Joshua, I completely understand your point of view. Perhaps if I explain my thinking a little further it will help (or perhaps it won’t!).
As this discussion clearly demonstrates, issues concerning pricing always generate passionate response, whether it’s from the person who was unlucky enough to buy the software a few days before the beginning of the grace period, or the person who is unlucky enough to buy the software just before or just after a sales promotion, or whatever it may be.
We have thousands of (hopefully, overall very happy) Dorico 3.5 users, but in the experience of my colleagues in the Cubase world, we tend to find that “small” updates attract a slightly lower update rate than “big” updates, and that has been borne out with the Dorico 3.5 update as well. As a consequence, there will also be thousands of Dorico 3.0 users, who are not necessarily any less “committed” or “supportive” or “brand loyal” than Dorico 3.5 users, but who simply chose not to buy the update to 3.5 because it was perceived as a smaller release, due to nothing more than its version number. (As I’ve explained before, we certainly felt that 3.5 was substantial enough to have been called 4.0 and to therefore use the higher upgrade pricing associated with, say, the 3.0 updates, but because of the attempt to get our release schedule back on track, we felt it would be too soon to ask for another full update fee, only nine months after the release of Dorico 3.0.)
I foresaw, therefore, that we might soon be in the situation where Dorico 3.0 users would be faced with a larger update price to Dorico 4.0 than they might have anticipated, and which could result in a mixture of complaints and, potentially, lost sales. I had (apparently misplaced) faith that on the whole those users who had updated to Dorico 3.5 had certainly had their money’s worth from the new features in that version, and would not respond negatively to me pointing out to other users who had not had their benefit over the past 20 months that they had a short-term opportunity to use the vagaries of our grace period and historical update pricing to their advantage.
With the benefit of hindsight, I will certainly think twice about this in the future. The past 24 hours has been a reminder that no good deed goes unpunished! But I do absolutely understand the point of view of you and those other users who have expressed disappointment about this and it will definitely inform my decision-making about talking about matters concerning pricing in future.
In terms of how we will handle this in future: we do not plan any further “small” updates for Dorico. Unless plans change very significantly (and of course I cannot give a cast-iron guarantee that they will not, as the past two years have provided ample illustration that the best-laid plans can and will go awry), the next major version of Dorico that will attract a fee after the forthcoming 4.0 release will be Dorico 5.0, which we hope will come some time in 2023. We have no plans for a paid Dorico 4.5 update, or indeed any future paid x.5 updates to any future version.
We cannot guarantee that no situation will exist in the future where a user on an earlier version may pay less for the new version than a user on the latest version. As explained above, it is a natural consequence of the way our grace period system works that somebody who prior to the release of the new version qualifies for the “small” update can buy that update and then activate it in the grace period to get a free update to the new version, and will have spent less than the customer who bought the “small” update earlier and therefore does not qualify for the grace period update.
The flip side of this situation, of course, is that the user who foregoes updating to the latest version until immediately before the release of a newer version also foregoes the use of the features and improvements in that version of the software for almost the entire period in which it is offered for sale as the latest version. They have paid less than the customer who has kept up to date, but they have received less value, too. They have got a bargain on the update to the new version, and they’ve of course also got the accumulated features of any interim versions to boot, but they have not been able to benefit from those features until that point.
This is an extraordinary situation created by the unusual circumstances of the last 18 months. I do not foresee that we will have a four-plus month grace period in future. I do not foresee that we will have any further x.5 updates in the future that will extend such a large pricing differential between the “small” and “large” updates for such a long period of time.
I can only offer my apologies to those Dorico 3.5 users who feel aggrieved by my decision to try to help Dorico 3.0 users save money on the update. As I have said above, I will certainly think twice about providing any advice about such matters in future.
I remain hopeful that we will make up for any disappointment you feel today when you see what we have in store in Dorico 4 in due course.