Announcement: Fork Licensing

[DanPristupov]

Hi guys!

Some people might already noticed that in the recent versions of Fork there's a way to buy a license (About -> Fork Activation).

So, after 4 years of being free Fork is going to be paid. The price will be quite affordable and it will be a one-time purchase.

$49.99

• It is a one-time purchase (not a subscription☝️)
• The license includes both personal and commercial use
• 1 user / up to 3 machines (should be enough, I think)

The rest will remain the same. We will continue releasing new versions once or twice a month. There's still a lot of things in our todo list.

P.S. A corresponding topic in the Mac issue tracker: fork-dev/Tracker#562

[decadence]

As I understand there is no visible differences between free and paid version for now and this is just a way to support your family as a Fork developers?

1 user / up to 3 machines (should be enough, I think)

What if I change 3 machines throughout lifetime (or reinstall Windows), can license be extended or something?

Anyway thanks for your work and great Git client! Just bought a license.
Keep it up!
Earlier I have used SourceTree but now I can forget it like a nightmare.

[DanPristupov]

As I understand there is no visible differences between free and paid version for now and this is just a way to support your family as a Fork developers?

Yes, exactly.

What if I change 3 machines throughout lifetime (or reinstall Windows), can license be extended or something?

You can deactivate the license. Or you can always contact me and I'll help.

[decadence]

You can deactivate the license. Or you can always contact me and I'll help.

Thanks. This means I can use Fork on 3 machines at the same time and be able to deactivate license and activate it on another PC?

[DanPristupov]

@decadence yes, that's right.

[JulienMaille]

Will you keep a free version? Will the already released free version continue to work?

[DanPristupov]

Most likely we will not have a free version because we don't a time to support it. I'm not sure if the existing versions will work.

[kvnhck]

@DanPristupov How long will the earlybird coupon code be available?

[DanPristupov]

It's called 'early'... not so long then :). A week or a few may be.

[nstubbe]

When clicking on the buy button the price goes from 49.99 to 60.49, is this intended?

[DanPristupov]

@nstubbe our price is $49.99, but the VAT of your country may apply (depends on the country). For example in Germany VAT is 19%. Here in Czech we have 21%. For US there's no tax.

[nstubbe]

@DanPristupov
Thanks for clarifying, we're not used to seeing 'VAT-less' prices where I'm from, and just wanted to make sure :)

[skyline75489]

@DanPristupov HI Dan, I purchased Fork on fork.dev yesterday but I don't know where to find my activition key. Is it going to be an email sent to me? I have on clue.

[DanPristupov]

@skyline75489 I see that you made a typo in your email. I will forward the key to the correct one manually.

[skyline75489]

@DanPristupov Thanks! I got the Paypal receipt and I thought it was good. Thanks for sharing fork with us 😄

[marsu-dev]

@DanPristupov Thanks your amazing work here!
Hope that my next contribution will be a PR 😇

[ecca]

@DanPristupov Thank you for a great and smooth git client and awesome for us earlybirds.

[yasinkavakli]

Activated. It was a no-brainer! Thank you for all your work over the last years!

And the 3 licenses is just perfect for me at the moment.

• macOS: using private at home
• Windows: using on my work-notebook
• Windows Server: the project where I am at at the moment (gov) only allows to develop on their dev-vms so I need/use git-fork there too.

The 3 activations are cross-platform, right?

Edit: could we pin this issue please?

[xmedeko]

I would expect the pricing (and licence) on the main fork site https://fork.dev/ top menu.

[DanPristupov]

@coupz yes, the license is cross-platform

@xmedeko yes, sure. Now we are testing that everything works properly.

[empty-k]

I would expect the pricing (and licence) on the main fork site https://fork.dev/ top menu.

As would I, along with changing the text below the download buttons, which still indicate this is free software.

When is this change scheduled to occur?

[MisterJD]

Absolutely a no-brainer! Keep up your great work!

[gscottanderson]

Sorry but my policy is whenever free software suddenly becomes not free, then I drop it immediately. I just uninstalled Fork. Simply put, I just don't agree with doing that to people for any reason.

[marsu-dev]

Sorry but my policy is whenever free software suddenly becomes not free, then I drop it immediately. I just uninstalled Fork. Simply put, I just don't agree with doing that to people for any reason.

there's a way to buy a license
It's not mandatory, juste a way to donate to this great free app

[DanPristupov]

@michel-foucault to be more precise:

after 4 years of being free Fork is going to be paid.

