[Steven Zahm]

@ Derek

Like most commercial plugins for WordPress support and updates are sold with an annual support license. When you buy, you receive support and updates for a year (some like Envato only give you 6 months unless you pay more). Renewing the support and update license is optional but you do lose access to the updates. This is a very common business model of commercial WP plugins. When the support license expires, the extensions and templates for Connections will continue to work just fine unless there is a breaking change. In this particular case, WP made a breaking change that I had no control over. The only thing I can do is release an update, which I did and which was free to everyone with an active support license. Those with expired support license have to new it the support license (at a discount). Really, this is pretty close to software sales has always worked. For example, you bought software X version 1 for Windows XP. You upgraded to Windows 10 but version 1 of software X is not compatible but version 2 is, you have to pay the upgrade to version 2. The analogy is not perfectly a 1-to-1 but its pretty close.