Why isn't QLab version 1 free anymore?

Good question. To understand the answer, we need to back up and look at the history of how QLab came to be.

When Figure 53 started, it was just one guy (Chris) working on QLab in his spare time. He released a free version, and frankly wasn't even sure people would want to use that. Happily, they did, and they even wanted to support QLab's continued development by purchasing licenses for additional features. Chris, still working at his day job, decided to test the waters and create a system of inexpensive paid upgrades.

The result: It worked great! Suddenly all sorts of folks were buying QLab licenses. Suddenly there was a chance Chris might be able to work on QLab full time. Awesome! But also: scary. Because QLab is for a niche market, and the most popular license (the audio upgrade) was priced at 49 dollars. That wasn't sufficient to support a company over the long term.

But the cash infusion from that first foray into paid upgrades did give Chris a chance to consider committing to QLab full time. So on April 4th 2008 he took a risk, quit his day job, and focused his entire attention on creating QLab 2.

Now, the free version of QLab 1 had supported 8 channels of audio output. That was too much. If you can do 8 channels of output, you've already invested several hundred dollars in audio hardware, and it seems fair to ask you to support the software development too. As such, in QLab 2, the free version was changed to support 2 channels of audio output.

And therein lay the dilemma: When QLab 2 was finally released on January 30, 2009, it was necessary to discontinue the free edition of QLab 1. With a full 8 channels of audio output, it had become serious competition to the paid upgrade for QLab 2. Barring some significant development time on old code, there wasn't a good way to fix that. So when QLab 2 was released, the free version of QLab 1 was discontinued.

It stinks that we can't give away a freebie for OS 10.4 anymore, but at the end of the day we felt that was our only good option.

And hey, there's a significant upside: the adjustment to the pricing structure did give us a foundation on which to build a real company. And we're still committed to making our future work available in some kind of free or cheap form to those who could not otherwise afford it. Discontinuing the free version of QLab 1 wasn't an attempt to milk you for money. We still want to provide you strong free tools. Basically, we want to help you out so that at some point when you do have the cash, you can help us out too.

We hope this helps clarify why the old version of QLab is no longer free. If you have any questions or concerns please let us know at support@figure53.com.