Since we are here...
@gscottanderson this change is absolutely not sudden.

Simply put, I just don't agree with doing that to people for any reason.

I'm sorry for keeping Fork free for 4 years and making it paid after we both left our jobs to work on it full time.

[ProfessorX]

News from P.R. China.

I would like to give some support or even donations.

Sadly some (like 50%) of programmers in China are not well-paid. For me my salary is CNY 5,000 a month. So $50 is, a little beyond me HAHA.

Maybe you want to contact some retailers in China for a discounted price and sell it OFFICIALY on taobao (the Chinese ebay from Alibaba group).

Please check my humble opinion.

[L1cardo]

Actually, I would love to pay for Fork and $49.9 may be affordable for many developers, but it is a high price for a student, especially for a Chinese student.
$49.9 is about ￥350, which is really high.

[mjfreelancing]

Happy to have purchased my license today. Keep up the good work.

[MikeWilliams-UK]

Is there any way you could see fit to issuing a free licence to Open Souce Developers?

[DanPristupov]

You can use Fork without activation. It will not have any limitations.

[MikeWilliams-UK]

So it has therefore become NagWare!

[joerghampel]

We just bought two more licenses: One for a new colleague, and another one for an adamant Sourcetree user who we manged to convert :-)

I also asked some of our customers to buy licenses to support the further development, and they happily agreed to do so.

Keep up the good work!

[mmfb]

I'm a teacher and have looked at some clients to make it easier for my students to use Git
I cannot ask my students to buy a tool for class, and I do not make any money on the code so I do not buy them for myself either. My use of them is also very limited in quantity and time
Most tools I use are free, free for the school, or the normal packages that the schools buys (windows, word, etc).

Not happy about this change, at least it can still be used (even if it has now NagWare features like someone mentioned before).
For that I thank you, it gives me time to search and adapt, thought probably not at this time with all that as happened and that makes teaching much harder, like with many other professions.

Developers do make stuff that is not paid, Git is not paid, which Fork uses, so is GitHub

I can understand the need to increase revenue, if donations are not enough, but there are other alternatives that are used in other products:

• Payment if you have a company that makes money with it
• Payment to use advanced features

With a free version, especially for schools, students will naturally bring the tools to the places they will work in the future and evolve to the paying versions

I suppose this solution was the easiest one, I can understand that, but I hope you consider other solutions

Thank you for reading

[Reneator]

I agree with @mmfb and think that free educational licenses would make sense as a long-term investment as it would make students used to the tool so they may request to work with it in their future job/company.

[Lonli-Lokli]

I do not agree that this proposal will give some value to the creators of Fork - everyone will use those tools which are available in company or free.
That's not JetBrains case when they might support even startups.

Lets be honest, everyone can pay this amount of money if find this affordable. Many of us have subscriptions for gaming staff, for music and so on.

Personally me it's good that it's one-time purchase.
I just like that it's cross platform , very modern UI and created by developers for developers.

[geckosoft]

Those students will run into fork when they 'grow up' (...) themselves once they start looking for a quality git tool. And as long as they can actually use fork 'without paying', I have yet to see the issue here..

I used winrar forever unpaid and that too had a 'nag screen', until we needed it at work and I convinced my boss to buy it.

[azimuthdeveloper]

Did someone buy WinRar?

[JosephTLyons]

Done. Super simple decision.

[dunlavy]

Did someone buy WinRar?

I did, too. Lifetime updates. It's valuable software. I don't de-value software, both as a developer and consumer.

[christhomas]

So if I summarise everything above me correctly.

There are no differences between buying a licence and using it for free. There are no hidden features in the paid version, or special options activated when you have a licence.

Are there any plans to change this? To put features ONLY in the licenced version? I'm just asking, not criticising.

Simply put, buying a licence is just a way for me to pay you for the amazing work you've done. I can pay you more money by purchasing as many licences as I want. Even if I don't need to.

So if I wanted to, I could just pay for licences whenever I felt like putting money in your pockets for the continued good work and good will?

Did I get it right?

[tgunr]

Don't understand all the negative comments, I didn't even notice the Activate menu item till now. Nagware? Hardly!

