Release Party!

Good bye dear patrons!

I have some great news. You can now subscribe to The Forge directly from the website using a credit card. 

As Foundry releases tomorrow (Congratulations Atropos!!!!!), this marks the end of the "beta phase" of The Forge as well, as things have been very stable for quite some time now, and the plan was always to be out of beta by the time Foundry is out. I just thought I'd be done sooner and that I'd have done a lot more by now!

TLDR in a bullet point format because writing paragraphs means this would take 10 pages : 

• You can now subscribe to the Forge securely using your credit or debit card. You will get 14 days trial, even though you probably don't need it, but you won't be charged until 2 weeks later!
• Paypal is coming at some point ("soon" hopefully, but I'm disgusted with Paypal at the moment, so I may not want to dive back into it for a bit)
• Your Patreon-linked accounts will still work until the end of the month as long as you are pledging, and I will allow access to the Forge services until the end of June as well since this isn't enough notice, then the subscriptions will be completely disconnected from one another.
• For Foundry beta users, you will be able to continue using Foundry 0.5.7 until the end of the month (you won't have access to 0.6.0), giving you ample time to remember to enter your purchased license key. Starting June 1st, only fully licensed users will be able to use Foundry, and version 0.6.0 will be the minimum version available for use for everyone.
• Every patron who had an active account on The Forge up until now has received a thank you bonus of one Data Extra and one Assets Extra for a year (priced at 12.99$ each). This is my way of saying Thank You for testing and providing useful feedback and helping me make The Forge stable and with high performance for everyone!
• The contest that I launched two weeks ago will be extended. Thank you for all those who participated already, I'll give more details below.

I wanted to communicate these changes with you sooner, but I wanted to finish adding support for subscriptions, which I had planned to finish by the 12th... but look at me, spending over 16 hours every day on this and I finally managed to get it working and stable by the 22nd! It turned out to be one gigantic thing to achieve and I had so many problems and had to redo the design so many times that I don't want to think about it. I unfortunately had to cut down on a lot of the features and flexibility I wanted to do in how subscriptions worked, and I added some unfortunate limitations that annoy me probably more than they might annoy some of you (like having to reset the billing cycle when you do a plan upgrade, or that you can only have extras on a yearly sub). PayPal support was planned but unfortunately their API, docs, services, website, libraries, everything about Paypal is &@!&^@!&* and I hate it. Adding Paypal support is not only 100 times more difficult than Stripe (for subscriptions, especially ones with multiple-items and varying tax rates). So... Paypal support also had to be removed for this release as I never got the time to finish implementing it, and it was going to be a very limited version anyway (right now, I'm considering having people "add funds" to their Forge account manually using Paypal, and not using Paypal's subscriptions system because it's simply too incredibly limited that it's not worth pursuing further).

I apologize if this comes a bit late. I know that some of you were wondering on how this would work long term with Patreon, but here it is. You can now subscribe to The Forge directly, you don't need to pledge on Patreon anymore (bye bye!). Your hosting tier will still work until the end of the month, and because this notice comes so late, I will keep support for patreons to have Forge access throughout June as well, giving you ample time to buy a subscription and switch over. There's also a 14 days free trial, so you won't have to worry about getting charged while your patreon sub is still active.

Note also that I've updated the pricing for the various tiers. The new prices were updated on the website for about a week, but most of you may have missed it. Basically I've increased the Game Master tier price from 4$ to 4.49$ and Extras from 12$ to 12.99$ as well as using more "marketing oriented" prices of 8.99$/12.99$ instead of 9$/13$ (even though I hate those who do that, it's apparently quite effective :p)

If you go to your Forge account, you'll notice you now have an Extra bonus of Data and Assets. This is my thank you for everyone who helped make this work as well as it does now. So every Patron got that if they had an active Forge account. And yes, I noticed it in the screenshot I posted above, the expiration of the bonus is set to June 22nd instead of May 22nd, that's my fault, I made a typo in the script, and gave everyone 13 months instead of 12. I won't change it now, so there you go, enjoy 13 months of free Extras :)

As for the contest from two weeks ago. It technically ended earlier today, but I'm extending it because I guess two weeks was simply not enough and I didn't receive as many submissions as I had hoped (none actually for the background and banner). Not being able to promote it much due to lack of time probably didn't help garner the attention I had hoped.. or maybe the contest was simply not attractive enough. I don't know.. if you have suggestions, let me know!

I'll give the one subscription prize just between those who submitted already so their chances of winning don't decrease and they won't have to wait longer before final results either. So I'm basically not extending the previous contest, I'll simply be creating a new one but as I'm too tired at the moment to write up updated contest rules, I'll leave that for some other time.

Finally, in the next couple of days, I'll send another post that talks more about Beyond20 itself. I was going to bundle both subjects into one, but this is getting long already, so I shall say good night, and see you all tomorrow for the Foundry VTT Release Partyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!