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Thanks for the input on the pricing. I won't really go into the proposal as such for now, but I think it makes sense to explain where our targets are, to put such proposals and their potential impact in context. Afterall pricing discussions spark every now and then here, which is great, don't get me wrong.
As you all might know by now, we are in this for the long run. @girish and I have built and keep building this since we want to see such a product out there in the world. This requires us to carefully work towards building a sustainable and robust organization, so it can serve more people solidly.
Since we care about the product, its usefulness and (for the lack of a better term) the ability to self-host services for various personal or business reasons, we chose to not depend on investors showing us eventually the direction whether we like it or not (I think I don't have to point to the sandstorm story here). We rather take your feature requests as guidance, compared to metrics and analytics. That decision has some impact on the adoption strategy of course, we thus do not operate on a mode where growth and adoption at all cost is the most important metric, I also do not think pushing people aggressively from free tier to paid tier is useful. Having to make the decision to pay or not update is just not how it works for servers. On top of that, deciding to pay for 1 month, after 1 year of postponing updates and then essentially causing us to spend a day getting your old system back on track, is simply not sustainable for us (this happens
one day less time getting to your app or feature request).I can't talk on behalf of @girish here, but to me ideally there would not be a free tier at all (no worries
). Product development and more importantly upkeep, maintenance and support needs time and dedication, this simply costs money in our society. Free tier Cloudrons, requiring help, need to be offset by subscriptions. So more free tier usage increases the price for paid subscriptions! This is just honest. We pay our salary with your subscriptions, hopefully we can extend the team this year to be able to support more apps upstream. We don't want to push our users into something or the other, there is no grand ideology topic here either, we aim to build a great product and if you find it useful, you have to pay to keep the lights on, not someone else. Your decision. So far that strategy seems to work towards long-term sustainability, we are in a good spot by now 
Since this also comes up every now and then, we also don't want to depend on donations. This is in my view not the right compensation model in our current society. Looking at such projects, it also wouldn't realistically work to pay our bills. We have started to donate money to other organizations developing apps like https://opencollective.com/gitea and you can look for yourself how much time you would spend helping, handholding users to ensure their data and service is not lost but up, and developing features for others from that donated amount. However that is their decision not ours to make, which is why we started to support such projects regardless. They deserve it in my opinion, I can only imagine how much time they spend on such a polished app, unfortunately not many people value it with money to buy this famous cup of coffee, to make that a viable model.
On top of all this, the pricing also just contain very pragmatic decisions. For example the mentioned monthly vs. yearly price tags. Reality is that most users have Cloudrons over a long period of time, afterall we talk about servers. With monthly payments we got a lot of churn where invoices failed for various reasons (mostly oversight or credit card expiration, temporary failure,...) those were annoying for us and users, created much useless manual work to handle and on top of all this, monthly payments amount in higher transaction and accounting fees. All this is just wasted money and energy not targeting the product and your use-cases. This is essentially the reason why the difference is so high.
To wrap up, my opinion: With more adoption, we can afford to lower prices for everyone, BUT we won't just buy more adoption by giving more for free, as this results in pushing the cost to subscribers.
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@nebulon said in Proposal: Free-Tier Alterations
:To wrap up, my opinion: With more adoption, we can afford to lower prices for everyone, BUT we won't just buy more adoption by giving more for free, as this results in pushing the cost to subscribers.
I hope with this clear and good statement this ever returning discussion can be closed.
If you can't afford 3 beers
a month (=$15) for this wonderful product (=Cloudron) that manages your server safely, keeps it up-to-date, provides you with hundreds of apps, keep them up-to-date and provides you email, backups, usermanagement, etc etc ... then you always have a choice to not use Cloudron. -
To wrap up, my opinion: With more adoption, we can afford to lower prices for everyone, BUT we won't just buy more adoption by giving more for free, as this results in pushing the cost to subscribers.
@nebulon appreciate the response and respect with your plan of action. Hope I didn't cause a ruckus here as I was not fully a part of the previous SUB discussions & I have not seen any suggestion like this, just trying to help both parties 🦾
On the flipside it sounds like we can just focus on producing content & selling/supporting the people who ARE willing to pay, collectively bringing the price down... Maybe in the future something can be done to further accommodate the "free tier" but for now I agree on why this is not ideal.
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I'm not particularly keen on this proposal (especially having read @nebulon's reasoning), but I would like the free tier to have unlimited users (even though in practice I bet the vast majority use less than the 20 users that are currently allowed).
This is for 2 reason:
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It's more tempting for people to try out and sounds like a much better deal even though most wouldn't take advantage of it (a bit like how mobile networks in the UK nearly always offer unlimited texts these days, knowing full well most people aren't going to spend their whole days texting - and of course actually having fair use in the small print)
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If you did have a team with 21 users you could actually fully properly use Cloudron with just two apps.