Have been merrily using it as I assumed it was open source until I came across this repo while looking for the sources. Now that I know the guys are working on it full time will 'donate' towards the cause and hope there are enough new donors to support the development.

Personally, I wish it were open source to add some features like incorporating GIT notes into the UI. Notes are a great place to expand upon the commit documentation.

[EnCey]

First day evaluating Fork, so far exceedingly positive experience in every way.
Will test for a while, but definitely buy a license unless something nasty turns up.

50 bucks as a one-time payment is very fair, kudos you guys! Just wanted to say that.

People affronted by the price: other clients (like gitkraken or tower) charge 50+ bucks per year, so be happy there are passionate people who charge a fair price. If you feel that high-quality tools should be free, why don't you go ahead and make one yourself?
Not 100% sure but I had Fork on my radar for a while and seem to recall that they disclaimed that Fork is "free for now" and they weren't sure about pricing yet, which is why I didn't immediately try it out – so if that's true then there's no reason to complain.

As an afterthought, seems to me that offering Fork for free for educational use is a no-brainer for the Fork guys. Positive PR and no lost revenue. Especially if you have an unlimited evaluation period anyway.

[trinode]

I just decided to give fork another go - it looks like it's gained some nice features, and am happy to pay for it but I have 4 machines 😂 I'd like to run it on (my MacBook, my iMac, my windows laptop, and my windows desktop) plus ideally my company supplied MacBook so 5 really, is the limit 3 though?

[ManickaP]

So I just tried to activate it in a new machine and got "License activation failed" without any reasoning why it failed. It took me quite a while to figure out that it's due to 3 machines limit, so it would be nice to have some better error message.
Another thing is that currently I do have only 3 machines that I know of with fork installed, yet it failed on the third one. The problem is that I might have reinstalled some of them without explicitly deactivating it. Is it possible to get a list of machine for which is fork activated and prune the old, forgotten machines from it?

[DanPristupov]

@trinode @ManickaP please contact me using the feedback button on the toolbar. It's much faster to solve such problems directly.

[MikeWilliams-UK]

Please leave instructions here as I would like to see how to know how many PCs I have "used" and how to release them.

[MikeWilliams-UK]

How does Fork know which PCs you have installed it on?
Is it recording this when it "phones home"?

If so under GDPR a user has a right to request their own data, and you ought to be able to comply with this legal requirement.

[DanPristupov]

@MikeWilliams-UK

You can't see how many PC you used. To deactivate a computer go to Help -> Activation -> Deactivate.

The application sends the machine identifier and the license key to the server when you activate it. Fork doesn't "phone" anywhere after that.

[MikeWilliams-UK]

So if you have to rebuild a "broken" dev machine, you could easily trip over the limit!

Can I suggest that you implement a "Deactivate All" option, which will deactivate all activated computers?
Then "this" one can be [re-]activated.

This would be similar to what you can do in iTunes if you exceed the 5 devices limit there.
It would also save you the hassle of fielding service requests.

[ErnSur]

I support @MikeWilliams-UK suggestion about the "Deactivate All" feature.

As a sysadmin I would like to have the following features:

• Check license activation state.
• Deactivate x license on y workstation.
  And doing so without access to the workstation in question (It may be broken, be used by the developer on his home-office machine, etc.)

I would also want to know if the license is bound in any way to an e-mail address that was used to buy it or activate it in the client's activation window.

[zscao]

Having been using it for a while. Thank you for your amazing work!

[chucker]

Can I suggest that you implement a "Deactivate All" option, which will deactivate all activated computers?
Then "this" one can be [re-]activated.

This would be similar to what you can do in iTunes if you exceed the 5 devices limit there.

Note that the way iTunes does this is you can deactivate all once a year. Which I think is a perfectly fair compromise, and is IMHO what Fork should do, too.

[MartaBerman]

I have the free version already but now got a new laptop. How can I keep my existing free license, but just move it to the new laptop?

[DanPristupov]

@MartaBerman
I'm not aware of a free version, but you can enter the existing license on the other computer (Help -> Activation) and that will be it.

[sfynx]

What do I do when my machine breaks / gets stolen and I need to deactivate, is this something you can do by e-mail as long as there is no way to do it ourselves? Don't want a machine to get stuck activated forever if such a thing happens.

[DanPristupov]

@sfynx contact us. Use the feedback on the toolbar in Fork, twitter or email to [email protected].