Please !
Please bring back FluentCRM LTD
There’s a huge and committed team behind FCRM - and that requires sustainable funding.
I’d love an LTD too, sure.
But let’s be real: when LTD offers go unchecked, they can literally kill a business. They kill support, they kill updates… because you simply can’t fund a dedicated team with a one-time burst of sales.
That’s why I’m actually grateful that, as has been mentioned many times, FCRM will never bring back an LTD. 😅
And that’s exactly why we get to keep seeing it grow and innovate!
Jorge de los Reyes I got the LTD and purchased five licenses. I sort of wish now that I'd purchased more, but I'm quite pleased with FCRM for the sites where I have it.
I think it was my second LTD purchase. I got an unlimited LTD for Fluent Forms, which was an outstanding deal for such a great product. I just didn't have the vision at the time to purchase more than five licenses for FCRM. Yet I'm still alive, so it worked out.
William Beem lucky you William! 👏
In our case, we meet FCRM years later of the LTD.
Do you remember when was that? I really can’t tell.
Same for Fluent Support. We missed that one.
But haven’t missed one since 😄 (forms, booking, boards, community…).
October 13, 2020 according to my dashboard.
William Beem Noted! I’ll use it once I crack time travel 🤓
Thank you for sharing: almost there, our times of discovering FCRM!
Jorge de los Reyes Time travel is easy. The problem is spacetime. Everything moves, so you cold time travel to the same space and find out the Earth is somewhere else. Details.
I disagree with the idea that this is a business model problem - LTD vs software rental model. It's a budgeting and math problem, and a total cost of ownership / break even problem. If fluent wants $10 a month for something, and I offered them $1000 for a LTD, which one is better for them? I come from the school of thought that EVERYTHING is for sale, we just need to negotiate the price. It is absolutely incorrect that a company should only rent software, and not sell LTD, because it removes the incentive to keep developing the product. It increases the incentive! If you want to keep selling your software, you will have to keep developing better versions. For those who disagree with my humble opinion, then why do companies like WP Ninja sell LTD's for a period of time and then flip the model? The core of the question in my mind is why have 2 different models for each product in the first place? If LTD's are bad, then don't offer them. Either they want a huge influx of cash when launching a product or not. There are enough people like me that would rather give them so much money for the LTD, that it would be very unlikely that they would ever get that much money from me over time if they only rented the software. It's just a break even equation. Some people, like me will spend a bunch of money on stuff, and never use it, so all WP Ninja has to do is look at their sales records and see how long the average customer continues to do the yearly rental? Certainly not everyone, right?
Just give me an LTD deal that there's no chance you would likely get that much money in the future. All LTD means to me is you are guaranteeing the price up front. As the customer, if you have a good reputation of not putting out a bunch of half baked ideas, that don't solve my problems, then I will give you a bunch of money, all up front.
Jeff thank you for sharing Jeff. It’s always insightful to debate this kind of things.
From my point of view, this isn’t a break-even game, it’s survival.
A SaaS or software company (like many others, like service companies) doesn’t scale on one-time cash spikes, it scales on predictable, compounding subscriptions / revenue that fund support, updates, and growth.
An LTD is a short-term payday. Recurring revenue is oxygen.
The real incentive isn’t selling more LTDs -it’s earning the swipe every month / year / period, because you’re still solving the problem.
History already proved it:
- Adobe once sold Photoshop for $700 one-time. Switched to Creative Cloud subscriptions. Now worth $200B+.
- Microsoft Office boxed product for decades. Office 365 subscriptions doubled lifetime value.
- Atlassian killed perpetual licenses in 2021, went all-in on subscription. Stock soared to $50B+.
And the graveyard…
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CorelDRAW / WinZip stuck in one-time. Faded into irrelevance.
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Countless WordPress plugin shops , launched LTDs, cashed quick, then starved. Products abandoned, customers burned.
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Or last but not least, look at AppSumo: endless LTD launches, quick cash, then silence.
Most of those “companies” don’t even make it 2–3 years.
Because one-time money doesn’t fund ongoing development, it funds the founder’s exit.
Pattern is obvious:
One-time sales = decay.
Recurring = survival and compounding.
That’s how you build something that lasts.
But of course, not everybody pursues that.