Hello 22459.

We completely understand your surprise.

This is our decision, not Envato's. Please let me explain.

The main reason of our decision, however, is not the wish to try to ‘rob off’ the existing or new customers, or anything like that, what some people assumed in comments.
 
Reality is that our products require a growing amount of effort to maintain. Each day we receive 80-100 support tickets, and we do our best to resolve each customer’s issues. In parallel, we are developing new products and new features for our products. So that takes a growing amount of investments to be able to keep on at this pace without sacrificing quality on any of the fronts.
 
Envato, on the other side of things made a lot of very disappointing decisions, and overall we don’t like the direction to which it is heading as a marketplace (the policy is now more corporation-style). I think they are trying to transition the customers as much as possible to using Elements. They are not doing anything to help authors with items promotion, 99% of the marketing and advertising activities are financed by us (another big cut of our revenue, to make sure the new customers keep coming). Their aggressive marketing of Elements everywhere, including the checkout, is at the same time “cannibalizing” a noticeable amount of the customers that we bring to our item page, without us even receiving a referral cut for that.
 
Add to that their fees that sum up to almost 50% of the item price for exclusive authors. And the fact that the licenses are lifetime (no more than 10% renew support). It is very hard to maintain and scale the software development in an economically viable way under these terms. As an example, some customers open up to 60 tickets during 2-3 years, typically not bug-related but just assistance requests for a custom use case, average time to resolution is 15-30 minutes per ticket, so you may understand that a 50% cut of a lifetime license cannot pay for 30 hours of  a support manager. That’s an extreme case of course, but it explains the point.
 
So Envato was actually a very expensive and not so helpful middleman at this point. When we just started it was a great place, and we are very grateful for the starting opportunity it gave us, but now the products and the business itself “overgrown” the marketplace model.
 
We built and launched our own online store, and started selling the items through it, having to opt out of exclusivity on Envato. And as non-exclusive authors we would now receive an average 20%-25% of each sale, which would be complete nonsense economically.
 
We considered disabling our account completely, but in this case our existing customers would not be able to access future updates (which we provided as lifetime at the time of their purchase), and would be very upset. So we set a restrictive high price instead.
 
For the existing customers we prepared special incentives to convert to become our direct customers, without having Envato as a middleman. Probably in the longer term when we see the majority of customers converted, we will delete our Envato account, but it may be further than a year from now.
 
My apologies for such a long text, but I wanted to make sure you understand our decision and hopefully see that it is reasonable. For obvious reasons we cannot provide the full explanation publicly at Envato pages.

So, with this in mind - if you wish to extend your license, I invite you to become our subscriber to receive all upcoming updates and support for the next year, and during the whole period you're subscribed. If you're interested in this, I believe our sales team can get you a one-time 100% discount before support expires (June 18th).

Please let me know.

Best regards.