Why the Price Changed.

You bought Reward Loyalty on CodeCanyon? Your license stays valid and your installation keeps running, forever. You do not rebuy anything. To keep receiving updates in Reward Loyalty 5, join the same $299/year update track every customer uses, your CodeCanyon purchase counts as your license. What this means for you.

Reward Loyalty started on CodeCanyon with a one-time license and updates forever, $99 for one business or $299 for client work. The days of updates forever for a single payment are over. The number on the price tag was the smaller problem; the model behind it was the real one. This page explains why, with the real numbers, so you can judge the decision yourself.

Support costs more than the sale

On the marketplace, a $99 sale nets us about $45 after fees and taxes, before any of the real costs: tools, hosting, accounting. Even at $45, an hour of development time is worth more than the sale earns. Every customization question, every hosting issue, every "quick question" pushes it below zero.

A loss on each sale can still work on volume. Sell enough copies, and thin margins add up. That volume is draining. Shutterstock bought Envato and moved the focus to Elements, its subscription stock business, so buyers and attention go there while the marketplaces keep shrinking.

From July 2026, Envato cuts its revenue share and ends exclusivity. That drops the same $99 sale to about $28 net, nearly 40% less, and half an hour on a ticket would cost more than the whole sale earns. The marketplace is going one way. We are going the other.

The platform stopped investing years ago

From an author's seat, CodeCanyon has run in maintenance mode for over a decade. While Envato built Elements and its stock content business, the marketplaces received no meaningful product investment: the author tools, the search, the licensing system, and the support model in 2026 are the ones we worked with in the early 2010s. The 2026 changes, a flat 50% fee and the end of exclusivity, confirm the direction. Elements is the business; the marketplaces are left to bleed dry. We are not waiting for that.

We asked for a fix, more than once

Over the years we raised the structural problem with Envato directly, more than once: a one-time sale with updates forever cannot fund ongoing development, and the fix is a recurring yearly fee for updates. The answer never came. What existed instead was the support fee: priced low, not configurable by the author, optional for the buyer, and in practice neither honored nor enforced. Buyers with expired support expected service anyway, and nothing in the system backed the author up. You cannot build a serious product on an optional fee that the platform itself does not stand behind.

So the model you see on this page, 12 months included and $299 a year after, is the model we asked the marketplace to make possible. It declined. We built it ourselves.

"One time, forever" was a race to the bottom

Both licenses, the $99 Regular and the $299 Extended, were one-time purchases with updates forever. Many buyers read that as a lifetime service contract: free new features, free support, free help with their server, for as long as the product lived. It never was that. Updates were goodwill on top of the purchase, not an obligation inside it. Goodwill does not pay for development, and a serious product cannot run on it.

Look at what that means after a few years. Someone who bought a license two years ago has received thousands of hours of work since, tens of thousands of dollars of development: new features, rewrites, security fixes, integrations. They paid once, years ago, and the model gave them no way to fund the work they keep receiving, and no reason that work could continue at the same pace. Charging for updates by the year answers both. The people who benefit get a way to pay for what they use, and the product gets a budget to keep improving.

We said this in writing, the whole time. Our documentation told every buyer to purchase the product as it exists today, to expect nothing beyond the current feature set, and to treat every update as a bonus rather than a fulfilled promise. See Feature Requests & Pricing and Who Is This For; both pages predate this change. Nobody who read what we published was promised more than they received.

The license confusion

The marketplace sold two licenses: a $99 Regular and a $299 Extended. In three years, almost nobody understood the difference, and barely one in ten chose Extended. Agencies ran whole client networks on a $99 Regular license. The marketplace wrote those terms and enforced them, not us, and we spent support hours explaining rules we did not design.

There is one license now, with terms we wrote ourselves, in plain language.

The piracy problem

Self-hosted source code at $99 travels. Copies circulate on nulled-script sites, and buyers forward the package to cheap offshore developers, from there it spreads further. Piracy exists for every software product and we accept that. What we no longer accept is the structural trap underneath it: at $99 with updates included forever, every $50,000 we invest in development ships straight to the nulled sites for free, and we can never outwork the pirated copies. A price that funds real development, and updates tied to a yearly fee, is how the legitimate version stays ahead.

What Reward Loyalty is now

Reward Loyalty grew past the script it started as. Multi-tenant architecture, white-label branding, wallet passes, prepaid passes, an extensive campaign engine, audit logs, GDPR tooling, e-commerce integrations. It is a SaaS business in a box: agencies and network operators run their own branded loyalty service on it, billing their own clients at their own prices. That is the product, and the price now reflects it:

• $1,199 one-time. Full source, all features, 12 months of updates and support included.
• $299 per year after that, if you want to keep receiving updates and support.
• Your installation runs forever. If you stop renewing, you keep the last version you received. Nothing switches off.

You pay for the software once. You pay for our ongoing work only while you want it. That is the honest version of "one-time purchase", and it funds a product that keeps improving instead of one that slowly dies under its own success.

If you bought on the marketplace

Your license is valid and stays valid. You keep the software you bought, the version you run, and the right to keep running it forever. Support continues through your remaining support period.

Your purchase counts as your license under the new model too. To continue with Reward Loyalty 5 and receive everything we ship next, join the update track at $299 per year, the same rate every direct customer pays after their first year. Your usage scope carries over from your original license: Regular covers your own business, Extended covers client work. You retrieve your Reward Loyalty key once with that purchase code at rewardloyalty.co/download, then activate the app with the key. The upgrade guide covers the steps.

One more option, with a deadline: a Regular license can expand to client-work scope for a $300 one-time scope upgrade, alongside the $299/year track. This puts you on the same footing as an Extended license holder. The scope upgrade is available until December 31, 2026; after that date, expanding scope requires the current license at its normal price.

We are grateful to every early buyer. You funded the years in which this product was built. The price change is not directed at you; it exists so the software you chose has a future.