I understand for the first time, in a long time, there will be a charge to upgrade SpamSieve to the version that works with Sonoma.
I have no issue with this as I consider SpamSieve the most essential app in my daily email usage.
When do you expect the upgrade to go on sale and for those who already have a paid version, what is the expected upgrade cost?
Thank You
We’ll see what happens with Apple’s release schedule, but my guess is that Sonoma will be released in late October, so I’m planning to release SpamSieve 3 in late September. The upgrade will likely cost $19.99 and will be free for people who had purchased SpamSieve 2 recently.
Hi,
So this meeans long time users are penalized right? I don’t get the idea behind that.
Dom.
Long-time users are not penalized.
There hasn’t been a paid upgrade to SpamSieve in years. Many years, in fact. Perhaps never. I have been using it for nearly a decade or more and I only paid for it once.
The only reason it’s free for people who just purchased the software is because they just bought the prior version and haven’t had the luxury of going years on end without paying for an upgrade.
Nobody is being penalized. In some sense, the most fair way would be to have a subscription because then everyone would pay the same “rate” based on how long they use the software. But SpamSieve does not already have a subscription, and I’m not switching to that model with SpamSieve 3. A lot of people don’t like subscriptions, and as a customer I’m not really a fan, either.
So SpamSieve is using the paid upgrade model, where the current version keeps working forever, and you can get the new major version at a discount if you had bought the previous version. I see this as a benefit for long time users. They are paying fewer dollars per year. In fact, this is the first paid upgrade ever. So if you bought SpamSieve a long time ago you got a very very good deal.
The last component is what I think of as the grace period. If you buy SpamSieve 2 today, it doesn’t seem fair to charge you the full upgrade price next week. I want everyone to be able to use what they bought (on the latest macOS version) for a good while. Everyone should get some updates for free. If a new major version comes out during the grace period, you get that for free, too. With a hardware product like a new iPhone, you might ask for a refund and send it back if the iPhone 15 comes out right after you purchased the iPhone 14. With software, we can just upgrade the “phone” that you already have.
You could look at this as some people getting two for the price of one, but it doesn’t penalize longtime customers because they are still getting the best deal over the long term of multiple years and upgrade cycles. Really, the goal is to avoid two potential bad situations. First, the customer doesn’t want to buy something and have it stop working soon afterwards due to macOS changes that they can’t really forego. Second, I don’t want people to hold off on buying the current version of SpamSieve because they’re worried about paying again for a new version that they think is just around the corner.
You explained things well, Michael. I have only been using SpamSieve for two or three years, but it has performed so well that even I–a subscription hater–would gladly subscribe if necessary. So $20 to get a new and improved version that will work with the latest OS is an easy purchase. But I prefer thinking of it as a way for me to help keep you in business happily providing free support, unpaid minor upgrades and developing other great solutions to some of the problems that no other developers seem to care about.
Bravo, sir!
That sounds reasonable. I’ve been using SS for probably about 12 years. It works.
I am fairly new to SpamSieve and will be happy to pay for the update if I am outside the new purchaser window. I am using the beta and I can see a lot of work has been going into the Sonoma Version.
I have bothered Michael Tsai, the developer, more times over the years than I would like to admit. Always stupid questions I could probably have figured out on my own. However, he always responds quickly and has always been nothing less than kind and helpful.
By far, SpamSieve is the most essential piece of software I use on a daily basis. It literally keeps my email spam-free and gives me complete control of training any mail that comes into my inbox.
In addition, I see more updates to this software than any other I use. It’s constantly being updated and refined. I believe I paid $30 for it well over a decade ago and I have never been asked to pony up anything further. I will be happy to pay $20 at this point.
And, THANK YOU, from the bottom of my heart for not going subscription. I have dropped so much software I used to supposedly “own” because the developer decided to be greedy and charge its customers a monthly rental fee to use the app. I am disgusted with the practice and I am so thankful it is not being done here.
So, today for the first time, I saw that my licensed copy of Spamsieve 2.xx came up in demo mode asking for me to upgrade.
So, I purchased an upgrade license for $19.95. At first it did not apply to the version 2, but after installing the Beta 3 version over it, I was able to input the new license information.
Nothing has changed for SpamSieve 2.x. Licenses purchased for that version are still valid for that version and will remain so forever.
SpamSieve 3 will be released later this week (since Sonoma is coming next week). Upgrade licenses and the store are now enabled in the beta builds.
I have just upgraded SpamSieve and bought a new license as soon as the pop-up proposing me to upgrade appeared.
It was obvious for me to thank you for the great work you have done to upgrade SpamSieve to Sonoma.
I just purchased a new license thinking that I could register 3.0b12 but the license was actually for v2. How can I change this to a v3 license without repurchasing or paying the upgrade fee?
You can enter the version 2 serial number on the upgrade page, and it will give you the free upgrade.