Update Policy

As our users know, we love to continually refine and improve our products. To date we have released countless free updates and will continue to do so.

Starting with Nuance V2 in 2018, we plan to release occasional major updates requiring an upgrade fee. This fee will help to cover the significant resource investment needed to deliver larger improvements and develop major new feature areas.

Grace Period

For any paid update, we will offer a 6 month Grace Period. Any user who purchased the previous version within the grace period will automatically receive a free upgrade.

Versions and Builds

From our point of view, the 'industry standard' approach to updates goes something a bit like this...

Company Y decides to update Plugin X to version 2.0, and switches all development resources to a new 2.0 codebase. As a result, for a year or so - everything goes silent - no more maintenance updates, improvements or new features are released. Known bugs remain unsolved and compatibility issues with the latest OS releases begin to stack up...

Eventually, many months overdue, Plugin X v2.0 is finally released. Some of the new features look useful so you take the plunge and upgrade, hoping those old bugs will be fixed too. However, soon after installing you discover the following...

  • (1) Your old projects still require version 1.x, meaning you have to keep both versions on your computer, and you can't use the new features in the projects you are currently working on.
  • (2) That bug you really need fixed is still there, and worse...
  • (3) The whole software feels like a 'dot zero' release, there are lots of new issues and it generally feels unpolished and less stable than before.

Over the next year or so, the 2.01 and 2.1 slowly arrive, addressing most of the issues introduced with the 2.0, and the product starts to feel solid again. You just wish that they would now take the time to tweak a few things and iron out those remaining irritations.

Instead, Company X announces version 3.0 is now in development, and the whole cycle starts again...

Sound familiar? Well, we pledge do things differently. Our policy is as follows:

We're doing things a bit different to the norm...

Even if you dont upgrade, you can still download, activate and use the latest release (be it 2.x, 3.x, or whatever) from the User Area as normal.

The latest version is always the 'same' plugin meaning there's only ever one active version installed on your system, and all your projects - old and new - load the latest version. This means that regardless of whether you upgrade or not, you still benefit from all general maintenance, small refinements, cosmetic enhancements, bug fixes, O/S update compatibility fixes etc.

The only difference is that the new features which require the higher version licence will not be accessible until you upgrade.

Disclaimer: While this is our general policy and plan for all upcoming major updates, given the unpredictable nature of software development, we reserve the right to go the more 'traditional' route if unforseen technical reasons arise.

Update frequency and pricing

Full version increments of a given product (i.e. v2.0, v3.0 etc) will occur at most once per-year (typically every few years) with free updates in-between as usual. Upgrades for major updates will be priced at 40-60% of the full product price.

Half version updates (e.g v1.5) are generally free, but in the case we release one as a paid update, the upgrade price will be 25% - 40% of the full product price.

Upgrade fee 'cap'

In the (unlikely) case that we release several paid updates within a single calender-year, you will never pay more than a total of 99 EUR per year on upgrades.

For example, imagine we release Nuance 2.0 for 49 EUR in April and Freestyle 1.5 in for 29 EUR in June, and you purchase both. Then in October we release Vice 2.0 priced at 49 EUR. Your personal Vice upgrade price would be capped to 21 EUR. Assuming you purchase that too, any further updates that year would be added to your account automatically and free of charge.