Unraid is a popular NAS software, and it announced a big change: it is moving away from perpetual licenses. This, of course, happens on the same day that we do a story on the VMware cost increases. Still, for a portion of STH readers, this will be a big deal.
In a blog post today, Unraid said that it will grandfather existing Unraid Basic, Plus, and Pro licenses. The company says that users with those existing licenses can upgrade to higher levels of perpetual licenses. That is great news for those already running Unraid OS.
Here are the three pricing levels that Unraid will be moving to.
The new pricing model at Unraid will introduce three new license types:
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Starter – Supports up to 4 attached storage devices. This will be offered at a lower price than today’s Basic key.
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Unleashed – Supports an unlimited number of devices. This will be offered at about the same price as today’s Plus key.
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Lifetime – Essentially the same as a Pro key at a higher price point.
These will function similarly to the current Basic, Plus, and Pro licenses, with the main difference being that the Starter and Unleashed licenses will come with one year of software updates. After that, customers will be able to pay an OPTIONAL extension fee, which makes them eligible for another year of updates. If you choose not to renew, no problem. (Source: Unraid Blog)
Although it sounds like the Starter is less than the Basic, Unleashed is like Plus, and Lifetime is more than Pro, realistically, the next paragraph tells us that is not exactly the case. After a year, one will have to pay an extension fee to continue to get updates.
Final Words
From a business perspective, what Lime Technology (the company behind Unraid) is doing makes sense. Instead of having users buy once for a device, and then having to deal mostly with hardware costs, there is now a subscription involved. Even if the initial price is close, over time Lime Technology can generate more revenue by customers paying for updates.
One, of course, could not update their NAS. At the same time, if you see the sheer number of larger SMB NAS provider bug fixes and security patches, you would not want to have a system running for years without updates. As a result, some may not pay to update, but our best guess is that the majority of customers will.
The interesting part is that this model might actually make NASes from vendors like QNAP and TrueNAS more enticing to Unraid users, even though Unraid has some features that are interesting in how they work differently. Unraid had just started to pull away from TrueNAS in some popularity metrics, so it will be interesting to see how this license change impacts that.