Unraid Increases Upgrade Prices for Old Licenses

[TsukinoYuuki]

Summary

Unraid is increasing the license upgrade prices for their grandfathered users (owners of Unraid licenses before the recent pricing restructuring). Changes will apply on June 2nd, 2025.
The changes:

- Basic to Plus upgrades will cost an additional $30.

- Basic to Pro & Plus to Pro upgrades will cost an additional $40.

(NOTE: Basic, Plus, and Pro are the old license tiers with lifetime updates. This does not affect users with licenses purchased after the pricing restructuring)

 

Quotes

Quote

"Hello there,

We’re reaching out to let you know that the price to upgrade your Basic or Plus license will be increasing on June 2nd, 2025 (in 2 weeks).

 

Basic  Plus will increase by $30.

Basic  Pro & Plus  Pro will increase by $40.

 

Don’t worry—you’ll still save over $50 compared to buying our comparable Lifetime license at full price, while Unraid Plus remains an accessible intermediate option with support for up to 12 devices."

 

My thoughts

It's a shame seeing Unraid constantly increase prices, not only for new users but also the ones that have been with the company for years. I understand that software development costs money and they have to get it from somewhere. However, I feel like part of the agreement at purchase was being able to upgrade the license later, as needs change, at the price listed so this does not feel good. This isn't the first time they increased upgrade prices either so it feels extra bad. They increased the cost by $20 for all upgrade tiers when they implemented the new pricing structure last year (Source 3 and 4 include a snapshot of their website showing this change). 

 

I do not mean to downplay Unraid's software support and feature updates, however. They've added a lot of new valuable features that I personally use, such as the native Tailscale integration and the integrated VPN manager. 

I personally will look to TrueNAS for future builds, especially now that ZFS Expansion is a feature.

 

Sources

1. Email I received personally as a license owner.

2. https://old.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/1kqj84z/wait_what/

3. https://web.archive.org/web/20240130002421/https://unraid.net/pricing

4. https://web.archive.org/web/20240601220354/https://unraid.net/pricing

[manikyath]

it feels odd to me that unraid is raising prices in the face of a direct competitor appearing on the market, and the free alternatives being very good as well... but there is one thing about unraid that's kept me on unraid;

 

it's the only 'linux' machine in my entire setup where i am pretty darn sure when i press the update button, that it'll just update and otherwise keep working.

---

 

in other news.. i guess i'll just stick to 12 drives in my array then

[porina]

Unless inflation goes away, is it really a surprise for pricing to go up?

 

I didn't even know we could still upgrade legacy licenses to higher legacy licenses. I have two of Plus, and realistically don't see myself ever going past 12 drives per NAS. If I do, the cost of the license will be insignificant compared to the drives anyway. I should move to higher density disks over more disks.

 

Having tried TrueNAS, at least for my use cases I'll be sticking to Unraid. Expanding ZFS is still full of limitations and restrictions. Best left to those who can set up something up front and not add to it gradually over time.

[StDragon]

On 5/19/2025 at 3:59 PM, manikyath said:

it feels odd to me that unraid is raising prices in the face of a direct competitor appearing on the market...

On 5/19/2025 at 4:57 PM, porina said:

Unless inflation goes away, is it really a surprise for pricing to go up?

If profit is the motivation, you achive that either through volume or margin when selling products and services. But even non-profit organziations too have to raise their prices just to cover expenses due to increases in cost of living. If they don't, they can't keep the lights on in the building and/or their employees will seek employment elsewhere.
 

[Mihle]

Worth noting that they did hire more people when they changed the pricing model last year or whenever it was.

 

Dont know how many, but at least two.