Unraid has come out with their new pricing plan.
I have mistakenly said in some comments here before that they were doing away with their lifetime plan. They still have it, but it is just more expensive. They have introduced a couple of cheaper annual subscription plans.
If anyone is still on the fence about buying Unraid, you have a week until the new pricing plan comes into affect.
After seeing so many examples of companies really screwing up their pricing changes, it is refreshing to see Unraid do this so well.
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I wouldn’t use a proprietary OS
Especially not one I have to “subscribe” to.
The whole idea is just ridiculously stupid.
I’m down with paying as that often means good support and stability. The problem is the black box that can’t be changed.
One without support for something as simple as groups and where everything has 777 permissions by design.
I’m a Pro licence owner and I tested Unraid for about a year until moving to TrueNAS and Proxmox.
laughs in truenas
Yeah no kidding, paying for unraid?
TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) keeps getting better, for free. It does most of the same tricks that the big boy appliances do, but with your commodity hardware, at no cost.
And it does all this exceedingly well. AND if you want… you can buy support. At your discretion.
I don’t have half the world’s RAM to give to ZFS on my budget NAS tho, and Unraid allows mismatched drive sizes, which is pretty attractive to budget users. TrueNAS is definitely great though.
If you’re on a budget, paying 110$ for an unraid license certainly doesn’t help your situation…
There are cheap NASes/home servers to be bought/built for a couple hundred bucks, with very limited RAM, while TrueNAS recommends 8GB minimum. It’s also often much cheaper to have the option to buy mismatched drives on sale and expand your storage over time, than having to buy matched drives, and having to plan long term for potential expansion of else have to replace a whole set of drives at once if you need more. But fair enough, yes.
I was considering grabbing a last minute legacy license, but I really don’t have a use case for unraid. I need a NAS for storage and a few VMs. And my apps run on generic SBCs or NUCs which I manage through ssh/ansible. So yeah, TrueNAS it is for me as well.
While I was initially skeptical about the pricing changes, the more I learned about it the more I was okay with it. I think part of the initial problem was the talk of annual subscriptions, when in fact it’s much closer to paying for version upgrades. Their new standard licenses have come down in cost from the old perpetual licensing and the price of a version upgrade is only $36.
Yeah this seems like a really reasonable way to make this change. You also don’t lose access to Starter or Unleashed if you don’t pay that version upgrade fee, they will let you keep downloading the version you’d paid up until. Having it be a unified upgrade fee for both is nice too. I think it makes clear that it’s to cover ongoing development and support in a way that’s more transparent than a lot of software subscriptions.
They also still allow you to buy a lifetime license, even if it’s more expensive. Considering Broadcom’s VMware just removed all of their perpetual options, it’s nice to see a different company going against that trend.
I would like to see them offering lifetime upgrades at the end of your first year with Unleashed though. Paying $140 to upgrade to that rather than $36 for a year makes a lot of sense at that point. If it’s a new customer they might not want to commit upfront.
Edit:
You can upgrade from Starter to Lifetime for $209 and Unleashed to Lifetime for $149. Prices are subject to change at any time.
There you go, you absolutely can, and they only charge $9 for the privilege of doing it later on. That seems good to me.
They have all the right in the world to do so, but I have a lot of trouble with them insisting that this is “not a subscription”. Let’s call a spade a spade. It’s a subscription to get updates, with a perpetual fallback license. The only difference with JetBrains’ model, which offers the same for their IDEs (which everyone calls subscriptions, themselves included), is that Unraid still offer a lifetime tier on top. But the lower tiers absolutely are subscriptions. If it was really a “version upgrade” thing, they’d tie the payment to major versions, not a time period. It’s a time based payment in which you get something in exchange during the payment period, therefore, a subscription. The word may have connotations for them to want to avoid it so much, I won’t pretend it’s not what it is…
Otherwise, for what I actually use Unraid for, they just put themselves out of my price range and it probably won’t be my next NAS’ OS. Outside the “use any disk size” RAID-like solution, there isn’t much keeping me on the OS, and I guess I can deal with setting up MergeFS/Snapraid…
I’m inclined to agree, but it’s really just semantic differences. If they really wanted to, they could just release a new major version upgrade every year, tie the license to that version, and still get an effective annual subscription.
