Consider renaming Cloudron Tiers

[marcusquinn]

I'm freeing myself up to take on some business clients for Cloudron. So far I've only used it for personal and internal use but I want to learn more about how others see it.

A minor thing I've spotted but something that will help me to help you, is the tier naming doesn't really match what I think people are used to and the feeling of what they mean.

I'm not putting a mark-up on any of this, it's just to help fund the cause, and get more attention to polishing this for the business users I can help with from personal contacts. So, how about this?

• Free = Free (that's all good)
• Premium -> Pro or Professional
• Premium Plus -> Enterprise

I figured we're all friends here so hopefully you don't mind the open-letter post on it.

[A Former User]

For "Premium Pro" read "Premium Plus"

https://www.cloudron.io/pricing.html

[marcusquinn]

@hillside502 Thanks, corrected

[girish]

@marcusquinn Thanks for bringing this up, we are in fact making some changes around this area. Essentially, what's clear as you pointed out is there are personal/professional users and then there are small business and then large companies using Cloudron. Because of our current pricing and feature categorization, all users pretty much go to the Premium plan (with very few on Premium+). This is causing some friction when it comes to timely support as we grow. It's hard for us to make out what requires more attention because the pricing tiers has put everyone in one bucket. Right now, the app set is also very diverse, so categorizing people will better set expectation on what we can do at the price. Apps like GitLab, Open Project, NodeBB etc are quite time consuming to maintain.

I don't want to bikeshed here But in the interest of transparency, I will give an idea of what we are planning to do. Premium will keep it's name but we will lower the monthly price (yearly stays the same). We also want to make this plan to be more suitable for small companies (say 5 people) and individual use (over time, we want to keep the price as low as possible here). This plan will also remove "business-y" features like email lists, signatures, user roles. Otherwise, everything is unlimited - apps/users/domains/mailboxes. Premium+ will get renamed to Business. This will also has a lower price than the current premium+.

Finally, we will have a "contact us"/enterprise with features like the external AD integration. Fact is the people who use AD integration require quite some hand holding and custom fixes, so we need to charge higher.

Important note: all these changes won't affect existing users! We always grandfather pricing and features. You will continue to get what you signed up for forever.

[marcusquinn]

@girish Sounds good. I'm working on some stuff that should generate a few extra Premium/Pro licences per month.

I won't use the referrer link as I want them to add up to an investment in your growth as the approach is one of the best win-win platforms I've worked with in all my online career.

It seems most pricing models now tend towards to 10 months for the price of 12 for annual plans and that seems to strike the balance between cashflow, commitment and up-front investment savings.

I don't know all the answers but happy to discuss in open or private as you prefer.

If you can keep in mind that I think you have a unique potential here to scale with a VAR/MSP model, so maybe that multi-Cloudron feature would be the right separation between personal and professional?

As an example, I have about 12 developers and people that can support Cloudron for users we introduce it to, and we could probably get to the point of onboarding 1 or 2 new businesses a week if I systemise it nicely.

So, all those users you shouldn't hear much or anything from but we would be acting as 1st-line support to filter and funnel any requests appropriately, respectful to your valued time between basic support, and platform & app development. Plus, as we get more experience across the team we'll try to contribute more upstream too.

I see what you're saying about having a home-user tier, although I don't know that I'd remove Cloudron features for that as that's kind of an antithesis to open-source where it's unrestricted but plugins & value add-ons are often extra.

Maybe for a personal plan, have a look at things like Spotify, Netflix etc for pricing inspiration as I think most people are comfortable at those price points.

Thanks for being so open. I do think you can help yourselves a little with some separation on the forum main topics too though. I'll try to find the post where I recommended on that so you don't have to follow everything and let the good community here help you own with some of the more basic questions or general discussions.

[jdaviescoates]

@marcusquinn said in Consider renaming Cloudron Tiers:

I don't know that I'd remove Cloudron features for that

+1