What do you feel about the $50 per worker pricing?

[jstanden]

Recently the pricing for Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 changed to a straightforward rate of $50 per worker. A license goes unlimited at 50 workers. Upgrades for Cerb 2.0 and 3.0 license holders are priced at $25 per worker.

This lowers our entry-level price for smaller companies, which we feel is important considering the higher product requirements (PHP5 with mailparse and imap extensions). Consequently, the pricing tweak raises the higher-end of our pricing to reflect that the major benefit of Cerberus is team collaboration. Each worker that's more productive is creating more value for your company. $50 per worker for the tools we provide should be a no-brainer (at least that's how we see it, and we're admittedly a bit biased!) ;)

It's important to mention that Cerb4 pricing entitles you to all upgrades in the 4.x version. Upgrade pricing from 4.0 is not billed annually, and will only apply when we reach 5.0 (which is contingent on PHP6, and likely at least a year into the future). If 5.0 is released within a year of your purchase you'll receive a new license for free.

We feel the new pricing is a much better way to let companies of all sizes benefit from all helpdesk functionality without us holding any features hostage.

But it doesn't matter what we think, it matters what you think. So? :)

[xps]

I must admit you sur'prised' me - i would say its a good move.
Congrats.

[trax]

Makes sense.

[fabiotpr]

It is good for small companies. But what for small-medium ones?
With our 20 users price is raised to 1000 USD.

f.

[jstanden]

Hey Fabio!

If you have 20 payroll workers on the helpdesk then $50/person ($1000 one-time) should be among the least of your expenses, right? The helpdesk is probably used more often, and to greater business effect, than the likely larger amount provisioned per head for pencils and staplers.

(edit: I should add that if you have real concerns about the pricing because of your business plan, such as having a lot of volunteer workers, you're welcome to contact sales(@)webgroupmedia.com to work something out.)

[fabiotpr]

I was focusing your attention only that new pricing model is a vantage for small one, but a disadvantage for medium/big company. Your speech is right but keep in mind that Kayako is now cheaper than Cerberus.

f.

[jstanden]

I was focusing your attention only that new pricing model is a vantage for small one, but a disadvantage for medium/big company.

Hey Fabio!

I don't think it's that simplistic. Larger companies also have much more to gain by improving team coordination too.

Technically, though, all our pricing is aimed at small businesses. In the U.S., a small business is considered up to 100 employees and a mid-sized business up to 500. We offer an unlimited license at 50+ workers.

Your speech is right but keep in mind that Kayako is now cheaper than Cerberus.So is every free open source project (and a thousand other alternatives).

Luckily our software isn't an interchangeable commodity that can be compared solely on price, right? ;)

I think that, for most people, innovation, personality, vitality and transparency also factor into a decision when comparing projects. We've built our entire company on that idea.

As a developer, I'd be happiest with everyone benefiting from my work. In a perfect world we'd give everything away and still be able to own our time, pay rent, feed our families and provide health insurance. In the real world we try to strike the best balance we can. :)

[chris bell]

Personally, if the couple of minor issues with printing are sorted,

We'll be upgrading - its a Bargin in my view.

Best,

Chris

[fabiotpr]

Yes, there are still some big issue I want to see solved before taking a decision (group failure email CHD-486, pre-parser rules CHD-445, internationalizations CHD-103, multiple reply-to address CHD-518, spam training from rules CHD-532).

I'm surprised that time is spent implementing new plugins (crm, forum explorer, mobile) or new features (sla, time tracking) instead solving this blocking bugs.

f.

[jstanden]

Personally, if the couple of minor issues with printing are sorted

I flagged that printing feature request for my usability task list. ;)

[jstanden]

Yes, there are still some big issue I want to see solved before taking a decision (group failure email CHD-486, pre-parser rules CHD-445, internationalizations CHD-103, multiple reply-to address CHD-518, spam training from rules CHD-532).

Grouping failure e-mail isn't critical compared to some of these other requests, but it would definitely be useful. I haven't looked into it, but it's probably trivial to finish up.

