Hi Jan,

Thanks for the questions

You can move the license by emailing sales[at]visualmicro.com with your key.

In terms of support and upgrades, this will be affected by a few factors... 

Currently everyone who has bought the debugger is getting free upgrades and a time limit is not being imposed. This is how I would like things to be in a perfect world.

An examples of the questions for me are:- 

How often does Arduino and Visual Studio/Atmel change?
How much work to keep up to date?
How many forum questions?
How much time involved in keeping the forum up to date?
How much do I pay to keep the documentation up to date?
How many Arduino boards do I have to buy to test everything?
How many people using the free software compared to buying a license
Do people try to avoid paying, do they pay the lowest amount possible?
Do commercial customers pay the commercial rate or the personal rate?


Over the past 18 months the product has received approx. 100k downloads. Each day thousands of people use the software and about 1900 have purchased it. With tax and expenses such as documentation this doesn't leave much income.

We are currently focussing on making the software easier to use and more stable in the hope that this will reduce the costs of the questions mentioned above and make people feel more confident in buying the upgrade. The intention is also to include more of the "extra" Arduino features provided by the plugin in the non-free tool thus helping people who do not need the debugger to pay some money

If this has the desired effect on sales then the paid licences will keep rolling. There is not a need to make millions just to be properly rewarded for the effort allowing ongoing development and product improvements.

As you can see, it is not black and white but if it needs to be then we say 12 months of updates guaranteed. 

One last thing, Commercial licence users will certainly get 24 months of updates and re-purchasing or paying for an update will be linked to how much users paid in the first place. We will try to be fair for everyone.

I hope this helps.