After two years from the first iSynCal release, this is the first upgrade fee I am requiring: look at the iSynCal version history and check how many (and which) new features and improvements there are in v4.6 when compared with the first release, and all this has been free for the customers from April 2003 to April 2005.
Most shareware developers require an upgrade fee after some period of time, it's a basic rule of the shareware software industry: you pay a low price to buy a shareware app's license, then a periodic upgrade fee helps the developer keep on working to improve and maintain the application.
It's also true that some software houses don't require upgrade fees for their products, but in most of such cases the price you pay to buy the license is higher. I don't find this method correct, because you may buy a license for an application because you need it now, but how can you be sure that you will need it after some time? I think it's better to pay a lowest initial price and then, if you continue to use that application and you need the new versions, you periodically pay some small upgrade fees.
When I started developing iSynCal I was new to the shareware software, so I thought it would be nice to "never require an upgrade fee" ... my mistake, I should not have done it, because I have then spent at least two hours a day working on iSynCal to add new features (mostly based upon users' requests), fix any bug eventually found and give full and quick support to my customers.
Most recently, I spent many weeks coding and testing to make iSynCal compatible with iCal 2 and Tiger: it may appear easy to the end users, but the changes made by Apple to the file format of the iCal calendars made this more hard for me than most of the new features I have added during time, and I have put my efforts in making it totally transparent, allowing you to seamlessly sync a iCal 1.5 calendar with a iCal 2 one, at the cost of much more work for me.
I know that some customers are disappointed by my retreat of the initial statement
that the iSynCal upgrades would "always be free" and I apologize for this,
but after all I don't feel like I am asking an high price for my work.
Fabrizio La Rosa
iSynCal Developer