Evolution of our products and pricing

Firstly, our move to subscription had some of you asking why?! We’ve explained the rationale in the follow-up blog post by Joachim - Subscription! Why?. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out.

Secondly, some of you raised major concerns with the new pricing:

• Some of you have been customers for a long time and have made use of upgrade discounts to your perpetual licenses. Those averaged to a yearly cost that was lower than the new subscription costs.
• If you develop for desktop only, the new all-platform cost is significantly higher than your old yearly cost.

For those of you hit hard by this, we think we've found a good solution.

Now, we don't want to go back to the old model of having iOS and Android be paid add-ons, while desktop is included in the base cost. This was always rather arbitrary. Developing and maintaining our desktop platforms is a real cost for us, just like for our mobile platforms, and yet mobile developers have been paying more. Now we're committed to making the price the same regardless of which platforms you target. We hope you understand and are with us in this decision.

At the same time, a lot of customers are telling us that the new prices are a very good deal. Some have the privilege to even say it's too cheap, though these people, being happy with the new prices, have not been as vocal in comments and social media.

The objective for us is to make everyone as happy as is possible given a rapidly growing global group of developers using Unity for many, many different things. We want paid versions of Unity to be affordable for developers big and small who want to go beyond Unity Personal, or are required to due to the revenue cap.

So with this goal in mind we are going to make these changes to what we announced previously:

• We're making the Unity splash screen in Unity Plus optional, like it is in Unity Pro.
• We're raising the revenue cap in Unity Plus from $100k to $200k so that more of you are able to take advantage of it.

In order to be able to do this, we removed the option to subscribe to Unity Plus without a one-year commitment. We also restricted Pay to Own to only apply to Unity Pro and not Unity Plus (see Pay to Own details further down). We let these things go from Unity Plus in order to be able to introduce the new advantages.

We know this is not going to change things for all of you. If your revenue is beyond the $200k cap for Unity Plus, and you are already a Unity user, we're announcing Transition offers below. We hope though that these changes will make Unity a great choice to those of you who might otherwise have had difficulties affording it.

Apart from price changes, we’re also working on some changes to the Unity splash screen.

The new splash screen will read “Made with Unity” in all editions of Unity - no more mention of “Personal Edition”. You will also be able to customize it with your own (blurred) background image and your own company logo in addition to the Unity logo. This feature is coming, but give us a bit of time to perfect the technical aspects of it before we release it. The customizable splash screen will be available in all versions of Unity, but can be completely turned off in Unity Plus and Unity Pro. We’ll have a blog post with further details later.

• Free
• $100k revenue or funding cap
• All platforms
• Unity splash screen (with customization options)
• Personal tier services

• Pay $35 per month with 12 month commitment
• $200k revenue or funding cap
• All platforms
• Optional Unity splash screen (with customization options)
• Dark Editor Skin
• Plus tier services

• Pay $125 per month with 12 month commitment
• No revenue cap
• All platforms
• Optional Unity splash screen (with customization options)
• Dark Editor Skin
• Pro tier services
• Pay to Own

Both Plus and Pro tiers can be paid monthly or upfront (for people who find that easier for budgeting or billing purposes), and require you to commit to at least 12 months of subscription. There will also be an option to commit to Pro for 24 months, for people who want long term price certainty.

We will launch the new products soon, for new customers to buy. As an existing Unity 5.x perpetual license customer, you will no longer get new updates after March 2017. However, you have a few options if you want to keep getting updates:

1. For up to five seats, you may subscribe to Unity Pro at the special price of $75 per month for a limited transition period, after which the price will revert to the normal subscription price of $125 per month:
   • If Unity 5 Pro is your first version of Unity, your transition period is one year.
   • If you owned Unity 4 Pro, your transition period is two years.
2. If you make less than $200k per year, you may choose Unity Plus and pay $35 per month with an annual commitment.

We will start sending out these transition offers by email after the new products have launched in our store.

If you pay for 24 or more consecutive months of a new Unity Pro subscription, you get to keep and use the version you have when you notify us that you are stopping subscription and choosing pay to own. At such point, you will stop receiving access to Pro tier services, new features and upgrades. You will receive the next 3 patches. We reserve the right to grant access to additional patches in the event that we find severe bugs. If you later resume the subscription, you will still own the perpetual license you elected but again start receiving updates, fixes and services. Once you have subscribed for another 24 consecutive months, and should you then elect to cease this new subscription, you will then be granted a new perpetual license of the then current version of Unity.

Thanks for taking the time to read all the detail. Please let us know your thoughts.

Read the updated Unity Subscription FAQ.

Talk to us about the new licensing on the forum.