I totally understand your feelings and would no doubt feel the same way. The cold reality for us was that our price had to increase to support our continuing existence and growth. When we realized we were going to raise our prices, we tried to figure out how to do it in the most reasonable way and decided the annual maintenance price that provides all users our current features, enhancement, bug fixes, certifications, access to ePrescribing, etc., should be the same for all clients wishing to have the most up-to-date version and features.
Otherwise, $500 for older clients and $1500 for newer clients would have to be charged to have the same effect. That seemed unfair given that existing clients should also be paying their fair share of our current expenses (when our expenses were less, so too was our price, and our feature set).
We also combined our old $500 for maintenance plus the $420 we used to charge extra for ePrescribing (prior to V5) into the one $995/year payment.
Finally, we anticipate no further price increases through 2012, and hopefully 2013 as well - at least that is one of our primary goals.
