Developer license - the facts

Update from July 7th, 2014:  New License Agreement applies to the usage of our software products. There are really important updates to our license policy, all in your benefit! Read more about the major changes and also find answers to the frequently asked questions about the new licensing policy.

I am happy to say that since we've launched the first product, based on the new PHP framework a month ago, we've received lots of positive feedback from all of you, our valuable clients. I am not hiding the fact that we have also received some negative comments about our new Developer license and some interesting questions about how it all works out. My team and I have always been open to all our clients and we've always replied to all the questions we receive - good or bad. As usual, I will personally do this again.

1. Why Developer license allows up to 5 installations?
For the last years we've been offering a developer license which allows an unlimited number of installations. Although most of our clients only use our products on a single or just a few websites there are webmasters who use our products on many more websites. We are happy that our products have helped many webmasters with their startup businesses and that they use our products on the websites they build for their clients.

However, this brought some difficulties:

• There were people who tried to start their own software selling business based on our products. They just changed the branding for our products and offered them on their websites directly to their clients. Yes, they did that! Our company invests a lot of resources in making all these web applications and when we see that someone does this we feel really distressed. Over the years we managed to take most of these websites down, by contacting hosting companies, domain name registrars, payment processing companies, local authorities and even starting lawsuit cases. Unfortunately, there are still people from parts of the world who do not care about copyright. Instead of fighting those people I personally prefer working on improving our products and services!
Having a limit of 5 installations per license and being able to track these installations will protect our work and copyrights.

• There were also people who asked us for support when the webmaster who installed our product on their website did not respond to their requests. You can imagine that this makes it extremely difficult for us to provide effective support not knowing what version the script is, when it was installed, who installed it, etc. Being able to track installations will help us provide better and faster support for our clients.

• As we constantly strive to create new and better products that are consistent with the current market, our investment costs have inevitably gone up. Fortunately, having an extensive and constantly growing database of loyal clients, we have been able to keep our products at very competitive and reasonable prices and stay profitable at the same time. Staying true to our company goal to offer great quality products at affordable prices have brought us to believe that the principle "to get more you need to pay more" in terms of licensing plays a vital role.

The above are the main reasons why we have limited the number of installations per license. Why 5? Based on our experience, we know that the majority of our clients who have bought a Developer License normally use it for up to 5 installations. Having said that, most of you will not be affected by this license policy change.

For all other clients who will get affected by the change, we strongly believe that it will not burden your projects' budget by a lot. Let's do some math here. Take as an example the purchase of 2 licenses keeping in mind that the average price of our products is $100-150. If you use these 2 licenses on let's say 7 web sites your average price per installation comes to $30-40. As a comparison, a client who has bought just 1 license and uses it on 2 websites has invested on average $50-70 per installation.

That being said, we trust that in the long run the license policy change will be beneficial for both sides.

2. When a script is installed does it depend on your server? What happens if you go out of business or your server is down?
Our scripts have never been made to depend on our servers and will never be. Once you install the script on your hosting account and you have the license key generated during the installation process you can use our product forever without being worried if our servers go down. Your script will never stop working even if for some reason our servers are down.

By the way, we use some of the best hosting providers and for the last 7 years our website has been down only for a few hours once due to a HDD crash. Since then, we operate mirror servers and our websites are up and running 100% of the time. But again I will say that your installation DOES NOT depend on our server in any way!

We've been running PHPjabbers.com website for almost 10 years now. It was started with a single product and just a few clients and as of today we offer 40 products, have more than 20 000 clients and 21 employees. I am saying all this so you better understand how we run our business. We are not new to the market. We've been here for many years and we plan to stay in business for a lot more! Still if you are worried that we may go out of business, I can reassure you that we've taken necessary measures so that you can continue installing our products without the need of a license key.

So in any case - server down or going out of business - you can continue using ALL our products without a problem.

3. Does the new license agreement affect my previously purchased products?
Absolutely NOT! The new license agreement only applies to newly purchased products and does not affect your previous licenses.

4. Can I still make my own changes and remove your copyright notices?
Of course, you can. Under developer license you have the freedom to make your own changes, remove our company copyright notices and put your own notices. We have not changed that and do not plan to do it!

5. When will all products be updated to support the new framework?
My colleagues are working really hard to update all the products as I am writing this. Based on my experience I expect that we will launch 3 to 5 products per month. We have many ideas for building new products but until we update our current products we will not create new ones. I expect that all products should be updated in next 4 to 6 months at the most.

I hope that the above explains clearly the new licensing policy of Stivasoft and hope you will understand and accept our new license agreement. We have always put our clients first and will continue to do so. That is why the new Developer License policy will continue to give you the freedom to use our products in your business and we will never put restrictions on that.

Yours sincerely,
Veselin Stoilov
CEO, StivaSoft