In the beginning of our story, SessionBox was mainly free for our users - except for a "Supporter" tier, that provided some income to cover our infrastructural costs. Today, SessionBox has well over 500.000 installations, and an active user base, which requires ongoing assistance and development support - to have a great compatibility with the majority of websites -, and also increased infrastructural costs. To cover all these, and provide a service that is useful for our customers, we needed to hire developers and a support team.
Lately we were facing with the question on how to generate the income needed to keep up this small team. One way to go would be to increase our subscription costs, the other, to increase the number of people that pay for our service. We already stated in our ToS that any usage of SessionBox that is part of a revenue generating use-case is considered business usage, and that requires an active subscription. So we decided to not increase the burden on our already paying customers, but to be more thorough in detecting business usage and bringing these users into our paid tiers. Also, use-cases, which require more resource-intensive workloads (eg. handling huge number of sessions) will require a paid subscription.
As a consequence, some of our users might see the "You have reached free plan limits" notification when using the extension. This means that we've detected suspicious or extensive activity, that seems to be revenue-generating, or resource-intensive usage. This might come from the way the extension is used, or the sites that it is operating on.
While we understand that this might be disturbing for those who receive this notification, all business use-cases already would have required an active subscription. We hope that by onboarding more users to our paid tiers, we can continue providing an outstanding service to our users, while leaving the subscription costs as low as possible.
Thank you for your support!