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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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 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.
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)
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.
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.
