I too was disappointed about the iLok requirement. I had a bad experience with a dongle several years ago (difficulty installing, weird driver issues coming up, always having to swap it when switching between my desktop and laptop, paranoia over losing it when traveling, etc.) Fortunately that product was upgraded to a dongle-less version so I've been happy, but the experience has led me to shy away from them. There are many products on the market that don't use a dongle, so I prefer to stick with products that avoid them. I'm sure they work fine for many folks, they are just not for me.

As a current, happy PSP customer I of course realize the sad necessity to protect your products from piracy. The "serial # only" protection obviously has its limitations but is simple for users. I'm fine with machine-bound challenge-response as long as (1) it is straightforward to do (e.g. via your website and I can get the response code immediately), and (2) I can put it on 2-3 machines (desktop + 2 laptops).

I like that you have offered protection options for other products, and I hope you will continue this in the future. Going iLok-only for the "pro" versions is fine by me for now since I'm just a home studio user, but at some point I may want the pro versions.

Fortunately Neon has a non-iLok option since I'm in the market for a high-end EQ plugin. I look forward to demoing it. Which reminds me, for demos I prefer the occasional audio drop-outs instead of a fixed-length trial. I find that I'll demo a plugin and decide not to buy it, but months later want to try it again as my needs change. So having the "crippled" version still sitting in my VST list makes it easy to give it a quick try again which often results in a purchase. Fixed-length trials make this more difficult. I'm not sure if other users are the same, but this happens to me often.

Anyway, good luck with Xenon. I hope to see a non-iLok version sometime- it looks like a great plugin.

Regards,
Chris