Xeater and stoneman have expressed the feeling that charging an upgrade fee for File Buddy 8 to people who purchased File Buddy 7 4-6 months ago is unreasonable, and they are entitled to their opinions, but their feelings are not consistent with industry practice. I use Metrowerks's CodeWarrior for my development environment, and this is Metrowerks' upgrade policy:
- CW upgrades are $199-299 depending on the option you choose.
- Free upgrades are only available to people who bought the previous version within 30 days of the new version's release.
- There is no public beta.
- The average life of a version of CW < one year.
- Upgrading is only an option if you purchased the previous version. If you did not, it's full price.

Or perhaps we should look at Apple's policies on free upgrades to it's products, including Mac OS X. How many of us got a free upgrade to Mac OS X 10.3 because we'd only had 10.2 for four months? None of us, that's how many. And Apple doesn't even offer upgrade pricing for Mac OS X.

The fact of the matter is that most companies don't offer free upgrades to customers that far back. Is it to make more money? Of course it is. It's no secret that companies are in business to make money. It's okay for Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, and other large, profitable corporations with large cash reserves to have such policies, so why is it so terrible when a smaller company, with far less revenues, adopts the same policies? I can assure you that Bill Gates has no worries that anyone at SkyTag Software is going to threaten his position as the world's richest man from File Buddy upgrade fees.

File Buddy 8 required several months of work from the primary engineer, a few months work from a secondary engineer, and several weeks from a professional writer who produces our PDF documentation. An "upgrade fee" a reduced price for a full product. It is not a way to get something for nothing. We, as do most other software companies, charge people for the time and effort we put into new products, and we don't apologize for that.