Hmm… I have to say, I’m very confused, @terpua. I thought that when I paid for Insync in 2013 I was paying a one time fee, but now I am being asked to pay again for an upgrade to “Prime.” 
Waaaaaaay back in 2011 I signed up to use Insync, primarily because of the cross-platform (Linux) support that you offered. Brilliant. In an email on 14 May 2012, you said:
Business model
We will make money the old fashion way by asking you to pay a one-time fee.
When the time came to pay that fee, I did so, in March 2013, signing up and paying for a “pro” account. Actually, I purchased a “pro” license for several of my Google Accounts - both Gmail and Google Apps accounts. At that time, you wrote:
Alongside 1.0, we are also announcing our introductory pricing:
Pro – 15 day free trial and $9.99 one-time per Google account after.
There was no talk about the use of Insync being limited to any specific version. The implication was that this was a one time fee for indefinite use of Insync–awesome!
Six months after I bought “Pro” accounts, on 22 October 2013, it was announced that my account had been transitioned to the new Insync Plus plan:
Hello.
Please be informed that Insync Pro plans purchased on or before October 13, 2013 were transitioned to the new Insync Plus plan.
Your syncing will not be affected and you will not be charged on this transition. You do not need to do anything on your part.
Introducing Insync Plus and the re-packaged Insync Pro plans
The new Insync Plus plan will sync one Google account for $10 one-time fee with free updates for Insync 1.x.
If you have multiple accounts, you can upgrade to Insync Pro for $10/year for the first three accounts ($5/year for each additional account) which comes with free updates to all Insync versions and a new Pro dashboard.
…
I didn’t get any option about this–it was done automatically without any action from me, as far as I can tell. This was the first time I can find that there was talk about my account now only being valid for a restricted amount of time (i.e. only valid for v1.x)
Eight days later, a subsequent email was sent out, on 30 October 2013, in which it was stated:
New plans
We are introducing a new Plus plan and a revised Pro plan.
The Plus plan is essentially the old Pro plan with one-time pricing of $10 per Google account. The revised Pro plan is now $10/year with built-in support for 3 Google accounts and includes a Pro dashboard.
Note that this did not mention that the “Plus” accounts were limited to being valid for v1.x only. Given that this email came out relatively soon after the 22 October announcement that my accounts had been transitioned automatically, it was very easy to over look the fact that there would be any kind of “version lifetime limitation” now being applied to my accounts, particularly as your email said: “The Plus plan is essentially the old Pro plan with one-time pricing of $10 per Google account”–well, that’s exactly the deal I had done six months earlier, so I didn’t pick up on any new limitation.
In 2015 Insync v1.2 was released, with a new UI–awesome–and an announcement that there would be a price increase. There was, in the 21 March 2015 email, no mention of a “version lifetime limitation” applying to any of the pricing plans.
It was very regrettable that the email you sent out on 22 December 2016 was filtered by Google into spam email folders, as this meant a lot of people, including me, missed this email. This was the first announcement of your new pricing plans, called “Prime”. This announcement would have been missed by many many people.
Then, of course, came the email today, which did not get filtered into spam, and was probably the first time most of your users heard about the new Prime pricing plan. The offer that you had made (in the “spam” email) has elapsed, and so it seems that people, like myself, who paid the one-time fee all those years ago, are now out of luck and will have to fork out unexpectedly for new account levels.
I think this could have been handled a lot better!
Unfortunately, you’ve caused a lot of confusion and uncertainty.
I think that what you are offering, at some stage in the future (once you’ve got it coded up) is:
-
the ability to upgrade from a “plus” account to a “prime” account, for an existing @gmail.com accounts. This ability will be a limited time offer (i.e. we’ll have to be quick to take advantage of this),and once this offer has passed, existing @gmail.com accounts can upgrade to “Prime” at a 30% discount
-
for existing Google App/G Suite accounts, there will be no free upgrade to “Prime”, but a 30% discount
I think it is totally understandable that Insync needs to secure revenue streams that allow your service (which, frankly, is superb, given Google’s dereliction of providing for Linux users, and their clients’ inability to support multiple accounts) to continue working. I think the vast majority of your users would be pretty devastated if you felt you were unable to continue operating your company. But, the announcement of the new “Prime” accounts has been pretty botched, considering the initial email was filtered as spam. My reading of the situation is that the “Prime” accounts will be valid for v1.x and v2.x of the Insync software, so the “upgrade” from Plus/Pro/Business accounts to “Prime” will pay for v2.x of Insync. If that is how things are, then I do think that could have been explained better.
I think, for people that signed up all that time ago when you spoke of a “one time fee”–that is, bought prior to the 22 October 2012 automatic transition to “Plus” accounts–there will be a little disgruntlement that actually we are being asked to pay again. (For those who signed up after the Plus “level” was created, they should have been aware that their account was only valid for v1.x). I probably will pay again–even for my G Suite account–even though I truly thought I had paid a “one time” fee; the functionality Insync provides is simply that good, and I want the service to continue. But the initial promise has been broken.
My personal concern is that I’ll miss the announcement of the new update page (and limited time offer), as there is now a history of your emails being sent to spam folders. I wonder if an announcement could be made “in app” as a desktop notification in addition to an email being sent out?
I’m sure you have a lot to deal with right now, so thanks for reading all the way through this message.
Yours,
Jon
Of course, I had no way of knowing that the 1st email was going to predominantly end up in spam.