Website updates and pricing/licensing changes

Announcement
#1

After the release of the web-based GUI, it is finally the time to update our website with a new download page and a new user guide: Duplicacy-Web User Guide.

Besides, there have been some pricing and licensing changes. First, the prices for both commercial GUI and CLI licenses will be adjusted to $50 per year, while the prices for personal licenses will remain unchanged. However, this change will only apply to new users – if you have a duplicacy.com account created before today you can still buy new licenses or renew existing ones at the original prices.

Second, from now on the CLI licenses will be charged based on the number of computers, not the number of users. This is mainly because the per-user model has been confusing to potential users, judging from the number of inquiry emails I have received. Again, if you have an account as of today the old per-user pricing still applies to you.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

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Why CLI License?
#4

Hi Gilbert,
First-up, congratulations on a great system! I’m loving using it as a replacement for diverse other backup systems across my household, and I’m speaking as someone with nearly 50 years IT experience who’s ass has been saved more times than I can remember by careful choice of backup strategy & tools. I’m looking forward to the user guide for the web-based GUI; it’s not all that intuitive without that, even for someone who’s both IT-literate and has used the CLI version previously.

Separately, a comment on your changes to the CLI licensing model: Have you considered the impact on IoT situations where there are clusters of small dedicated-purpose machines?

The previous licensing model allowed a single licence to apply to an entire IoT cluster (presuming it was running for and as one user). Given the unit cost of such machines (think RPi zeros as examples), requiring each machine to have its own licence will mean that it’s not cost-justified to use Duplicacy in those situations. The flow-on of that is that the higher-level components (servers, etc) of such a cluster will also end up using some other approach for backup, in order to have commonality of approach.

Perhaps a dual model (users OR machines) could be considered? I’ve seen otherwise-excellent products killed in the past by the inadvertent choice of licensing model that kept the product from being adopted (or encouraged users to migrate to another product), and I’d hate to see that happen to what’s looking like a great product!!

I’m not saying this for my own benefit - I’m both no longer employed and a previous licensee, just passing on some thoughts based on that long experience I mentioned at the start of this post.

Brian

2 Likes
#5

Do you mean something other than the newly-updated guide here? I thought it seemed pretty thorough, so if that’s missing something I wonder if there’s some aspect of the web GUI I’m not taking full advantage of.

1 Like
#6

Thanks, I hadn’t spotted that. I read Gilbert’s note as implying that the guide was still in production and not completed. Perhaps a link in the post would have made it clearer.

Looks good!! Brian

#7

This sounds like an interesting point.

#9

Our old model is a dual per-user and per-computer model. There was a clause to allow the CLI to run on a machine with a GUI license. The main reason for this licensing change is to get rid of the notion of user. In case this change causes the cost of licenses to become prohibitively high, I think the solution is to offer an alternative licensing option on a case-by-case basis.

2 Likes
#10

You should totally add this to the website and github, probably also give the example of iot swarm. In this way you would give more incentive to people to give :d: a try, knowing that they can possibly negociate a different licensing agreement for their specific use-case

#11

OUCH! That’s a bit disappointing to see the price hike for CLI. Feels like being jabbed in the gut for a 2.5x price hike! I’m being over dramatic, but still. Its not an unreasonable price. Just seems a bit high for CLI version. I may as well point my clients to the GUI only. I don’t have that many systems, just a few, but I was waiting for the web GUI to push my clients onto this system. Except I was planning on my CLI scripts to run many of the systems and the $20/cpu pricing, with just a few on GUI. When the price is $20-ish-per-computer, its easy for me to justify the extra hassle of a CLI and some scripting, combined with cloud storage. Its still cheaper than Crashplan’s $10/mo even at $50/cpu (depending on data). But then I have to ask, is it worth the hassle? Ugh. I still hate crashplan’s stupid Java and huge memory consumption… rrrr.

Sorry. I’m just being a cry baby. I love your program! I have a lot more freedom than with CP.

2 Likes
#12

@gregthegeek you are locked in to the old prices so you can buy CLI or GUI licenses for your clients. $10 or $20 per year for support isn’t going to scale well when more users come in, but if you can handle most customers’ support for your clients then it should be ok.

