Questions and concerns about new subscription model

Hi Aaron, welcome to the user forums!

I am currently at Verbum 10 Diamond (after regular upgrades over time) with additional resources from other purchases. In general, I have been very happy with my purchases and am glad to support Faithlife for the products that they have offered. (...) While I understand their interests, I cordially dislike subscription models and I won’t be participating. 

Having purchased up to Verbum 10 Diamond, what will happen when the new subscription model is released? (...) Will the program just update to Verbum 11 (or whatever it will be called), I keep everything I have, and just learn a new interface?

Basically yes. You own all the features of the current Verbum Full Feature Set and will be able to continue using those. The program - which is currently at Verbum 35 - will continue to update and you will continue to get free updates, so the functionality you have now will continue to be available to you, as well as all the books and resources you bought. Those are quite specific promises made. You may not even be asked to learn a new interface (developments in the user interface are seen as improvements by Faithlife, and thus may largely be restricted to subscribers - in fact there's a discussion right now about changes in the look and feel of the resource menu, and users have been told that the new interface will be mandatory for subscribers and the old interface for non-subscribers. It looks counterintuitive to me to maintain two different interfaces and not allow subscribers to switch as they choose, but that's how it is announced at the moment) 

Will I have to be always online? One of the great features of Verbum is I can have it on my laptop, go anywhere, and use it. No. Some functionality in your Verbum already requires online connectivity to use it (maybe you never came accross those) - the general expectation is that NEW functionality will be more likely to need online access (such as AI-powered tools that run on large training sets not available locally). But by and large, for the next years, Verbum will be a local, offline application for the most part. This won't change for the existing application - why should it?

Will there be ads in the interface? Right now, I can hide all the ads and other garbage and just keep my pinned layouts. Will the program I have spent thousands of dollars on keep trying to upsell me? There have been things on the Verbum homepage (now called dashboard) in the application that users consider Ads. Sometimes even a more intrusive message bar - those things you can avoid. From my experience with Faithlife, of course they want to upsell you to a subscription, or inform you when some new things come around (they may invent non-subscription packages in some months or years time). At the moment I don't think they will put nag-screens and other annoying ads into the free version of the software - but there has been no discussion and no official word about this. 

Will their be purchasable feature sets with libraries (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, etc.)? Not this year and maybe not next either. The feature sets will be contained in the subscription levels (Premium, Pro, Max). Tere hasn't been much said about Verbum 11 libraries with no features attached - my personal thinking is that there will be such purchasable libraries, maybe even with the traditional levels. And I think they will be available for non-subscribers as well as for subscribers (maybe those get a general discount that works as an incentive to subscribe). There are some libraries that have been put out for subscribers only - they currently have only small content and are not directed at user demographics, thus my speculation that Verbum 11 libraries will come out for all users but with no Feature Sets inclued.