Scaffolding License Expired -> Plugin No Longer Working

[M.S.]

We are using the very popular Scaffolding plugin, like many others. I was not very happy to see it going from free to paid some time ago, but I can understand that the company needs to earn money somehow.

I did purchase the license. It merely said "Scaffolding Plugin" on the invoice.

After 12 months, I received an email, telling me that the license would expire:

This is a reminder that your production license for CustomWare Scaffolding Plugin for Confluence from ServiceRocket is due to expire in 6 days. ... Once the license has expired, you will no longer be able to use the product, you will need to renew this license if you wish to continue using it after the expiry date.

And then it actually did stop working. This is different from any other paid plugin or confluence itself. They would charge you for maintenance, so once this expires, you no longer have access to updates, but you can still use your current product.

So it seems I am forced to pay them again - yearly - in order to keep my plugin working. What am I paying for???

I am not happy with this. Do others have the same issue or is it just me being upset about this licensing policy?

[M.S. · Accepted solution]

I like the licensing that Atlassian offers. I don't like the Scaffolding / ServiceRocket license model, but I can see that this is outside of Atlassians responsibility. We ended up paying for Scaffolding again.

[Rodrigo Girardi Adami]

Hi there,

I believe there are other plugins which ceases functioning when the license expires. Atlassian does not do that with the applications such as confluence and jira. You are free to use the application as much as you want, even with the license expired. However you won't receive support and won't be able to upgrade the instance.

For the Scaffolding plugin, as a third party, they might have a different vision. For this, I would recommend to reach them to double check if this is the common behavior.

Regards,

Rodrigo