Topaz Labs, who used to offer free major upgrades to their products for free, has announced that from Summer 2020, they will now be charging for product upgrades.

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Products under the Topaz Labs umbrella include DeNoise AI, Sharpen AI, Gigapixel AI and Mask AI and even though the company liked the fact that they were giving upgrades to these products for free, instead of charging for every little thing, they've now realised it's just not feasible. 

"Although it started out with good intentions, our free upgrade policy ultimately prevented us from delivering the best possible products to you," says the CEO of Topaz Labs. 

In a statement shared by a Reddit user, the CEO of Topaz Labs has said that the company wasn't focusing on improving existing products as much as they wanted to. Instead, they kept releasing new products and as a result, they ended up with several different products that did similar things, which caused confusion about which tool to use.

"It turns out that if we can only earn money by releasing new products, there’s a very powerful internal incentive to only do that," says the CEO of Topaz Labs. 

Going forward, after buying a Topaz Labs product you will receive 1-year of free upgrades and then when your first year of free upgrades is complete, should you want to continue to access upgrades, you will have to pay for another year's subscription. You can, however, choose to not pay for the updates and just use the software as is (you don't have to pay to keep accessing it unlike Adobe's software plan where if you don't pay, you can't use the software). 

"If you don’t think a certain upgrade is worth it, don’t renew your upgrade license just yet. Wait until it actually includes something you want to pay for," says the CEO of Topaz Labs. 

Only DeNoise, Sharpen, Gigapixel, and Mask will require an upgrade license in 2020. Other products remain under the old policy.

Existing customers have an upgrade license starting from a year since they purchased and if you purchased one of the products mentioned above over a year ago, you get a minimum 6 months of upgrade licenses.