After much consideration Plant Base licensing is changing to Donationware, meaning that registration and use is now free but with a respectful request for a donation.
Donations are entirely voluntary, there is no connection with the registration process. Any amount is welcome although the suggestion is for £20, a little less than the previous selling price of £25. Some users may choose a lower contribution, which is fine as even small amounts are helpful and appreciated. Perhaps a small donation might be repeated at a later date. Others will no doubt register for free and never make a donation, but we accept that probability.
The normal donation method is via PayPal which is well known and straightforward. Most debit and credit cards are accepted, so a PayPal account is not necessary.
Donations are needed to help fund continued development of Plant Base. In recent years most of the basic ongoing costs involved have been paid from personal resources, but that means the budget is necessarily very limited. Future progress depends on greater expenditure for newer systems. We are strictly non-profit and no longer operate as a business, so all time spent on this and other projects is given freely.
There is no change to the program versions for now. The Windows and Mac editions continue to require a registration code to run the program beyond the 20 day trial period, same as the previous purchasing arrangement. These editions remain by far the most popular.
The Linux edition is already free, with registration optional. Since the last release in February there is no trial period and it works indefinitely as unregistered. Free codes were issued for the Beta test phase of Plant Base on Linux and we decided to continue the Linux tradition of free and unrestricted software. Linux also has the lowest cost overhead since even the latest OS releases run happily on our old refurbished hardware.
The free registration code can be obtained from a simple web page that generates the code, logs it to our system and emails it back to the user. Code generation uses exactly the same method as the old purchasing system and existing users don’t need to do anything. As always, the program is fully functional with no run-time restrictions whatsoever apart from the trial period limit.
The registration page is here – Get Plant Base Registration Code which includes an optional PayPal donate button.
Direct link to PayPal donate page – https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=N2BDJ2JCZV9BL
Or for those who do transactions on their smartphone scan this QR code for the direct link:
We know continuous reminders for donations are annoying, so we don’t do that. Static donate buttons are shown on a number of web pages, the link above is included in the registration email and that is about all. There are no follow up emails, no pop-up donate requests and the application programs do not have any donation reminder nags.