1 Like
#13

IMO, the price changes are reasonable and I think it’s very generous to lock in the old prices for existing customers. Thank you. :+1:

However, I have a question about the license changes - GUI vs CLI. Previously, “A computer with a valid GUI license can run the CLI version without a CLI license.” - that no longer seems to be the case?

I can understand this change from a commercial perspective but it seems a bit inflexible insofar as being able to switch licenses between CLI and GUI if, for example, you bought GUI, then later decided to downgrade to CLI for a more headless/automated setup. You’d need a different license for that switch?

What I’m trying to get as, is… why make commercial GUI and commercial CLI licenses… different? When 1) they’re now the same price, and 2) you’d probably not want/need to run both GUI AND CLI ‘backup’ jobs on the same computer anyway. I feel if there was a single commercial license that would allow you to run GUI OR CLI, that would make much more sense, and thus make the licensing simpler.

Consequently, the licensing table on the Buy page is a bit confusing. Under Limitations for Commercial License it says “None”. What does that mean? How is it different to the last column for CLI License?

3 Likes
#14

This is indeed a good idea. :+1:

1 Like
#15

@gchen thank you! And yes, support by me is how it goes. My clients are small biz networks, very small, not large enough for IT. They don’t know or would not even care to bother with support directly to you or any software vendors and they only have me deal with it.

I’d also like to get clarification about the GUI/CLI combination license brought up by @Droolio. This would be the normal use case by me anyway. Because while I love the new GUI, I do more with the CLI and my own scripting (like phoning home status and using my own web service to notify me if systems haven’t backed up in a few days). So on some systems, I’ll only use CLI , but even those we do use the GUI, my scripts will do all the job handling. I just want a nice GUI so we can quickly recovery files and review storages.

Separate question: Will be be required to enter license keys on the CLI at some point? I’m ok with that, providing I can use and move the GUI’s copy of the CLI to other locations on the system.

#16

No, that is still the case. See duplicacy/LICENSE.md at master · gilbertchen/duplicacy · GitHub which still has this clause:

  • The computer with a valid commercial license for the GUI version may run the CLI version without a CLI license

I agree this is a good idea but I still want to keep them separate for the flexibility of adjusting the prices differently when, say, running a promotion for one license type only.

This would never happen, as the source code of the CLI is publicly available so it is pointless to include license checking code there.

2 Likes
Why CLI License?
#17

So, previously if I have 10 servers (backup is controlled through SSH by a script from a master server to invoke duplicacy binary stored on each machine), I would pay $20 per year to back them all up but now I have to pay $500 per year (and more as I add servers) to back them all up? Seems like a big change. In fact, it’s about doubling the price of the server fee for small sized machines ($5 instances).

Not that I’m going to do, due to performance reasons, but if I mount the file system on remote servers on the master server and use duplicacy on it to back the data up from there, would I only need a single license?

Seems a bit expensive when you have lots of small servers that come and go but do you have any plan to make the licensing cost cheaper for these cases?

#18

I would expect this is possible but leaving @gchen to give his opinion .

#19

Right, only one license is needed if you run Duplicacy on one machine.

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#20

Just to note, for anyone interested, I could successfully run duplicacy over sshfs mounted volumes and while it obviously takes longer than from native file system, for my use case, the slow down was well within the backup time window and restoring can be used without a license from specific machines with a native performance, which is a plus.

You could also ‘rsync’ files over to the master server and backup from there for native performance, if you have the space with a bit of extra time synching files, which may be cheaper to increase storage size than pay licenses for each machines.

1 Like
#21

I liked the old CLI license better when it was per user. Glad I purchased mine before the switch.

#22

I’m confused as to why the CLI license exists. It seems to be the same price as the commercial license, but with less features (no GUI). Under which circumstances would I want to buy the CLI license at all ? Would it not always be equal or better to get the commercial license for the same price ?

#23

A CLI license allows one computer to run the CLI version to backup any files.

GUI/CLI licenses are not required under the following situations:

Running the CLI version to back up personal files/documents on a home computer
Running the CLI version to restore, check, copy, or prune existing backups on any computer
Running the CLI version to back up any files on a computer where a GUI license is already installed

https://duplicacy.com/buy.html