Thank you! userTrack was never free, but I did change the pricing model from lifetime, to yearly to now being one-time payment + yearly payments for updates.
I would love to make userTrack free if I can find a sustainable way to work on it. Most other similar open-source software offers a "hosted" version to get revenue, but my goal is to promote decentralization and self-hosting in general, so me focusing on the hosted version would go against my goal and beliefs. I really want to see a feature where any non-technical person can choose a few products and have them running on their own VPS/server in a few clicks. This would have many advantages for the clients AND for the developers:
* Clients pay a lot less for a products
* Developers must focus more on product and performance, leading to higher quality products.
* Hugely increased privacy for the average internet user and for the own data of the client using the product
* Better performance (each client has their own server so it is more likely to have more resources)
* Better latencies (each client can choose to use/host their product on a local datacenter)
* Better data transparency, easier migrations and fewer vendor lock-ins (if you own the server and the data on it you can most likely always export it in some form)
I think there are many other advantages for both companies and clients. The current SaaS environment makes it really easy for companies to ask huge amounts of money for services just because they want to, as the client has no real alternative unless he is really technical and can spend days installing and maintaining a self-hosted software that rarely gets updated.
Sorry if it seemed like I was complaining about the pricing change. I was just wondering whether I remembered it correctly from here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24207129)
No worries, I was just making the history of the pricing structure clear.
Thank you for the kind words, I do love working on this project and I hope to be able to continue working on it. Existing customers absolutely love it and keep recommending but I am still struggling with finding a pricing structure that makes sense for everyone.
I do hope that one day I will find a way to make userTrack free for everyone, but looking at Matomo, making it open-source seems to drastically slow the development of a project as there are so many people involved and so much more decisions to be taken. Apart from that I would still have to earn a living somehow, but if I get a job and keep userTrack open-source I won't be able to spend too much energy on maintaining it and I hate not being able to make a product as good as it can be.
Great product and an excellent demo!