Hi Iain,
Firstly, I am not making any threats, so please do not take it as such. I am not a user of your products, however; I am watching them to see what you do in relations with them for XF, as I am an avid supporter of XF and third parties to XF. I have liked several of your products, though they haven't been made available to XF.
I have questioned the cost of your branding free, as many others have in this thread and concluded the same as myself, pass on buying from you due to the ridiculous costing applied to branding free.
Secondly, as an ex-marketing professional in both online and offline marketing, and one of the pioneers to SEO on the web (do a search to establish my history back when Altavista was around), I know exactly what branding is, and is not. SEO is not link building. Link building is link building, plain and simple. SEO is an old term that is quite redundant today with search positioning. It is only due to its longevity of usage that it is still used today, though its meaning is vastly different from where it began its roots.
Branding is about marketing your brand name, and doing so in the best possible methods. Branding is putting your brand name onto your product, link or not.
Fillip answered the first part, regarding your products including a link to a hosting company. I asked simply, is that your company or are you using the product to place affiliate links on clients site that benefit you? If affiliate, that is actually illegal, regardless whether its in a TOS or not. You cannot profiteer from the sale of a product through such methods when a fee has been paid for a product. Ask a local lawyer about International implications of such of rate answer. When selling across borders, it is no longer just your local laws that apply, there are International jurisdictional laws you need comply with, especially if the majority of your sales are actually outside your countries borders.
Again, not a threat, but a question of what is within your product that I may, or may not, be looking at buying in the future depending on what you do with pricing and branding free for XF products.
You said the link does not exist in the "pro" version. Now I am confused more.
I asked earlier if the pro version still had branding, which was stated as yes, and that a pro + branding free was required to remove branding.
So are you saying, the free version has more links and the pro version only has a branding link attached?