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Please understand that our renewal policy has changed, for more information about the renewal policy, please visit the link below:

https://blog.wholetomato.com/2018/09/17/changes-to-our-renewal-policy/

Please understand that the customers who have been off maintenance less than a year can request a quote to restart maintenance the date of purchase. The term will be for a full year. The cost to renew is $119 per user. This offer expired on March 12th, 2019.

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Sorry, but in this case I will have to wean myself off VAX after being with you for nearly 15 years.

You have your policies, I have my principles. I contacted WholeTomato last year some time before Christmas and never heard back until your response now. So much for the "world class support" mentioned in your blog article ... or perhaps I didn't receive that support, because I was already "out of maintenance" even though what I was merely asking for a renewal? I had tried another time in spring 2019 also. But since I had to change jobs (and such purchase was out of the question) I didn't keep at it. As a last resort I then wrote into the forum and lo and behold this time contacting you via that email address worked (last few times were via the web form).

I have not been able to use Visual Assist X in VS 2019 for obvious reasons, nor have I been able to use a version that was released after the maintenance period ran out in September 2018. I am certainly not going to pay a full year's worth for what's now less than a month until the second year of the quoted maintenance period starts. Even if I pushed it, I'd hardly get 12 months of "world class support" in the remaining weeks, would I? So unless your offer includes time travel, I'm out.

While I really loved VAX and it has helped me a lot with Windows kernel mode development (where IntelliSense sucked particularly), VS has come a long way since 2005, the add-in community is thriving and while there is still a gap to VAX (feature wise) it's getting smaller and smaller with every year. While I used VAX with VS mostly for spare time projects of which several are open source, I kept renewing (Professional) at intervals to keep myself the option of using it for commercial development.

In short: Your policies and my principles seem to have diverged.

... therefore I have pulled two blog articles I had written, endorsing VAX (and no, I am not showing ads on my blog nor do I endorse _anything_ for money!). I will also make sure that the planned purchase for VAX (and subsequent renewals) at my new job will be stopped. Last but not least I will cease to recommend VAX to friends and colleagues. I will, btw, not regret having done that in the past, because in the past the product (as a sum of features, stability but also renewal policy and support) was brilliant (to quote myself). As a memento of better times, I am attaching a screenshot I took in 2012 when renewing.

Farewell and I wish WholeTomato the best for the future.

With best regards,

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