Per the pricing plan, all licenses are forever licenses, but the lowest two tiers only offer 1 year of updates.
After that you can choose to renew, or continue with your current version.
If you do not like subscriptions, there still a lifetime plan, but at a higher pricepoint.
All existing plans are grandfathered in.
Full announcement form Lime: https://unraid.net/blog/pricing-change
Note: I have mixed emotions about this, but I’m seeing a lot of rage bait, and if we’re going to rage we might as well have our facts straight.
If you haven’t subbed already and are interested, check out the unraid community at !unraid@reddthat.com. We are already discussing it over there too.
I like what u/mosiacmango said.
Also, as someone new to self hosting, Linux, containers, networking and assembling computers, Unraid has made the steep learning curve easier to climb.
From my perspective, staring at Unraid’s Black Friday pricing, it was a no brainer when the alternatives seem to be truenas and maybe Synology. Truenas would’ve had a steeper learning curve, and Synology provides a cookie cutter experience and learning little.
A different perspective:
I run a syno box and I have been learning quite a bit; driven recently by docker and ngix, basically. It removes the daunting ‘everything in *nix is commands in a terminal’ and gives me this nice UI and bumpers so I don’t royally fuck myself (at least not without warnings and scary red icons telling me beforehand).
The hardware is meh and the upcharge is yikes but it’s kept my data safe while I screw around “in prod”; and when I do actually mess up, the backup system is easy enough to use and recovery saves my skin in just a few minutes (snapshots too, super convenient). That’s what I want - a touch of guidance (so those changes at 4am where I skim the docs and get a warning about a dangerous command making me double-check before execution), a simple UI for system things (backups, control panel, user account access…), but the ability to venture beyond their little garden. Training wheels to be fast, loose, a bit reckless - but still safe.
Funny enough, I was looking at unraid for a replacement/transition not even a week ago. But I figured that there wasn’t a compelling reason to switch (the website is barren for actual feature information), and figured I’ll upgrade to a new syno box in a couple years instead. This unraid news is concerning but at least I get to watch what happens from the outside looking in, see how it goes.