I emailed the FORScan dev about pricing and a timeline when it will become a paid product and got permission from him to post this to all of you. I hope this puts a lot of minds at ease. Below you'll see my question and his answer:
Q: When FORScan gets out of beta and becomes a paid product, will it be a monthly fee or a flat charge for the program? Do you have any idea yet on a range that it may cost or when it will be a paid program?
A: There is no final decision about it yet, however, it will not be monthly fee for sure. Initially we planned to have free standard license + paid extended license. Extended license fee was planned to be either flat (lifelong license) or long-term (ex. 1, 3 or 5 years options - as not all of users really want to have lifelong license).
As for the cost, we thought about something like $30-50 for 5 years - lifelong license. However initially we planned to include firmware update function in the extended license. But our tests show that firmware update function has quite strict harware requirements. Although this function is quite stable already, it works fine only on J2534 adapters and some white-label ELM327 compatible devices like ELS27 (that costs almost like lower J2534), So far majority of tests on ELM327 are not successful, as china ELM327 devices (and they are all manufactured somewhere in china) is really a pain as their quality is unstable. This is some kind of conceptual problem for us, as initial idea was to "make FORScan available for everyone", so now we are looking for a solution. If we start selling Extended Licesene without firmware update function, the price will be lower than mentioned above.
