You can argue that the way he implemented this without warning you is bad, but you cannot argue that charging for updates is "not right". What is "not right" is expecting something for nothing. In fact, it has been
blue iris policy since sometime during the v4 release to provide minor updates for 1 year only. This is made clear on the blue iris website in the support matrix attached below. The developer (who does this all by himself) has been generous in not enforcing this rule until now. This is standard practice with other vms and other software. More importantly, the updates constantly add new features. Would it make you happy if he just released a new version every year and charged you for that? Consider this, the developer is under no obligation to add any function to the current version of blue iris. He can just leave it be, wait a year and release version 6 with a ton of new features. Blue iris gives you the OPTION to get these new features as they are released. 30-35 bux is a joke compared to what you get considered the cost and limited functionality of many of the alternatives.