Upcoming changes for 2020 in MBS Plugins
First we got questions for subscription pricing. First we don't sell the plugin licenses as subscriptions. We ask you to keep the license up to date and buy maintenances. And you can buy them for up to 5 years in the future. But we will continue to have a nice kind of licensing, where we do not technically force you to buy the updates.
You can continue to keep the old license with the old plugin files until they break. Please be aware that newer FileMaker / Xojo versions may break them as well as newer versions of the operation system. Looking on security related changes in the plugin and used libraries, it is highly recommended to keep the plugins updated to get latest versions of them.
If you like to see it as subscription, please consider the update price as subscription price. For first purchase, you pay a year to get current version and a year of updates, which defines the purchase price.
Conference Discount
For the conferences we used to offer 20% on everything as discount. This is a great incentive for visiting the conference and buying some of the software you see for a special show price. With yearly licenses, some people tend to only buy at the conferences and that is the direction we don't like.
Starting with next conferences we limit discount to new licenses only. Also with more conferences here on the horizon, we may reduce the conferences where we have a booth and just put up some posters and be available for questions.
Conference Sponsoring
We'll continue to sponsor as many conferences as possible and prefer to sponsor those where we can attend. If you have details on a conference we may attend or sponsor, please let us know.
Price Changes
As you know we didn't change prices for ten years, but are always looking on fine tuning them. For Xojo plugins, we continue to de-emphasise buying individual parts and prefer to sell Complete plugin set licenses.
With DynaPDF 5 on the horizon, pricing is expect to change and we allow all existing users to order up to 5 years of maintenance for todays prices.
Last versions for 32-bit on MacOS?
Next year, we may upgrade to MacOS Catalina. That could break our ability to build for 32-bit. In that case version 9.5 for FileMaker or 19.5 for Xojo may be the last ones to support 32-bit on macOS. This is just a warning and you should be on our list for FileMaker MacOS 32-bit version or Real Studio Plugin version if you asked for them before.
As all MacOS versions since 10.7 from year 2011 are 64-bit operation systems, 32-bit is only needed for older OS versions. But we only support MacOS 10.9 or newer, so there is hardly any use for 32-bit plugins.