Indeed, I think all restrictions aside from the number of apps should be lifted in the free tier, e.g. it should also include a full mail server and let people assign roles too etc.
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@robi Looks like its just you and I who like this idea lol! I understand everyone's concern of outdated systems & the extra support work it could lead to. It was more of a "its the free tier so its their problem to deal with" proceed at your own risk but fully rethinking it again that might be a good recipe for disaster, leaving people out to dry. There could be some use cases for "static" systems like in an isolated network but that's not common. Regardless appreciate everyone feedback and glad we can have a discussion without any issues. 🦾Cloudron
✌💙+1
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@plusone-nick thanks for bringing it up and promoting the discussion.
I am ambivalent on the pricing, and agree with the great points made about keeping systems updated and patched. Learning more about how some of those choices cause excessive problems is also eye opening.
My wish still stands for engineering an experience of more soak time and ability to see the difference in quality of life. From that perspective it's worth a lot more.
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@plusone-nick said in Proposal: Free-Tier Alterations
:Provide a one time "Update" subscription/service
Anything that encourages people to run outdated software for free sounds like a nightmare and irresponsible to me.
Sorry, but none of this makes any sense.
People pay $10/month for music and video subscription services where they never own the data.
$15/month for what can replace many other paid services is a time-waster filter in my opinion.
Decent System Admins are in the $50-250/hour range. I seriously think Cloudron is too cheap sometimes.
As far as I'm concerned the current pricing is very generous and accommodating for my needs.
I feel it is up to us as the larger network of experienced experts to champion the cause on other chatrooms, forums, social media and business contacts as to how happy we are with Cloudron and what great value it is.
Attracting more developers to app packaging also keeps increasing the value.
I'm trying to get some higher ticket clients onto it, that can then sponsor more of the enterprise types apps.
Maybe if we focus on getting more higher paying subscribes, that will create the economies of scale for a lower pricing on a home tier.
I hate limitations on software - but completely respect paying for luxury add-ons, security not being a luxury.
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@plusone-nick said in Proposal: Free-Tier Alterations
:It was more of a "its the free tier so its their problem to deal with" proceed at your own risk but fully rethinking it again that might be a good recipe for disaster, leaving people out to dry.
I'm glad you came around, this is definitely the better way to think about it. Sure, the license terms may say that you're on your own, no support etc; but users don't interact with license terms, they interact with your product. If someone has a bad time because of choices you enabled them to make with your product, somebody has to pay something ($, time, ...) to fix it, be it staff, the community, or even the product's reputation. I hope the team avoids going into future-support-debt in exchange for a short-term growth spurt.
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I'm not sure where all new users here are coming from - but I do bang on to as many devs as I can, and Tweet & Retweet @cloudron_io mentions whenever possible, so I hope a few have made it here from that.
I even one posted a "Job" on Upwork for people to package Apps on Cloudron - not because I needed anyone - but because I knew the posting would reach lots of developers and hopefully a few of them would look it and get involved anyway
Just shout loud and proud wherever we travel online about it.
I think the people smart enough to be visionary with the product are equally smart enough to make their business model sustainable.
gets off soapbox and goes back to very much enjoying working with the apps I discovered here
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How about we limit forum access until everyone has posted a 5
review on at least 2 public sites listing Cloudron as an option and upvoted all the others? -
@marcusquinn said in Proposal: Free-Tier Alterations
:@plusone-nick said in Proposal: Free-Tier Alterations
:Provide a one time "Update" subscription/service
Anything that encourages people to run outdated software for free sounds like a nightmare and irresponsible to me.
Sorry, but none of this makes any sense.
Indeed and no worries, it was a half baked idea and that’s why I wanted to discuss it
People pay $10/month for music and video subscription services where they never own the data.
$15/month for what can replace many other paid services is a time-waster filter in my opinion.
I get it and you’re preaching to the choir lol as mentioned I don’t have any qualms with the price.
I just had someone on Reddit complain after I suggested Cloudron that’s it’s “too expensive”...I wanted to respond with the similar “15$ for Spotify” argument but value is more subjective than objective sometimes. I responded with “assuming you want to pay nothing?”The idea was to find a middle ground for those on the fence but they can stay up there I guess, you can’t make everyone happy
️✌💙+1
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@plusone-nick It's all good - I did suggest at some point a lower cost tier for families to somehow encourage kids to get Cloudroning.
All great minds here, kinda like a free think-tank and experience market-research debate to save devs time.
I can see many ways to slice things - but ultimately, I think founder intuition is always going to be good and open, so it seems to me the current model has been good enough to get things to this point, and it's a free market that I haven't found anything better value in, so maybe others will either find the same or pay with their time instead of what's been good to all those already here.
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
@marcusquinn Kids! we need a good writeup everywhere on how to run your own minecraft server the easy way.. the Cloudron way!
