Trust me guys we are not making a killing here on revenue with a onetime purchase. Do your research with other big companies that are making the big $$ and they perform the annual service fee's. To me this would be nirvana to have this in place and maybe we do this new support plan as we are talking about and we would make more $$ and charge a yearly fee like $1,500 - though many would go ballistic over this and if we say ok then what about just giving it away for free! Think about it really hard and use your business sense here guys. If that is the case then we should be a nonprofit company and then let you develop the software (good luck and try supporting over 650 products- that will change your mind in a split second).
Now the problem comes into play here is what to do when we tell the other 1000,s of existing customers this new service plan that starts now and they come back and say - this is wrong I paid my onetime fee and I don't think this far!! Are you in a position to spend hours responding to their postings that cost me and others time and takes away from supporting other customers. You just don't spit out emails that fast - I do 90 sent emails daily plus many others not including the forum (very long hours guy's that many of you only do 10hr days), so I don't know if that will work.
As I stated in the previous posts, it is hard to please all 100% of your audience - so, how to do it?
I think for now we should move onto working on technical issues for others, unless there is more to beat up on this horse but I do like the input that all of you are providing. I just don’t think there will ever be a perfect answer here - I think it's been like this for 1000 of years with mankind (sorry had to bring old history politics .
What you would need to do is issue an End-of-Life notification for all products beyond a certain version, then offer the ability for customers to purchase an extended service contract (like you do with the Lite version of the products). This is how you take care of the old customers that purchased under the one-time fee plan.
Here at our company, I would totally be willing to buy a DSS License for ~$1,000 USD and an addt'l support contract for like $250-350/year. If you can honestly say this would not result in increased revenue and the chance for explosive growth, I don't get it.
Assuming you get at least 30-40% of your existing user base to purchase the extended support contracts and then 100% of all new customers on the new plan with a supplement support contract you are talking some serious dollar signs here. You establish recurring revenue from a once dead user-base and you establish a new line of revenue for future sales. In 2 years, each customer has already paid for an additional license, thus you can issue free upgrades within the given support contract period. Even if you were to reduce the amount of new sales by a fraction, you are still seeing increased revenue on the front-end to compensate for it.
This is just my opinion and I am speaking for myself when I say I would be willing to pay for support.
Yes, from an end user this would be ok and easy but keep in mind we have partners and this might be very nasty for them. Ahh the balance is hard but I just like the idea of reoccurring revenue and if many of you believe this is the way to go then maybe create a 2 tier support pricing module. We have been talking about it but we are just too busy now to implement it and there are many things to consider. Keep them coming .
I will be dropping off now on this topic but will be watching - I have to go back to work .
Sorry to raise this again, but any thoughts for v5 product in the supply chain already (eg. stock held by resellers/distributers)?
We have a v5 DSS based storage system on the bench ready to be delivered now, & not too sure what to say to the customer when they visit the Open-E website & find their DSS version not actually listed. We can handle it, but if there was anything available for these cases, we would be keen to pass it on to them. Cheers.
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