Wait… Free?
“Okay so let me get this straight, when we first spoke it was $13k to own it, and now its free? Are you sure about this?” a dear friend and repeat client who runs an agency just asked me.
I get that you want to provide for your family, sooo what are you thinking?
Are we going to offer a “freemeium” model where you get crippleware for free and the useful parts in expensive add-ons?
Nope.
Are we going to have a different license depending who you are?
Nope.
Are we going have a donation button or something?
Yes, but it will point to our favorite charity, which can do more good with the cash than us.
So I give up, why do you think destroying your perfectly viable license revenue is going to provide stability and creative freedom?
Here’s what I see. The biggest challenge my crew has is bizdev. We’re not perfect at everything, but we sure can deliver sweet stuff and we improve every day, execept for sales.
We’ve only really won good gigs through word of mouth. We’ve tried just about everything, and without marrying yourself to a particular vertical, it’s very difficult to define a meaningful marketing strategy for a web/IT services company that wants to do “cool stuff.” From my experience you do your best, and try to cultivate as many life long associates and friends who will recommend you as you go.
As the network slowly grows, things get easier over time, but it doesn’t really deliver with security and creative freedom if it ties you to a limited local gossipy scene. (yeah i said it).
So while completely giving away something we have and can charge a lot for, we’re actually doing ourselves a practical favor. Sure, we’ll be giving up a revenue stream, but we’re dropping a expensive business development challenge that we’ve never been good at or interested in solving. We certainly will still spend some real resources to make Concrete5 known – but a lot of that can be our time instead of cash. Moreover, if what we’ve been working on all these years is really as good as we think it is, we stand to jump-start a process that would traditionally take much longer. I’m interesting in seeing what a larger open source developer community might contribute to the project from a code standpoint, but I’m hungry for their evangelism about concrete5 to their clients. I don’t need (or want) to own every dollar that is made off of concrete5. Why not just get out of the way and respond to opportunities as they arise as thousands of people deliver concrete5 powered solutions to their clients?
That’s the practical reason to go “free beer.” The real one is better:
Content management is a basic human right.
It costs next to nothing to write your thoughts on a piece of paper and nail it to a door, it should cost about the same to make a basic website without it having to be a blog. If we can do that, we’ll win one way or another.
“Are we going to offer a “freemeium” model where you get crippleware for free and the useful parts in expensive add-ons?
Nope.”
Mmmm… Are you sure? So, what’s the marketplace supposed to do?
I don’t want to speak bad about concrete, I’m just trying to figure out better the whole thing.
Lazza
April 11, 2009 at 12:34 pm
That’s a fair question, here’s a direct answer.
The marketplace is not crippleware for several reasons.
1) Concrete5 core is full of features. We never sat down and said “how little can we give them to suck em in so they have to spend money on what we really care about?” In fact quite the opposite is true. When were looking at features that go into the core the question is “can everyone benefit from this, does it add much bloat, and is it something that should really be done ‘right’ once instead of as a bunch of add-ons?” That’s how we decide what goes in core. The idea is all the tools you need to build 80% of the websites out there, and nothing you don’t need.
So for example, you will never see a bunch of permission modules in our marketplace like you do at Drupals, because our core concrete5 offering handles both simple and advanced permissions right out of the box. There are countless other “enterprise level” features that are in the core, so I really don’t think anyone could rationally look at that and say “oh yeah, it’s a teaser for concrete5-platinum”.. Moreover, I am strongly against maintaining two core versions of the app. I think one always suffers, and it’d obviously be the free one..
So point 1 – concrete5 core is a LOT for free. Be happy. ‘crippleware’ wouldn’t.
#2) $55 for a calendar block is not expensive. $15 for an image gallery is not expensive. These are things that a PHP developer could write from scratch. It would /certainly/ take longer to pay a PHP developer to write one from scratch than it would to just buy the block. Value your own time, at some point you might want to ask yourself if it is in your interest to build everything from scratch or if perhaps you could do better by spending a little cash instead of only your time. Even the new ecommerce add-on we’re discussing in the marketplace is pretty affordable.. Yes I know there are free ecommerce apps out there, and I encourage you to use them, but me setting a price point of $255 for a beefy enterprise level version seems pretty reasonable.
So #2 – common, we compete with software that often comes with a 5 or 6 figure license fee. You’re telling me that $55 for an extra feature not everyone needs, but you do, is a sin?
#3) We are willing and eager to sell OTHER people’s stuff in the marketplace. We’ve made it clear time and time again that if someone wants to submit a block for free, or for us to sell, we’ll happily review it and post it to the marketplace. All that we ask is that it work, be well written, and be useful. No, we’re not interested in this becoming some wiki-powered-anarchy. We think it’s important that stuff you find in the marketplace be safe to install and actually behave. We don’t want one add-on destroying another. This means we will always have a smaller marketplace than some projects, but whats in there will make sense.
To be frank, we’ve had maybe half a dozen submissions from other programmers, most of which have made it live, all of which are free. You spend your time writing something you want to sell in there, and I’ll be happy to help you do that.
so #3 – we haven’t kept all the good parts, in fact were willing to help you make some money too in selling your extensions.. hey, if you don’t even like that, by all means go post your add-ons on your own site, we have no problem with at as long as you’re careful about using our logo.
So really, no. To me 1) crippleware? We’re not that at all. 2) For just a few bucks, or less than a few hours worth of development time you might have a nicely thought out solution to a problem you need to solve for a particular client..and 3) you might be able to make some money selling stuff there yourself.
Seems pretty reasonable to me and we’re gonna stick with it. I bet we do get ongoing attitude from a percentage of the open source community about it. I bet that same 10% aren’t members of our partner program, aren’t hosting sites with us, and aren’t spending that much time helping other people in the forums. Certainly if that 10% wants to undercut our commercial add-ons with their own free ones, we’re fine with that. We can handle some healthy competition. What we can’t do is work for no pay forever, and what we are unwilling to do is provide a crappy experience to the end site owners “because its open source.”
franzmaruna
April 11, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Thank you. Just to be sharp, open source does not mean free. I’m happy to pay $50 for an open source software. I’m not happy at all to pay $25 for a proprietary one. That’s all.
Lazza
April 11, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Best of luck to you guys!
kyle
April 12, 2009 at 12:41 am
It’s nice to see Concrete5 out there in the market. It’s the first CMS(other than WordPress) that have themes that are clean and easy to make. I am anxious to get down and see how the insides work. I appreciate that this is now open source.
Jack
April 14, 2009 at 3:42 pm