I fully agree with Jaap. I am in the same situation, free upgrades were part of the buying decision for what were essentially beta products which did not yet deliver what they promised.
Correct, I agree. But that "free upgrades for life" did come at a cost. Their needed to innovate in order to attract new customers was a great thing, but it also meant that new products were essentially beta/early release products, and could stay that way for quite a while because releasing new products became more important that solving issues with the existing ones. And they recognized that themselves and wanted to improve.
I think that they should change their policy for new customers and bite the bullet on the existing ones. Deliver what you've promised Topaz.
I agree with that since we early adopters allowed them to reach the scale of operation they now have. And they also had access to a large pool of beta testers, some really beta testers of unreleased products or features, others as customers on a wide range of platforms with software issues that remained to be resolved. I do not know how/if the Beta testing community will change its participation, knowing that they will 'have' to ultimately pay for their own service and be able to benefit from a new stable product.
I do appreciate the somewhat less aggressive Upgrade policy, where one can postpone upgrading until the new features become relevant enough to spend some more money, and then be fully eligible for a year of upgrades. That's the same model that e.g. Qimage started using after more than a decade of free Upgrades and frequent Updates, but it also assumes that Updates are timely and that they actually fix stuff. Taking the pressure off of creating new, but instead improving quality should allow that to happen. Wait until its worth Up
grading, which still makes it worthwhile for TopazLabs to keep innovating and create added value in an Upgrade, quite unlike a regular monthly/annual subscription model, e.g. as with Lightroom.
I'm not thrilled by the change because it breaks a promise, but I do understand its necessity. The Quantity (to attract new paying customers) over Quality (of bugfree functional tools) practice was starting to hurt them more than it benefitted the users. Something had to change. Hopefully, they will fine-tune the transition a bit more for existing users. The method they have chosen still gives an incentive to them to keep innovating, otherwise people won't Upgrade each time.