You’re right, it is pretty common to do that but there’s always the chance they just cancel the discount around renewal. If you have autopay then you probably already committed to the new price before you realized what happened.

I looked on the website. This is actually an “early bird” special price that is ~80% discounted. So after a while, it’s going to be $162/year and $310/2 years.

Matrix’s encryption algorithm was broken for a while and when it was fixed it it took app devs years to migrate to the new requirements. It still might even be the case for a lot of them, I haven’t looked in a while.

SimpleX should be secure AFAIK though, but I’ve heard that it may not be able to scale well to larger user bases. It seems everything has pros and cons.