ZorinOS 15 pricing and soem possibility of upgrade pricing

Hi all,

as a person who is using ZorinOS from version 7 I am confused with pricing of Ultimate version. It is doubled comparing to last version!

Is there some possibility to have special price for upgraders?

The effect of this is that I am thinking about switch to Core instead of Ultimate version. In past I treated the payment as support for development but this price is too much for me.

Are there any plans to somehow bring advantage for long term supporters? Otherwise from my side you will not get any money when I can not feel I can get something for the money. Even the page describing the differences between versions is using some vague term "The best business & media apps" and "Premium desktop layouts"...

My feeling right now is that people behind ZorinOS have chosen business...

An interesting point. I will PM Zorin team and put it to them.

I have PM'd Team Zorin - I await their response.

@svatas Thanks for your post and for your contributions to Zorin OS, they help us enormously to keep the project running for the benefit of all! I have just sent you a PM about this.

As a small team working full-time on Zorin OS, we could keep the project going and progressing over the past decade primarily because we've been able to pay the bills with the sales of the Ultimate edition. However, if you've been following the development of Zorin OS 15, you probably noticed that it has taken much longer than expected to get the release developed and this is due to the limited manpower we have for programming, documentation and support, amongst other administrative tasks behind the scenes.
The long-term goal would be to be able to hire more full-time developers to not only improve Zorin OS faster, but also contribute to upstream projects such as the kernel, Gnome, XFCE et al. We think this would accelerate progress towards our goal of making Linux accessible to as many people as possible in the general public.
In order to raise the funds to go on this path, we didn't want to make the compromises that other companies have done such as advertising or selling user data. We're aware that not everyone is able to pay money for Zorin OS – which is why we've made the Core, Lite and Education editions free – but having a sustainable way to fund the project can mean the difference between it thriving and it abruptly ending, like what recently happened to Antergos. Our plan over the next year will be to develop tools and services for business & government users of Zorin OS and generate revenue from them. This will hopefully allow us to avoid price increases to Zorin OS Ultimate in the future while still allowing us to achieve our goal and improving Zorin OS for everyone, but it will still require more resources than we have now to get there.

In addition, when we previously launched both Zorin OS 12 Ultimate and Lite Ultimate, there were many customers who were confused about the 2 editions and that they were purchased separately (2 X €19). With the new version, we've included both the full Ultimate and Ultimate Lite editions (which will be available later this summer) in the same bundle, so anyone who purchases Ultimate for their main computer would be able to use the Ultimate Lite edition on an old PC they might have. We've combined the 2 editions so you'd be getting both this time around.

Once again, thank you for your contributions, they really mean a lot!

There is also another point to make also. When you invest in Zorin 15 it is based on Ubuntu 18.04 which is supported up to April 2027 and offers a far better experience than Windows 10. Thanks Artyom for your striving for excellence to help users migrate to GNU/Linux.