- Unraid is switching to annual subscription pricing, offering Starter, Unleashed, and Lifetime licenses with optional extension fees for updates.
- Existing Basic, Plus, and Pro licenses can be upgraded to higher levels of perpetual licenses.
- This change may increase revenue for Lime Technology but could also make other NAS providers more appealing to users.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/YCFoR
I’m sure there are reasons for using Unraid but the original funky raid alternative they marketed has always struck me as extremely fishy. The kind of solution developed by folks who didn’t know enough about the best practices in storage and decided to roll their own. I guess people like web interfaces too. Personally I’d never use it. Get Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS, learn some Docker, Ansible and Prometheus, deploy and never touch until you break it or the hardware breaks. Throw Webmin on it if you like dancing bears too.
The draw to me was always that you could do a RAID without needing every disk to be the same size. Parity drives just had to be the size of the largest disk in the array.
I had been thinking about buying a license previously, when it was still “lifetime.” Now I’m skeptical and probably won’t although good for the people who got grandfathered in to free updates, though. However, I would question how long that lasts before they’re un-grandfathered-in and have to start paying for updates like everyone else.
“Now announcing UnRAID 2, UnRAID original will no longer receive updates as we focus our resources on UnRAID 2.”
And “UnRAID 2” will only have a subscription model, and people will the OG lifetime license won’t be grandfathered into the new license.
Like Adobe and Photoshop.
I’d say it’ll happen before 2030.
But I may just be cynical at this point.
Not a terrible monetization strategy but I personally don’t want proprietary software
By the way, you can still buy the old licenses, which will be grandfathered in, and they will keep the old license upgrade paths too (Basic -> Plus -> Pro), so now may be a good time to grab a Basic license if you think you might want a lifetime Basic, Plus or Pro license in the future.
