pricing too high
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- don’t pay by month - get an annual subscription
- it’s not about cost : it’s about time saved and knowledge gained. 15/30 bucks is cheap price for time saved, knowledge gained and productivity gained.
I understand money is important, but time knowledge productivity are more crucial.
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I think the price is fair if you set it into relation with the product quality and the support of it.
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I think that if you use it for professional/company related things, 30/15 is nothing. If you use it for personal stuff and fun, the 30 may be challenging, in case you have a budget of just a few bucks per month - but still its a fair price.
I'd only wish there would be some more options. Like 1-year-contract but still monthly payments. Something like 30 per month, 15/m for 1 year and maybe 20 or 18 per month payment but contracted for a whole year.
I understand that yearly subscriptions give more financial flexibility and better calculations for Cloudron. Maybe there's a chance to mix monthly payments and yearly subscriptions in the future.
Another good feature would be if Paypal payments would work right out of the box and without manual request. Cause that way everyone could deal with PayPal and pay monthly or later and Cloudron still gets the full payment instantly.
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@Stardenver monthly payments are convenient for the customer but they're a real pain for the business owner.
Even with repeat billing systems (Stripe, Paypal <yuk>) to do the hard work, even 1% of payments failing cost a lot of time to administer.
I've experienced this in business and with apps.
It really changes the dynamic, so I completely understand and support Cloudron's monthly/annual model.
With so much work for the Cloudron to do maintenance and development of the system and apps, and ever increasing requests for apps, the last thing the community should be asking them to add non-productive work like administering subscriptions.
Discussion of an intermediate tier between 2 and unlimited may be more valid, but I'd expect a similar differentiator between monthly and annual.
Time is money, both for business owner and for customer.
Customer does have to make decision : is this worth forking out a chunk of money for?
Well that's what the free tier is for. 2 apps concurrently, but you can test 50 (in sequence). It's enough to make the decision.
Just my 2p. -
@timconsidine Totally getting your point. But I would still prefer some ootb PayPal payment support due to the flexibility it gives. Cloudron gets full payment and customer still can pay later or in monthly rates.
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We should all remember that there is a generous referral scheme in place :
For every paid user using your referral code, you will receive $30 service credits. The person you referred with get $30 service credits as well.That's one month off for each referral. For each person !
(2 even if you pay annually) -
@timconsidine oh.. if only I would have known
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@Stardenver Yep I get your point also
Maybe bear in mind that for many self-hosters (and Cloudron is all about self-hosting) PayPal is one of the "Big Evils"
Not sure if Cloudron already uses Paypal; if they do, then my point is invalid.Paypal is unregulated and their decisions defy logic or inspection or appeal.
Personally I refuse to use them, even if they are convenient to the consumer. -
@timconsidine From what I read here in the forums they do, but you have to ask support and they will send you a manual paypal payment request.
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The staff have mentioned in other posts that anything lower than $15/30 per month would cause them to lose money if the customer sends in ONE support ticket and that monthly subs cause a major accounting hassle for them.
I propose eliminating, or at the very least offer a single app limit for the free tier (for testing purposes; aka demo) and then offer a lower priced plan for homeservers that has a higher app/user limit (5, 7, 10, wtv) but can only be purchased yearly. It's how ultra-cheap shared hosting is sold (ex: $3/mo but paid yearly). That's less accounting for the staff and more money in their pockets. Bunny(.)net has a $1/mo minimum charge until you exceed certain limits regardless of how many of their services you are using. It's a genius price plan that's pulling in profits. Meanwhile, you have Cloudflare reporting "[losses] (https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/cloudflare-net-reports-q4-loss-tops-revenue-estimates-2021-02-11)" for Q4 2021.
The real brain teaser is that service providers using Cloudron for profit pay the same price as those that don't make any money off of Cloudron.
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@timconsidine said in pricing too high:
Maybe bear in mind that for many self-hosters (and Cloudron is all about self-hosting)
In spirit, maybe. In reality, Cloudron (and in extension, the CR community) caters to "developers" more than it does to the average Joe. Also, I've noticed many open source projects and developers continue to use big-tech and closed source software (Cloudflare, Google, Discord, Github, etc.). Screw big tech but is Paypal where we draw the line?
