EE Point Releases Now Free

In an announcement on Friday, EllisLab revamped how they do paid upgrades for ExpressionEngine (and MojoMotor). Straight from their blog post:

When you own ExpressionEngine 2 or MojoMotor 1 you won’t pay for an upgrade until ExpressionEngine 3 or MojoMotor 2 get released. A more developer-centric way of saying this is that all “right of point” upgrades are free and all “left of point” upgrades are paid.

Got that? Point releases are free, major releases (3.0, 4.0, etc) will be paid.

This doesn’t mean that you get a pre-determined number of updates for free; EllisLab could jump from EE 2.5 to EE 3.0 if the improvements, new features and work deem it necessary. But what it does do is make it easy for everyone to know when an update will be free and when it will be paid. And, most importantly, it does away with the annual subscription thing.

Bravo. This is a great change.