I get your point, but if it’s just about semantics, why would they be so defensive about it not being one?
Jetbrains moved away from the purchase version model and to an actual monthly/yearly subscription model a very long time ago. I don’t even think you can buy their products anymore, they’re literally subscription models, no longer buy versions then get updates for a year sort of thing. You either pay them and have access or don’t and lose it.
You get a perpetual fallback license even if you stop payin, which is what I was referring to. It’s pretty much functionally equivalent to what Unraid is proposing here. You pay for a first year, get a license to use that version, then need to pay again to get an additional of updates.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-a-perpetual-fallback-license
Huh, I did not know that. Wild.
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I do see an advantage to tie it to a time period for the customer. If it was just tied to a major version then Unraid would have to make a decision about if a feature belongs in version 8 or version 9. Essentially locking that feature behind a paid upgrade. By making the upgrade tied to a time period they have no incentive to hold features back for the next major version.
The incentive is still there, it just presents itself differently. Nothing prevents them from withholding major changes so they happen every 13 months either. If anything, I would at least expect yearly major versions to have large changes, while they can technically do whatever they want during the year I pay for, including not pushing any updates whatsoever.
If you choose not to extend your license, no problem. You still own the license and have full access to the OS.
If your license extension lapses (as in, you do not pay your annual fee), you can download patch releases within the same minor OS version that was available to you at the time of the lapse.
Someone knows what the official minor release cadences is?
Looks like they release a new minor release ~ every year. That means you in the most optimal case (ends on the day of the new minor release) your Unraid will be supported for 2 years after your license ends and in the worst case (ends day before minor release) 1 year after your license end.
Assuming they do keep their release timing.
Not too bad actually. Especially since you can purchase another year of support at any time, so you could basically get a 1 year license every 2 years and should be covert with security updates. (Assuming they do not change their release timing much)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
[Thread #620 for this sub, first seen 22nd Mar 2024, 11:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
If you ask me, Unraid went the Plex way, enshittification ensues.
There’s no enshitification happening if the product hasn’t gotten any worse. It’s just a pricing change. In fact, if the pricing change does in fact lead to a better product then this is the complete opposite of enshitification.
You also, no matter the tier, still get a perpetual license. If you don’t pay the upgrade, you keep your current version and can download and install it forever. This is just a more streamlined version of the same business model software has been using forever.
It’s the same model JetBrains has for their IDEs. You pay for a year, you get a perpetual fallback license. You pay again, get another year of updates.
JetBrains (accurately) still calls it a subscription though.
Can I update every second or third year? Will the previous versions receive security updates?
Go read the link, I’m not a TL;DR bot mate.
No worries.
For those who were wondering:
On the security updates:
Yes they’ll provide some security updates for some time even out of contract. No time frame given, only in relative release numbers:
Our naming convention for releases is: <major>.<minor>.<patch>.
Version -2 of currently released minor version goes EOL. The cadence is not explicitly provided
On not renewing or renewing later:
Yes, jump in any time.
Fewer people will get into unraid. Natural churn will happen. The OS will slowly die, and as it dies usability will get worse.
Not many people are going to choose the subscription Linux over a free Linux.
I am personally not a huge fan of unraid, but their new licenses seems based.
One time purchases are not a sustainable income source for long living and updated software products like unraid.
Since they (for now) keeping the ‘legacy licenses’, offer security patches for some time after the license ends and do not restrict access to the system after the license ends means they do not fully follow others like Plex to the enshitification.
One time purchases are not a sustainable income source for long living and updated software products like unraid.
I’m always left scratching my head every time I hear this line. Software subscriptions are a relatively new trend. The majority of software has been single-purchase until then over the last handful of decades. Why did it suddenly stop being sustainable to do so?
Because they released a new version every year or two. Look at Microsoft Office, Windows, Adobe Suit (Or any other successful software that is still around) All had a new Version every few years where all the new shiny features were locked behind.
Yes there are exceptions…
Very few companies are able to offer only lifetime plams for as cheap as they did and still be profitable… Was cool that they did but obviously wasn’t very beneficial for them in the long run. No enshittitfication making sure your company survives…
