects. Keeping them would have risked Kirby’s future. Let’s put it very clearly: we are not profitable with a 15 € license model.

To wrap this up, I can’t tell the future, but I can say that we will always try everything to make Kirby better with each release (minor and major) and we will also try to stay around for as long as possible. There might be price adjustments again in the far future if necessary, but we will do everything again to keep them fair and to make sure that they keep us moving. Nobody wins if Kirby is no longer sustainable one day. If you cannot make the jump with us, you still have the license for the old version and you can keep that running.

Talking about non-profit projects, please also keep in mind that we support many non-profit projects with free licenses (NGOs, student projects, educational projects, open-source projects, etc.) If you are working on such a project, please feel free to write us: support@getkirby.com

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Thanks for your reply @bastianallgeier! This answered the question perfectly - I was mainly focused on the private/hobby license in the past vs. the new one and only license type. I appreciate the time you took to answer this and I think this is a very fair point of view. No open questions left.

Best Regards!

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