Okay, but...
Permalink 1 user found helpful
Looks like something I could use, but I don't see why the cost is so high. How come?
Frz's Note: I moved this from the User Login Redirect Add-on because it turned into a discussion on pricing that I thought other developers might benefit from and probably didn't see in there.
Cause my children are beautiful and I'd love to send them to college.
I AGREE! The price is obscene. The MOST I'd be willing to pay is $30.
This is an add-on I have been waiting for so will probably purchase it but the price is high considering the eCommerce block, which adds more functionality, is $95. Pricing structure seems a little strange.
Okay, at 5pm yesterday my reply to this one was admittedly a bit snarky, so in interests of keeping our community civil here's a more detailed reply..
Here's the logic path we tend to follow when the "what should this cost?" conversation comes up around the office today:
1) Is this something that EVERYONE needs? If so, we still put it in the core - which is free, you'll remember. So something like Layouts that really any type of site would benefit from, I find the cash somehow and pony it up to have a developer build it into the core so you can have it for free. Did I mention it was free? Thousands of hours go into that. Did you see the new caching stuff in 5.4.1? That could have easily been "concrete5 for enterprise" and we could have easily kept it for ourselves and clients like Clear Wireless that would be willing to spend 10k on it.. and yet, it's free. Go check out Magento if you don't understand/believe me. So the first question always has been, and will be - does this benefit /everyone/ and is this something /everyone/ will use. If so, we find a way to make it free.
2) Okay if it's not something that /everyone/ needs, who is it that is going to need it? eCommerce was designed for small businesses who want a design-centric way to sell a few hundred products at most. $100 price point is reasonable. So who is going to actually benefit from the product is a key consideration. What are they used to spending for similar solutions?
3) How much support pain will this cause. Generally we're budgeting 15 minutes of time for every sale at this point. Certainly many folk need no help at all with our add-ons, and then others consume hours on installation problems that we didn't create, or sometimes on bugs we did. Regardless the great challenge with selling software is support, so we try to figure out how painful support might be and use that for a baseline.
4) How long did it take to build. Frankly this is the last of our concerns, but we do try to build in the costs of development into a baseline number we need to achieve in sales to make it worth our while to do it at all.
4) What can we get away with? Yeah I'm not gonna lie -I'm not some trust fund kid or spending VC's money here. DotNetNuke is our closest competitor from a business model prospective, and they have a commercial version of their core, a marketplace, and they've still raised at least two rounds of funding with the most recent at $8m just to stay afloat. We've never taken anyones money but mine, but yeah amongst various goals having a nice life style business is pretty high. Since we've given away the core, which incidentally does a lot more out of the box than most of our competitors, we've lost the revenue stream that any commercial software company would have. Typically in software the initial license fees goes towards marketing and business development costs and the recurring fees go towards support and application development. Since we have neither, the simple truth is that we have to make it up on add-ons, and what - maybe the partner program? Of course no one who has posted to this thread in outrage (so far) is in the partner program, but I guess that's our fault for not pushing/creating more value there yet..
So you'll have to pardon my obscene evil nature, but "gee can we make some %#! money on this one?" is a question that comes out of my mouth. Frankly you should all want me to ask that more often if you want the free core to continue to improve.
So how does that apply to this add-on?
1) Is it a fundamental?
No.
This is not something that everyone needs. Most concrete5 sites don't have user registration enabled at all, and for those that do there are plenty of options around where a user goes when they login. I think it's great that you guys need it, but it's not a core feature by any stretch of the imagination.
2) Who is it for?
This add-on is clearly geared towards extranets. If you really need to send specific users to specific destinations, sometimes only once, chances are you're running a extranet/intranet in my mind. Solutions for that problem tend to cost in the thousands - frequently tens of thousands for total project cost. Even if you buy all the add-ons we've ever made, you'd be spending a lot less than a basic sharepoint install.
3) Support?
I see nothing about this that makes me think support will be easier than anything else. In fact since you're redirecting users around it seems like there could be any number of weird edge cases we haven't predicted. Since we expect it to be used in the more corporate environments, we tend to think that any bugs or issues that do arise with it will be high priority issues.
4) Time to build?
Actually not that easy. Took a solid two days of Ryan's time to get it right.
5) What can I get away with?
Domain mapper is $125, its geared towards the same type of client. It sells all the time. The Dealer Locator is $255 - it sells as well.
So some considerations that don't get asked:
1) How many lines of code it is.
2) The quantity of functionality it adds (we're looking at the value of the functionality.)
3) How we can get it into the MOST hands.
I think that last one bears more explanation. There seems to be a consistent argument from the folks who complain about prices being too high that we're somehow missing the boat on volume. "You could sell 10x more for a tenth of the price!!"
I'm just trying to be transparent with you guys as I am just a guy who ran a webshop and is now trying to make a living at selling software by going open source. Given that disclaimer I can tell you that more volume has zero appeal to me at this level. Yes, I want concrete5 to be successful, obviously, and part of that is growth - but not all of it. I can't let things grow in an out of control fashion, and I can't price things in a way where we're unable to provide the level of support or feature set we should. We routinely face decisions about where to apply our time, and these decisions can get quite awkward when the licenses of some add-ons are paying for the development of a larger core. We have a huge audience with the free core already, having a huge audience with paid add-ons for the same end revenue simply doesn't make sense to me.
So I totally get that you'd only be willing to pay $30 for it, I'd encourage you to avail yourself of the power open source and take the free software I gave you to write your own solution to the problem. If you want mine today, along with the promise we'll make it work, oh and did I mention unlimited upgrades to it, I need $125.
