Am I understanding this correctly?
 

I recently went to a PFS game but was unable to get a seat at the pathfinder game. The only game available was Starfinder. As I had not played it before I gave it a go. End of the night and I have two XP and thought I would try creating a few characters with HL. First I was surprised I could not do it with Herolab. I took a look at Herolab Online and have some concerns. This is how I see it.

1. Need to purchase the data set @ $34.95. This dose not concern me as this has been the marketing plan for LWD since the beginning. You buy a data set.....you own it.

2. Pay a monthly fee to use data set. Now $2.00 a month is not a lot of money, but spending $24 a year to use a data set I already payed for seems disingenuous and i do not like people double dipping into my wallet. My main concern with this is that I have 75+ data sets for pathfinder in HL. I have no idea how much I have spent as it was $10 here $35 there, but it is a LOT! Seeing as the bundle cost for 2008-2016 is $374.99.

If we fast forward a few years, are we going to see thousands of customers having hundreds of dollars worth the product they have purchased held ransom for $2.00 a month?

3. Need an internet connection to use at all. Not a huge deal but inconvenient/devastating at times. I like to game at our cabin on long weekends. There is no signal at the cabin...on purpose. With classic you can at least play offline.

Please let me know if I have made any mistakes in my assumption above. I do not have a problem with subscription based plans or purchase based. I do have concerns if you do both.

Starfinder is only Hero Lab Online (HLO), because some/many of the features they wanted to offer would not work on the Hero Lab Classic (HLC) platform.

The existing stuff for HLC, will eventually be available for HLO, but at the moment it appears to be Starfinder only.
When that occurs, they'll charge a one time fee to migrate content.
Going forward from that, anything you purchase for either platform will be available for both.

The subscription is a minimum to keep the server active.

The subscription still is a problem, not because of the subscription itself, but because it is a paywall for other paid content. Usually with subscription models you get the full deal, all content in one package (or different tiers), here you only get allowance to use what you already own.

There is a plus side to it, though: Ongoing subscription prices are relatively low, so that you don't pay higher subscription prices for content when you don't have time to play anyway.

What I miss from the main web-page is more comprehensive information:

- Do all players of a gaming group have to pay subscription?

- Do all players of a gaming group have to buy packages? Can they display character sheets created with packages they don't own themselves?

- Is subscription monthly or yearly? Is there a discount when you pay yearly? Can you easily pause/cancel subscription if you don't play for one/some month(s).

- What parts are fully implemented yet, which are not?

- Will there be adventure path packages?

- Will there be "backup" servers that users can login to when the main site is down (maintenance or otherwise)?

- Is the local browser cache made full use of to keep data transfers to a minimum (important for mobile use)?

- What is a "Lone Wolf account"? It neither seems to be my forum account here nor my Hero Lab Classic license account. How does HLO know about my already licensed packages once Pathfinder is supported?

Weissrolf, those questions are best asked on the thread mentioned above.

Will do, but those questions are best answered on the web-page that is asking people to buy the product.

Thank you fort the info on the Starfinder FAQ page. I moved my questions to that tread.

Most of your questions have obvious answers.

"Obvious"ly not, hence I ask the questions. Here is another one:

- Why is the Hero Lab ONLINE FAQ thread in the Hero Lab CLASSIC sub-forum, but not in the ONLINE forum?

Seriously, please put the FAQ on the web-page and answer cost and account related questions before making people create an account.

The Starfinder/Online FAQ is correctly in the Discussion forum.
Can this thread be moved to either the Discussion or HLO Forums. All these posts have nothing to do with Pathfinder, and all of this has been asked, answered, debated, argued, discussed, etc in those forums previously. If people want to keep going over it again, please do it in the appropriate location.