1) Technically, the system is too basic for what it costs.
I disagree. We hide the complexity of LimeLM and TurboActivate. Designing a hardware-locked licensing solution is a hard thing to do correctly. We go into the details of what LimeLM does here: What is hardware-locked licensing and why choose LimeLM?
LimeLM doesn't just do licensing. It does it right. For example, we work to reduce false positives (seeing 2 different computers as the same computer) and reduce false negatives (seeing the same computer as a different computer). That in itself is a huge deal. All of our "bargain bin" competitors screw this up.
And this is to say nothing of the massive amount of work we do to make the end-user's experience with TurboActivate a painless one-click thing. This is no small feat.
We continually monitor our competitors. The only competitors of comparable quality cost an order of magnitude more than LimeLM.
Respectfully, I think you're confusing the simplicity of our interfaces with a "basic" design. (E.g. the iPad is simple, but it's not "basic").
2) Deadlines are never met, I am reading promises that next release will be here next week since last year.
A couple of things about this comment. Firstly, I wish we could implement features faster while maintaining the same, or greater, level of quality. I concede we frequently miss self-imposed deadlines for feature requests.
There are a couple of approaches to this problem. One approach is to stop making hard date of release promises and take a Valve approach and just not comment on dates (e.g. "if we even release Half Life 3, then it will be released when it's released").
Or perhaps we should temper expectations. That is, features get bumped for other features -- the requester of the feature is notified privately via email or a phone call. Feature request conversations frequently start on the forum and finish via email or phone call. So you might see "features to come" that have already been resolved via other channels. But random walk-on users who see the forum post may think a requested feature is still coming soon despite being bumped for a future release.
Critical bug fixes come out often the same day they're reported (often the same hour). Less critical bug fixes come out quickly (usually within a couple weeks of the report).
Lastly, we're not very good at updating duplicate feature-request posts. I bet more than half of the feature requests that you see as unresolved have already been added. We just haven't updated the dozens of posts to say as much.
3) When we have a large number of registrations, and many developers have, it does not make sense to pay hundreds of dollars every month to you for past registrations which do not generate developers any more income.
Our pricing is setup in such a way to segment startups from mature companies, and it's largely successful at doing that. But unfortunately we're not always successful. Ideally a Fortune 500 company shouldn't be on anything lower than the Max plan (or the self-hosted version of LimeLM) and a slowly growing (or unprofitable) one-man startup shouldn't be on anything higher than the Plus plan.
In other words by the time you need the Max "unlimited activations" plan the cost of the plan should be a negligible expense.
Also, the increases sales that come from LimeLM should far outweigh the cost of LimeLM. Are you a customer of LimeLM, or have you just been playing with the free plan? If you're a customer of LimeLM and you're not seeing increased sales, then you'd be right to be upset and we should talk (email me, or we can schedule a time to have a phone conversation).
Part of our problem is the value of LimeLM is implied, but rarely explicitly stated. That is, we assume you know everything we know. Which is a huge marketing problem that we need to fix.
Short answer: LimeLM has tremendous value for its cost.
Other providers charge only once when the activation is done, you want a life rent!
Unfortunately for customers choosing most (but not all) of the other licensing companies is that if the licensing company charges too little they end up going out of business. (The 3rd-party licensing landscape is riddled with corpses of unprofitable licensing companies). Plus, if the licensing company charges too little then the they're limited in the employees they can hire, and thus the quality suffers.
Unless you're an expert in licensing design, it's hard to tell low quality software licensing from high quality software licensing. We try to cover this here, but I think we can do a better job explaining this.
Yes, we're not the cheapest. No doubt about that. But you'll be hard pressed to find anywhere near LimeLM's quality for a comparable (or cheaper) price.
We can even develop our own system and will save many thousand of dollars in the long run.
Maybe, but you need to be realistic about how long it takes to develop properly designed licensing, how much it costs in development hours, how much it costs to test this.
I'd be shocked if you could spend less than $100,000 to develop a properly designed bare-bones hardware-locked licensing system. That's a lowball number (based on cheap outsource labor costs) and it doesn't cover continuing development costs, let alone testing costs.
That is it, i will not expand because I know you are going to delete the message.
We only delete messages from spammers and from former customers who harass and verbally abuse us (which has happened once before, unfortunately). We don't delete critical messages (you can find a few others on our forum).
If you have other criticisms then I'd like to hear them.