I have the same problem with Phase One's free upgrade policy that a previous poster noted - C1 Pro 9 looks great, but I bought 8 (upgrade from a very old license I got from a colleague who moved to Lightroom because he didn't like the C1 interface) in the middle of October, and I don't get a free upgrade). Phase was great in letting me upgrade the old license to 8, but then had the very short free upgrade period from 8 to 9, when 9 wasn't a predicted upgrade. I don't mind short free windows if you know when the upgrades are coming, so you can avoid buying a program right before an upgrade comes out.
Adobe used to do this before CC, Photoshop always came out in June, and sales dropped off after the new year, because you'd hold on if AT ALL possible. The free upgrade window was very short - only a couple of weeks before the announcement, plus the month or so between announcement and release.
Microsoft used to follow the opposite model - Office came out at random times (although there were enough leaks that it was possible to guess), but the free upgrade window was 3-6 months, so nobody was stuck with brand-new Office that was already a version old!
C1 Pro 9 dropped completely out of the blue - there was no mention on the Luminous forum prior to the release (I just looked back), and has only a month's free upgrade period, leaving a lot of people who recently purchased (or returned to) C1 out in the cold. Many of us bought in response to Adobe's import antics in mid-October. At least I know that my story is that I'd been using Lightroom, but wasn't terribly happy with the color rendering (especially on Fuji and Sony files - Adobe gets Canon right, but the farther you go from Canon, the worse it is, and don't dare feed them X-Trans), had been experimenting with Capture One trials for years (and knew I had access to this old unused license I could buy cheap and upgrade), but had never pulled the trigger. I finally bought C1 when Adobe pulled the import downgrade, and have my library all moved over. I'm much happier with the colors, am learning the interface and getting pretty good, and don't especially like the DAM. Now, here comes C1 Pro 9 (with a major DAM upgrade), and I miss the upgrade by two weeks and a day (my install date is Oct. 14).
Making things worse, I'm an educational user (photo faculty at a university), and can't find Phase One's educational pricing anywhere (if such a thing exists), so I'm stuck buying two successive upgrades less than two months apart (the first, admittedly, a 4 version jump from an application that hadn't been used in years) at commercial pricing. Capture One is expensive enough that buying an upgrade to C1 is equivalent to buying a whole new copy of any other raw converter.
David, can you talk to your colleagues about whether there might be an option for free (or something like 50% off - I'd feel pretty good about a $49 upgrade) upgrades for those of us who bought C1 Pro relatively recently, but missed the 30 days? I think the fairest possible outcome would be to push the free upgrades back another 30 days, which would get past the Adobe import downgrade that brought in new C1 users, and then offer several months of $49 upgrades (going back to the spring?)...
Dan
