Any plans for DevPacks or bulk buy reductions?

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Hi all,

The market place is really expanding now with add-on modules. However, buying groups of these can work out very expensive.

I wondered whether there are any plans to group some of the add-ons into packages, at a lower price to encourage uptake? As it stands, to buy all the modules would cost about $1850. Even if you were only buying a set - say the simple suite, a premium gallery, forum, blog and a few others , you can soon spend upwards of $500.

Whilst I appreciate all the work the developers do in producing top quality add-ons, I wonder if we will approach a point where the pricing model effectively starts to hobble potential uptake of Concrete?

 
RadiantWeb replied on at Permalink Reply
RadiantWeb
This certainly has been discussed pretty widely. There is a good deal of division on what is the "best" way to handle this.

Bundle options would be the closest single developers could get to a discount at present.

This is really up to the core team ultimately.

My personal opinion as a developer, is that I do in fact want to honor return purchasers with a discount.

If I'm not mistaken, a "gift" license is being drafted for developers to use at their discretion.

So in "theory", dev's could issue a freebie every now and then.

But with that there is a huge margin of error possible because it would not be automated in the marketplace.

The marketplace is relatively new, and the core team is still trying to get that where they want it. Things like Developers being able to track sales and even mass connect with purchasers of new updates and special offers or surveys in regards to purchased addons to name a few.

So, I do believe we will "get" there, but it will take some time. Frz & co do not "haste" into anything. Which can be a really good thing most of the time.

Chad
icowden replied on at Permalink Reply
Another thought is that we could really do with a showcase environment for commercial blocks where devs can actually try the block to judge whether it is right for a site.

I have a great deal of difficulty sometimes working out whether I should go for a block or not.

Good to hear that there are some plans though!
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
Chad has it right.

The complexities around the various different developers adding stuff makes it really hard to see any kind of bulk or volume thing happening across the board... Two things are very much in the works however:

1) Gift license. Now that we have a nice way for add-on developers to manage support, we need to give them a way to gift a license to someone without getting paid. Its up to them when they want to do that.

2) Cash back. We've discussed having some type of cash back system where the more business you do across all of concrete5 you might get some dollars in your account. That would obviously come out of our 25% cut, which already is getting a 3-4.5% chunk removed for transaction fees... so it takes some real thought and frankly a lot more volume than what is going on to be worth while to build... but yeah.. getting a few bucks back towards the next purchase on a big gig would be nice...

Last but not least is the MSM, when and if we ever release the Multi-site-manager as a product for hosting companies, its safe to assume it's going to be expensive and ongoing in terms of cost. Frankly its a huge pile of work and tremendous risk for us to take on. When we do that I'm sure every small shop will be annoyed at our pricing, so its quite likely we'll launch a "reseller" type deal on concrete5.org at the same time so if you're hosting a few dozen sites instead of a few thousand there's an option here for ya.

hope that helps.

PS: you're still getting a deal today.
-frz