Cascable Blog: Cascable 3.0 Pricing Changes and Upgrade Policy

We’ve been hard at work since late last year on our next major update to Cascable, and it’s nearly time for it to see the light of day! All going well, Cascable 3.0 will be released on August 8th, 2017 — just a week from now!

We got impatient and opened some of our Christmas presets early. Looks like we have some work to do! 😮 #fujifilm #panasonic pic.twitter.com/JI6nNponBa
— Cascable (@CascableApp) 23 December 2016

The reason we’re writing this early blog post is to discuss our pricing changes and the reasoning behind them, and to make sure that existing paid users know what’ll happen when they upgrade to Cascable 3.0.

Feature Packs Are No More!

In short, we’re discontinuing the ability to purchase individual feature packs. From 3.0 onwards, you’ll either be using a free, limited version of Cascable or a fully unlocked one (unless you previously bought one or two feature packs from Cascable 2.x and choose not to purchase the discounted upgrade — more on that below).

The main reasoning for this is complexity. In Cascable 2.x, we have four things to buy — Pro: Remote Control, Pro: Photo Management, Night Mode, and a “Full Unlock” bundle that contains them all in one purchase. That’s already a lot, and Cascable 3.x would bring that up to five separate purchases with the addition of geotagging!

Another drawback of our old model is that in order to justify a big release that adds feature packs, we need to spend a long time making a really big release. We started work on Cascable 3.0 over seven months ago — that’s a long time with no feature updates for Cascable 2.x!

With our new model, we’re moving to smaller but much more frequent feature updates — aiming for a new feature release at least once every two months, but hopefully a bit more frequently when we can.

Sounds Great! How Much?

Starting with Cascable 3.0, purchasing Cascable Pro will cost $29.99 or your local equivalent.

That’s Too Much!

We understand that a big draw of our feature packs was that they provided a lower barrier to entry for some of our Pro features. If you’d like to try out Cascable Pro without paying the full cost of admission right away, we’ve added two subscription options:

$2.99 per month with a three day free trial.
$5.99 per quarter (equivalent to \~$2.00 per month) with a one week free trial.

These subscriptions offer several benefits:

The free trials allow you to try Cascable’s Pro features with absolutely no financial risk. As long as you cancel your subscription before you’re charged at the end of the trial period, you won’t pay a penny. You could even use the trial to try Cascable Pro then buy the one-off $29.99 Pro upgrade if you prefer that to a continuing subscription.
The cost of entry is much lower — you can pay just $2.99 to get the whole suite of Cascable Pro features for a month.
Since there’s no binding time, they allow you to dip in and out of Cascable Pro when you need it. Of course, we hope you like Cascable Pro enough to stay subscribed, but if you only need Cascable’s Pro features on your annual astrophotography hike you can subscribe for the month you’re away.
As long as you’re subscribed, you’ll get all new Cascable Pro features as soon as they’re released.

Great question! We have a long list of planned feature updates stretching well into the future. You can also check out our version history page to get a feel for how we release feature updates.

If I Purchase The $29.99 Cascable Pro Upgrade, How Long Do I Get Feature Updates For?

Also a great question. If you read our upgrade policy below, you’ll see that we’re still offering free upgrades for users that purchased Cascable 1.x back in 2015.

Unfortunately, we might not be able to continue this forever — we do need to keep roofs over our heads! We don’t have any plans yet, but we will certainly guarantee that we won’t charge for updates for at least 18 months after the release of Cascable 3.0 in August 2017, making the $29.99 Pro purchase the most value for money out of all of the purchasing options.

What’s Your Upgrade Policy For Existing Paid Users?

If you’ve already paid for Cascable 1.x or any feature packs in 2.x, you won’t lose anything that you paid for. Your upgrade path into Cascable 3.x depends on what you bought:

I purchased Cascable 1.x, the Full Unlock in 2.x, or all three feature packs in 2.x

You get a completely free upgrade to Cascable 3.x, including all its new Pro features! 👍

I purchased one or two feature packs in Cascable 2.x

Your existing feature packs will continue to unlock the Pro features that you paid for. If you’d like to unlock the remaining Pro features, including the new ones in Cascable 3.x, you’ll be able to purchase a one-time discounted upgrade to get everything in the newest version.

Keep In Touch!

You can keep in touch in a number of ways:

We’ll be posting handy tips and tricks on this blog, and you can subscribe to our RSS feed here.

You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for byte-sized looks into life at Cascable.

You can subscribe to our email newsletter. It’s very low-volume, and we’ll use it to send you the occasional email about Cascable updates and new features.