Posted By Paul Kafasis on April 15th, 2005

If you haven’t heard, Tiger is coming April 29th (Now!). We’re starting to get emails about this, so I thought I would post here. Rogue Amoeba plans to have Tiger-compatible versions of all our software in the coming weeks. We’re not certain that everything will be updated specifically for Tiger by the 29th. However, whether we make that deadline or not, all the software will be rapidly updated as needed for Tiger free of charge. If you’ve not yet purchased our software, there’s no need to wait. Bug fix updates, as these will be, are always free. Purchasing now will entitle you to any updates that are needed for Tiger, let there be no uncertainty.

On a related note, I’d like to briefly discuss upgrade fees. In the near three years of Rogue Amoeba, we’ve charged for just one upgrade, from Audio Hijack Pro 1 to Audio Hijack Pro 2. Audio Hijack Pro 2 was a major developmental effort, and we needed to recoup the time spent. As well, the improvements were quite drastic, so we felt there was definite value there. Upon the release, we polled our users for their reactions and they were nearly unanimous in supporting our decision.

We take this sort of decision seriously and upgrade fees are not a primary method of revenue generation for us. We don’t have a policy laid out on upgrades, because we evaluate it on a case by case basis. If someone can think of a way to phrase all this into a coherent policy, feel free to let us know. Meanwhile, I’m hopeful that our track record will speak for itself and that customers will trust us. My desire is always to release even major updates for free, and thus far we’ve been able to do that in all but one case. While we don’t have a policy, I will state flat out that we would never charge for bug fix updates, such as those that might be needed for Tiger compatibility. That’s not fair or right, and it’s not something for which we’d want one thin dime.

There’s a much longer discussion to be had regarding updates, upgrades, and deprecated versions, but that’s all for now.