3CX has, for many years, offered a “FREE FOREVER” license. What that license included has changed over the years, at one point being feature limited to 1 SIP Trunk with no BLFs to later on removing the trunk limit and so on. Another example of the limits of the free editions was the mail server – you used to be able to use your own SMTP service – later on it was changed to force use of the 3CX SMTP service. I could take up this entire post talking about the changes to this offering, but it always was a basic “make a call” phone system you could run with no yearly license fees. You can’t really complain about a free offering when that was what you signed up for.
Another key note of the 3CX Free Edition was that it was always available to self host, either on-prem or in your own cloud. This was important to many of it’s users – home / tiny business users who may have old/legacy equipment, no budget, and a need for a PBX that was easy to use.
Despite all the changes to the Free Edition offering over the years, the FREE FOREVER edition always claimed that it was free – forever. As you can imagine, this caused a lot of confusion and frustration when, in December of 2022, 3CX announced the upcoming termination of those licenses.
In response, many users flocked to the 3CX forums to ask when “forever” came to an end. 3CX’s response has been to steer these users to their new “free forever” offering – 3CX StartUP. An offering that feels like a beta and is missing a large portion of the 3CX feature set at this time. An offering that in many cases, won’t work for these users at all. They may have intercom systems that can’t relay to the cloud or phone service that isn’t delivered over a SIP trunk and requires an analog gateway (this feature exists in “Dedicated” but not “StartUP”). Or a myriad of other reasons – like not wanting to share their data with 3CX or perhaps lock their system down and only allow access from specific locations. Regardless, the loss of their “forever” license will have an impact on them.
While the current issued licenses have not been terminated yet, 3CX has been cleared they will be at some point in the future. The current date floating around is the end of 2024, but can always change.
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