Alex Hartman

Hi Folks, just wanted to stop by here and clarify some stuff.

People have suggested the sliding scale or reducing the cost. Sliding scale based on what license you have is hard math. Someone with a passthru core and livewire for instance just to use as a streaming encoder at 5% the original value would be $5.40USD. It costs us 3%+$1.50 of that to even process your credit card. Flat fee just made the math simple for everyone. After the dust settles, your 15 bucks, we see just under about half that (taxes, fees, hosting fees, processing fees, fees for the fees, etc, the things we are trying NOT to do).

Going to an automated licensing system has huge costs these days. Commercial products available to people like me and Leif are upwards of $3500 a YEAR and $500 a month for hosting the service. This would have to be put somewhere. Either new customers would pay for it (hopefully?) or it’d be a sunk cost and we would be out of business really quickly. Either way the costs go up drastically. Hans also wrote his own system for licensing, which yes, it can be done, but he also has other ventures that utilize that licensing mechanism so it does pay for itself in his case. Changing ours to something like that has a huge cost (time and money) and we just haven’t been able to come up with a system that works and makes sense at the current prices. It’s not going to get better, we will have to do something, we just haven’t figured out what that is yet.

Right now every key is made by hand, by a human. We review every key request, every change, every order. That’s why it might take a day or two to get you a new one. We have familes too, graduation parties, school recitals, vacations, etc. Bear with us, it might take a day or two to get to your request, but we do get to them.

Leif is good at telling me this one line every time I ask for something I assume is “easy” to do. “…says the person who doesn’t have to write the code”. And he’s right. Something us non-programmers take for granted is that we think a “simple” thing like licensing or allowing the stereo pilot adjustment to move more comes at some greater difficulty we don’t see or understand where Leif does and understands that maintenance tax or implementation tax.

As has been said, that fee is not friction for those who change machines once every 5 years or so. We understand computers have a finite lifespan, things get struck by lightning, etc. This is more for the ones who abuse the thing we technically don’t have to do at all, and that is reissuing keys to allow you to move around. The downside is that we can’t apply that surcharge to just a handful of people, it’s across the board. (laws and all that) We aren’t dismissing that $15 is nothing, because it’s obviously something, but doing it for less than free all these years have now come at a pretty big cost, mentally, financially, even medically in some cases.

I hope this clears up a few things surrounding this new charge. It’s not meant to disuade you from buying, upgrading, or even transferring your software around. It’s to keep the ability to do so alive entirely and Breakaway Software available at an affordable pricetag.

//Alex