It just feels like cherry picking since the essence of self-hosting is to break away from big-tech and to preserve our data privacy and control.
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@humptydumpty said in pricing too high:
@timconsidine said in pricing too high:
Maybe bear in mind that for many self-hosters (and Cloudron is all about self-hosting)
In spirit, maybe. In reality, Cloudron (and in extension, the CR community) caters to "developers" more than it does to the average Joe. Also, I've noticed many open source projects and developers continue to use big-tech and closed source software (Cloudflare, Google, Discord, Github, etc.). Screw big tech but is Paypal where we draw the line?
It just feels like cherry picking since the essence of self-hosting is to break away from big-tech and to preserve our data privacy and control.
Well, while you are right with what you said I don't see any big difference between PayPal and your cc provider except the fact that with PP its just one company getting your data while cc payments involve 3 parties. So from that pov PP may even be more privacy friendly (just in comparison. PP isn't privacy friendly in general). Cloudron is using a payment solution and they will - of course - get all your data. Your card is from VISA or Mastercard and therefor they will also receive a lot of your data. Last but not least your bank which handed the card to you and fulfills the payment. Don't know about your country but here in Germany a lot of people use debit cards instead of credit cards and therefor every payment requires a back-check with your bank-account and even though you may be using a real cc, a lot of data will be shared and saved from every of those 3 parties.
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As was already said here to some extent, the goal for us is not to spend much time on accounting and invoicing, but rather work on the product. This mostly means that we keep payment options limited to something which may not be preferred by all people, but is somewhat ok for most. We have basic PayPal option as a fallback if a customer does not have a credit card, but this is not the default. Again this is mostly to keep the time spent on accounting as low as possible. This is also the main reason why we do not want to offer smaller amounts per month at the moment, as any transaction for a start adds extra cost (stripe, cc, tax accounting, ... ) and is prone to failure where we then need to manually follow up.
Generally I guess one can put it as: our business is in enabling self-hosting, not working in accounting. Already choosing stripe is not ideal but a somewhat okish tradeoff so far to not having to reinvent the wheel in an area which is not the product.
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@nebulon said in pricing too high:
the goal for us is not to spend much time on accounting and invoicing, but rather work on the product.
our business is in enabling self-hosting, not working in accounting
Even if you (Cloudron) would become much more attractive by lowering the barrier for small groups and (single) private users? The field were small self hosting has a real impact because business users have much more options and ressources. 17$ for Cloudron, 8$ for a VPS, 4$ for backup = ~30$/month....not reasonable for single users and also a hurdle for smaller teams/non profits. If you are doing business and involve Cloudron, the price is ridiculously low because support is already included.
The free plan is good for evaluation, development and understanding the product but for productive use limited to two apps, it is not reasonable (in most cases) to run a whole server with it.
For a smaller plan you could:
- cut direct support
- only offer yearly plans
- limit app use (obvious) to....I would say 5-7
- lower referral credits to a price that equals 1 month (for both)
- price something between 7-11$ which equals to 84-132$/year...how about 99$?
To end my point: I know I asked this already but if accounting is a pain and you (both) have to focus on development AND support....why not hire someone (part time) to do all the accounting/billing/contracting and maybe communications too? It's not that hard of a job and even if it costs more then you would earn from it, you would save yourself the stress/pain which is, in the end, much more beneficial to yourself AND the product.
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I'm very lucky because Cloudron is basically free for me.
How?
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a special half-price for life deal was offered in New Year 2020. I used that deal to get $15/mo price paid monthly.
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I've referred over 40 paying customers, so I have loads of credits.
For ages now, those credits and paid for my Cloudron(s) and I still have $249 of credit left
I'm a happy bunny
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To no-one in particular, I think we should stop telling Cloudron how to run their business.
Cloudron is astoundingly good value on the annual plan and still good value on the monthly plan.
Hosting costs don't come under the same scrutiny, nor (probably) any form of 'why don't change your pricing model'.
If anyone is going to use the product for >6 months, just take the annual plan and get resourceful about how to fund it.
Cloudron!
