We used to offer a lifetime license for $999. But, we don’t do that currently (and if we did, it’d have to be more expensive now).
We try to make GPL better with every release, and we bring things down into GPL from Pro over time. The GPL release from yesterday has more Install Scripts than the previous one (added ClassicPress, a WordPress fork), for example. But, I’m extremely leery of making a lifetime commitment to maintain a whole bunch of frequently changing stuff for a small up-front payment.
The install scripts are one of the things we definitely can’t do in a one-time transaction, unless that transaction is quite large. We have ongoing maintenance costs for those, as new application versions come out, installation processes change, security issues come up, etc. It’s also one of the main reasons people buy Pro. If we offered a cheap “forever” license for that, I suspect it would dramatically cut our Pro revenue that we pretty desperately need to keep developing all of Virtualmin.
So, there’s been a couple decades of work in the past to get Virtualmin where it is and it works great for a lot of people today and there is a tendency for people to think, “This does everything I need today, why am I paying for it every year when I don’t need it to do anything else?” But, we can’t stop in place and just sell what we built and call it profit. We’re building software that sits on the open internet and is the target of vast resources trying to exploit it.
Even if our software is pretty sturdy (and it is historically pretty sturdy, though there have been exploits in Webmin and Virtualmin, too) and does everything you want, if we stop working on supporting new OS versions, new Apache/nginx/Mariadb/etc. versions, a whole lot of servers will get compromised at some point in the not-too-distant future. We can never call it “done” and take a break from development.
So, if we sell software for a one-time cost, at some point, we’re working entirely for free. I’m not independently wealthy, and I’m getting older without a lot of retirement savings. I can no longer afford to work for free. I’ve done so for many years, and I guess the OSS community has come to expect that sort of loyalty from people working on projects with a long life, but living in poverty for OSS ideals isn’t very appealing at my age.
Anyway, my position has always been that the things that won’t trickle down into GPL are things targeted at making money (reseller accounts, some delegation and scaling features, etc.) and things that require ongoing maintenance. Install Scripts will always be labor intensive, so I don’t see a way to extract them into a product or project that doesn’t make some recurring revenue. Cloud services fall into “scalability”, though they also happen to be convenient for smaller users, so that one feels like a hard call. It’s possible more of the cloud features will trickle into GPL, eventually.
If we were rich and making tons of money via some other revenue stream, we’d give away more and maybe we could find some way to offer a “once” kind of license, but as it is, we don’t make enough money to pay everyone a decent salary (Jamie and I are mostly volunteers and have been for years, and Ilia is very underpaid). I understand where you’re coming from, and I find this (https://once.com/) an appealing idea, and I’ve tried to figure out how we could offer products like that. But, we don’t have any SaaS services bringing in millions of dollars to prop up revenues, like 37Signals do. That’s (SaaS) something we’re considering for the new year as an attempt to resolve our perpetual revenue problems.
Pro subscriptions are probably too cheap, as it is, and they’re definitely a lot cheaper than cPanel or Plesk. A cheaper one wouldn’t be sustainable from a support burden perspective. I think it’s the lower bound of what we can afford to support…so, if we offered a “smaller Pro” or a “GPL Plus” it’d have to be the same price as Virtualmin Pro for 10 domains and I guess we’d have to raise the prices of all the other stuff. Note that $150 will currently cover two years of a Virtualmin Pro 10 domain license, and that includes unlimited support…which is time I bill at $150/hour if doing it as a contractor. Honestly, every time someone asks for cheaper licenses, I go through the math and realize we don’t charge anywhere near enough. There’s a reason our competitors charge separately for support incidents, I guess.
Unfortunately, wire transfers are costly and complicated in the US (you may note that no US company will accept a wire for anything less than several thousand dollars, I think it’s $3000 minimum for Red Hat, for example, because of the cost of doing business that way in both time and money). We currently accept PayPal and all major credit cards.
So, I guess the summary is: GPL already does more than several of our commercial competitors, and it gets better with every release. We reserve some things for Pro, as a way to encourage people to fund development of all of our Open Source projects. A one-time payment is untenable for software that requires a lot of ongoing maintenance and support, without some other revenue stream to cover costs.