Here's the logic path we tend to follow when the "what should this cost?" conversation comes up around the office today:
1) Is this something that EVERYONE needs? If so, we still put it in the core - which is free, you'll remember. So something like Layouts that really any type of site would benefit from, I find the cash somehow and pony it up to have a developer build it into the core so you can have it for free. Did I mention it was free? Thousands of hours go into that. Did you see the new caching stuff in 5.4.1? That could have easily been "concrete5 for enterprise" and we could have easily kept it for ourselves and clients like Clear Wireless that would be willing to spend 10k on it.. and yet, it's free. Go check out Magento if you don't understand/believe me. So the first question always has been, and will be - does this benefit /everyone/ and is this something /everyone/ will use. If so, we find a way to make it free.
2) Okay if it's not something that /everyone/ needs, who is it that is going to need it? eCommerce was designed for small businesses who want a design-centric way to sell a few hundred products at most. $100 price point is reasonable. So who is going to actually benefit from the product is a key consideration. What are they used to spending for similar solutions?
3) How much support pain will this cause. Generally we're budgeting 15 minutes of time for every sale at this point. Certainly many folk need no help at all with our add-ons, and then others consume hours on installation problems that we didn't create, or sometimes on bugs we did. Regardless the great challenge with selling software is support, so we try to figure out how painful support might be and use that for a baseline.
4) How long did it take to build. Frankly this is the last of our concerns, but we do try to build in the costs of development into a baseline number we need to achieve in sales to make it worth our while to do it at all.
4) What can we get away with? Yeah I'm not gonna lie -I'm not some trust fund kid or spending VC's money here. DotNetNuke is our closest competitor from a business model prospective, and they have a commercial version of their core, a marketplace, and they've still raised at least two rounds of funding with the most recent at $8m just to stay afloat. We've never taken anyones money but mine, but yeah amongst various goals having a nice life style business is pretty high. Since we've given away the core, which incidentally does a lot more out of the box than most of our competitors, we've lost the revenue stream that any commercial software company would have. Typically in software the initial license fees goes towards marketing and business development costs and the recurring fees go towards support and application development. Since we have neither, the simple truth is that we have to make it up on add-ons, and what - maybe the partner program? Of course no one who has posted to this thread in outrage (so far) is in the partner program, but I guess that's our fault for not pushing/creating more value there yet..
So you'll have to pardon my obscene evil nature, but "gee can we make some %#! money on this one?" is a question that comes out of my mouth. Frankly you should all want me to ask that more often if you want the free core to continue to improve.
So how does that apply to this add-on?
1) Is it a fundamental?
No.
This is not something that everyone needs. Most concrete5 sites don't have user registration enabled at all, and for those that do there are plenty of options around where a user goes when they login. I think it's great that you guys need it, but it's not a core feature by any stretch of the imagination.
2) Who is it for?
This add-on is clearly geared towards extranets. If you really need to send specific users to specific destinations, sometimes only once, chances are you're running a extranet/intranet in my mind. Solutions for that problem tend to cost in the thousands - frequently tens of thousands for total project cost. Even if you buy all the add-ons we've ever made, you'd be spending a lot less than a basic sharepoint install.
3) Support?
I see nothing about this that makes me think support will be easier than anything else. In fact since you're redirecting users around it seems like there could be any number of weird edge cases we haven't predicted. Since we expect it to be used in the more corporate environments, we tend to think that any bugs or issues that do arise with it will be high priority issues.
4) Time to build?
Actually not that easy. Took a solid two days of Ryan's time to get it right.
5) What can I get away with?
Domain mapper is $125, its geared towards the same type of client. It sells all the time. The Dealer Locator is $255 - it sells as well.
So some considerations that don't get asked:
1) How many lines of code it is.
2) The quantity of functionality it adds (we're looking at the value of the functionality.)
3) How we can get it into the MOST hands.
I think that last one bears more explanation. There seems to be a consistent argument from the folks who complain about prices being too high that we're somehow missing the boat on volume. "You could sell 10x more for a tenth of the price!!"
I'm just trying to be transparent with you guys as I am just a guy who ran a webshop and is now trying to make a living at selling software by going open source. Given that disclaimer I can tell you that more volume has zero appeal to me at this level. Yes, I want concrete5 to be successful, obviously, and part of that is growth - but not all of it. I can't let things grow in an out of control fashion, and I can't price things in a way where we're unable to provide the level of support or feature set we should. We routinely face decisions about where to apply our time, and these decisions can get quite awkward when the licenses of some add-ons are paying for the development of a larger core. We have a huge audience with the free core already, having a huge audience with paid add-ons for the same end revenue simply doesn't make sense to me.
So I totally get that you'd only be willing to pay $30 for it, I'd encourage you to avail yourself of the power open source and take the free software I gave you to write your own solution to the problem. If you want mine today, along with the promise we'll make it work, oh and did I mention unlimited upgrades to it, I need $125.
I am all in favour of you guys making money cause C5 is hands down the best CMS system and as you say, its free!! Without some income C5 would not exist. Just thought the price was a little strange.
I suppose from the users point of view of what it does the add-on looks simple but as you say, spent a good bit of time on the back end to get it to work. That's what makes a good add-on. Looks simple but is actually not.
It will be something I am buying shortly so thanks for creating it guys!
I suppose from the users point of view of what it does the add-on looks simple but as you say, spent a good bit of time on the back end to get it to work. That's what makes a good add-on. Looks simple but is actually not.
It will be something I am buying shortly so thanks for creating it guys!
Same applies to themes. They all offer basic styling but if you want, say, the ecommerce module styled, that might be a little extra.
I could see a few uses for this that none of them say needed or non profit but it seems very handy. Extranet, intranet and most importantly from a profitable stand point, a social site. I am thinking of purchasing it to simplify hosting my own project management system. And I am tossing around the idea of building some social networking type themes that utilize it. Dunno if there would be a demand for them or not.
Steph
Steph
