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Do we have to pay again?, Ritlabs demand money for v8
 
Paid many times for previous versions. Now my client shows:"Valid until version 7.9".
I live in a rich country, for me what they demand is not much, but how long do I have to support half-baked product?  17 years and counting. That's enough dear Moldovan friends, you won't receive a penny more from me unle3ss you issue a lifetime license for me and people like me.

What do others think?
 
Sorry Andre, but I think you deserve having to make monthly payments just for calling The Bat a half-baked product! :-)

I've been using The Bat Pro for more than 15 years. After the initial purchase I've only ever bought two upgrades that I can remember, when I needed the features offered by the latest version. Total expenditure must be around € 100. Considering that it's an all-day-every-day type application for me, and that it has brilliantly handled hundreds of thousands of incoming and outgoing messages for me, I think it's been a bargain.

I appreciate that Ritlabs has never gone full corporate on us, extracting every last dime they could, like Adobe and others are doing with their mandatory subscription models. Old versions of The Bat keep working fine and my latest upgrade, from v3 to v7, went perfectly smooth.

The cut-off dates for the previous upgrade were May 9, 2015 – August 21, 2017 for versions 6.8 through v7.x. If you upgraded in early August, I can see that it would seem a bit much when you get a new paid upgrade offer for v8.x just a few months later. But then, you *could* have purchased and enjoyed that earlier upgrade two years earlier, so that would have been really your own fault. Over all, we get two years of use out of every € 30 upgrade. Seems fair to me, especially considering that those upgrades are not mandatory.
I volunteer as a moderator to help keep the forum tidy. I do not work for Ritlabs SRL.
 
The market for stand-alone email clients has all but disappeared because people moved to "free" webmail services that vacuum up your personal information as payment. Even Thunderbird only sees security updates with no new features the last few years. Outlook isn't an option for me (I've had too much trouble with it) and my last email program, Barca (Pocomail), is no longer available -- largely because they couldn't justify maintaining it because of the changed market for email software.

The Bat provides an excellent product for a reasonable price. It costs money to have a team keep a program updated and to fix security issues and provide new features. One of my reasons for choosing The Bat  was the fact that it is updated.

I bought version 5 in July 2013 and paid to upgrade to version 6 in November 2013 (and have upgraded to each new version since). Sure, it stings to have to pay for a product again after a little more than 3 months, but I also got a new and improved email program (and wasn't forced to upgrade, like I would be with Microsoft).
 
I am more than happy to pay for upgrades. The developers of The Bat are not our slaves for life just because we make one purchase.  I don't expect plumbers to return to my home and do more plumbing jobs just because I paid them once years ago. Seriously!
 
Just to add my thoughts on this. The problem with the original poster's desire for a lifetime license is that such gives zero incentive to the developer to add new features or fix problems. The primary market for new features and maintenance is the existing base, not new customers. And email is a function used daily, so figure the average monthly cost and it's pennies. TB! isn't perfect and I'm quite displeased with its slow shutdown and some overly complex (to me) aspects, but it works. There is also somewhat of a "Catch 22" here. To achieve a better product, it is necessary that we continue to pay for periodic upgrades, even when we aren't 100% satisfied. That's the incentive to realize an improved product. Once the base retreats, the product quality starts to suffer.
david  
 
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david kirk wrote:
TB! isn't perfect and I'm quite displeased with its slow shutdown [..]

I'm sorry for this off-topic response, but have you checked your account and folder properties to see if TB is deleting any old messages, compacting any folders or emptying the trash upon exit (Account Properties | Options, and Folder Properties | Additional | On Exit) ?  My PC almost qualifies as an antique, but shutdown takes just a split second. You could also try SysInternal's free Process Monitor tool to monitor The Bat's filesystem and registry activity upon exit, to see if anything is going wrong there and causing a delay.
I volunteer as a moderator to help keep the forum tidy. I do not work for Ritlabs SRL.
 
Quote
david kirk wrote:
The problem with the original poster's desire for a lifetime license is that such gives zero incentive to the developer to add new features or fix problems. The primary market for new features and maintenance is the existing base, not new customers
Well, I have been using other software for many years and two vendors offered me lifetime licenses at some stage. Won't tell who as advertising is not my intention. With Ritlabs I paid 6 (six times - 1x, 2.0, 3.0, 4.1, 6.0, 7.0) so I believed they could have offered me at least significant  discount to upgrade. As for new features, since they implemented html templates and almost succeeded in supporting MS Exchange protocol (still buggy - nowhere near what EM Client managed to offer for free) I do not need any - but would very much prefer for them to iron out all glitches and bugs at least in one version. I know, I know - every time they switch to a new version of Delphi, the damage is comparable to rewriting everything from scratch....

Interesting idea about existing customer base that is supposed to support the developers even if no one new is going to buy it.    :D

P.S. Decided to bite the bullet and buy this version. Installed and first thing I discovered was that invoking Mail Dispatcher cases Bat to crash. Speak about half-baked....
Edited: Andre Tissot - 19 November 2017 18:14:56 (New development)
 
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Andre Tissot wrote:
With Ritlabs I paid 6 (six times - 1x, 2.0, 3.0, 4.1, 6.0, 7.0) ...
I only paid 3 times for a license (or perhaps 4). I stopped these "upgrades" with Version 6 because I did not see any significant improvements of the program or a benefit for me to continue to upgrade. I was always expecting new functionalities, but I did not find any. (If I overlooked a new 'killer feature' which has been introduced since version 6 please give me a hint.) Several improvement mails have been ignored by the developers in ten years - ok, so I will ignore their updates/upgrades.

BTW Mail handling is great, but any other functionality for e.g. planning or mail workflow is nearly not existing or too rudimentary/bad implemented (e.g. Scheduler). Something useful like SmartBat ist nearly complete crap and has not been improved since the beginning.

Thorsten
Edited: thorsten - 19 November 2017 21:00:10
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