Let me try once again to clarify. From 2015 to 2017 Glasswire sold its software as a one off license. A one off license is by definition not a subscription. It’s a license to use a very specific version of a software that is sitting on a specific computer. Once you buy that one off license you have the right to use THAT software in perpetuity on your machine. Normally in software land, and since the beginning of time of software sales, as software evolves, maintenance contracts are sold along with one-off software sales which entitle the user to updates. Alternatively, and more commonly for consumers products, users are asked to buy a new more evolved product if they wish to do so (remember Microsoft Word for window version 1 in 1989? And then Microsoft Word for windows version 2 came in 1991 and so on).
As the Glasswire product was still in its infancy during that early 2015-17 period, and out of sympathy to all our early adopters, we decided at the time to push software updates free of charge to people who had bought the one-off license, even though the company was not legally obliged to do so under the terms of its licensing agreement.
In 2018 Glasswire moved to a subscription model. Let me highlight that this was a good thing because none of you would have enjoyed Glasswire for the past 5 years if that didn’t happen – the subscription model put the company on a sustainable path allowing it to keep development going.
Under the subscription model introduced in 2018, users can buy a 1yr subscription which entitles them to any updates during the subscription time. Again, as a gesture of goodwill to its early adopters, Glasswire offered to previous users who had purchased one off licenses to continue offering upgrades for free. This is regardless whether you had a V1 or a V2.
Fast forward the clock to today. We just launched V3. We are still on the same subscription model we introduced in 2018.We just changed the licensing engine behind the subscriptions because license codes are a thing of the 90s and nobody uses them anymore and for good reasons. We moved to the 21st century and, for NEW clients, we now check the validity of their subscription license via user authentication on the cloud. To allow existing paying subcribers (ie. anybody who purchased a subscription license from 2018 till last week) to continue using the product which they subscribed to and paid for, we still let them use in V3 their license code to authenticate each endpoint, effectively bypassing cloud authentication.
As far as our early adopters from 2015 till 2017 who paid for a one-off license are concerned, we are still to this date offering them the possibility of upgrading to the newly released V3 free of charge. For the avoidance of doubt, this is an optional upgrade, we are neither forcing you nor are we asking you for any more money for it. If you like what we are developing please come and join us for the ride which you get for free as a thankyou for being an early adopter. If for whatever reason you don’t like it or the new V3 feature don’t suit your personal situation, please don’t upgrade. You are absolutely free to continue using in perpetuity V0, V1, V2 and/or any upgrades that have been published in between up to last Friday.