We have pre-parse mail rules about 50% completed. You can match to, from (addy/org), subject, new/reply, headers or body. So far the actions are: ignore, mark spam, redirect. This allows people to borrow the spam scoring from Spam Assassin and several other big requests.

Internationalization just got a huge boost from the UTF-8 issues we fixed up today and blogged about here:
http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2008/03/12/my-kingdom-for-an-umlaut/

Multiple reply-to is a pretty rare situation, so it's also not surprising it's not considered a 'blocker'. But I agree it needs some attention.

Not doing automatic "not-spam" training from mail rules isn't a blocker either. You're the only one who's requested it or voted on it (as far as I can tell). We'll still happily do something about it, but you'd have a hard time making the case we're belligerently ignoring something people are banging the door down about (the same way you could about the ongoing internationalization issues that should have been solved much sooner).

I'm surprised that time is spent implementing new plugins (crm, forum explorer, mobile) or new features (sla, time tracking) instead solving this blocking bugs.

It shouldn't be that surprising if you think about it.

We collect all our feedback of what to work on through the forums (Forum Explorer) or email (CRM). It makes sense for us to have those pieces in place just to help gather better feedback and build the roadmap democratically. Without the Forum Explorer you'd never see me here answering replies.

Service Levels are very useful so we can respond to the issues of paying users first.

Time Tracking hasn't actually received any attention yet, but we're shifting some focus to it because it's ranked #1 on the "What do you want to see next?" poll.

I agree that the mobile plugin isn't all that important, but it's been something a few of the devs over here (like Mike@WGM) can work on to push the plugin system and Devblocks (and ultimately help document it).

Thanks for your thoughts!

[fabiotpr]

Internationalization just got a huge boost from the UTF-8 issues we fixed up today and blogged about here:
http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2008/03/12/my-kingdom-for-an-umlaut/

I was talking about having cerberus translated (or ready to) in other languages as Cerb 2.x does.

f.

[Hildy]

That's what Jeff's referring to, too, fabiotpr. We're gonna be stripping the text from the templates in short order, possibly creating a TMX editor plugin to make translating easier, and then enlisting help from the community to actually translate the strings.

[jgrose]

Both pricing options are excellent in my group's opinion. The SoS (hosted) for $50 flat rate is great (although I can't speak to it's performance in larger environments since I haven't actually used it) and the $50 per head one time is very reasonable considering the alternatives.

We paid a good amount of $$$ for Track-it! Enterprise (talk about bloatware) and (at least in our case) it is nowhere near as useful/fast to us as Cerberus appears to be.

[peter_mcc]

It's ok but my bosses don't like spending money so I can see what would happen is some people who should use Cerberus occasionally would "miss out" on a license. We've got that problem now - 10 user license but really need 13 or so! I guess the upgrade pricing makes it ok for us now.
peter

[jstanden]

Hey all!

We've also decided to split the difference with you guys:
http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2008/03/18/save-60-on-the-upgrade-to-unlimited-workers/

We're bringing the "unlimited workers" cap down to 20 from 50, which should make the unlimited worker license a lot more accessible (especially when coupled with an upgrade discount).

That means the initial purchase price scales by $50 per worker from 2 to 19 workers, and after 20 ($995) it's unlimited. The same is true at $25 per worker from 2 to 19 for upgrades, and after 20 ($497) it's unlimited.

If you've already purchased 4.0 you'll either qualify for a deep discount or a free upgrade to unlimited. The blog link above has the full details.

Thanks for sharing your opinions so far!

[jwattscpc]

I would say the $50 per user pricing was perfect. It certainly cuts our costs down vs. the $995 when we only have 6 users. However, I thought $995 was a steal for the things we have gotten with Cerberus.

We've spent more money than that on *junk* systems that have gained us nothing in return.

/John

[dsugita]

Thank you all for your input on this poll/thread, the pricing has been changed and Jeff has posted a blog topic regarding it at: http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2008/05/06/more-pricing-tweaks-what-a-bunch-of-incrementalists/

Thanks again!