New PE Gold Benefits and Perpetual Licenses Grandfathered

Today, we are announcing two changes to our PE subscriptions.

New PE Gold benefits

Customers with PE Gold subscriptions will have new benefits:

• 4 hour response time – In our support queue we will prioritize messages from PE Gold customers. As a result, as a PE Gold customer, you'll typically get a response from us in the next 4 hours, during our business hours. This won't impact our response time for PE Silver or PE Basic customers, who can still expect an answer during our next business day.
• Chat interface – As a PE Gold customer, you'll find a new chat tool called Campfire in your private Basecamp, along with your existing Message Board. It will be up to you to decide whether you post new questions on the Message Board, or as a quick message in Campfire. We expect that this will allow us, during our business hours, to answer short questions even faster, and thus even better serve our PE Gold customers.

Pricing for PE Gold subscriptions is unchanged, and those new benefits apply to all new and existing PE Gold subscriptions.

Perpetual licenses are discontinued but grandfathered

Every PE subscription includes two parts: support from Orbeon, as well as a license for using Orbeon Forms PE on a server. 

The way this worked until now was that support would end if the subscription was left to expire. This applied to all PE Basic, PE Silver and PE Gold subscriptions. But licenses for PE Silver and PE Gold subscriptions would remain active (and were described as perpetual).

This situation was confusing and unusual for software licensed on a subscription basis. As a result, most customers assumed that licensing ended with the expiration of their PE Silver or PE Gold subscription, and just renewed their subscription as long as they were using Orbeon Forms PE. A minority of customers was left wondering under what condition it could be beneficial to them to delay renewing their subscription, which created a fair amount of friction.

To make things simpler and avoid friction, starting today, licensing and support will both end if a subscription is left to expire. This will apply to all new subscriptions. Existing subscriptions are grandfathered and still come with perpetual licenses.