I had an interesting e-mail conversation today with a fellow interested in a leased license of Tasks Pro (as an additional pricing option). There are several software packages that use this model. It’s an interesting idea; basically, this would allow you to buy a monthly usage license.

I’m reluctant to offer this option at the moment unless there are a number of people that would purchase it:

1. I’d need to encode the source for this version so I can expire the release every month. This would definitely increase support issues and make it harder to install.
2. I’d have to release a new version every month and leasing customers would have to upgrade their version every month.
3. Encoding costs money. I’d go with ionCube and their encoder doesn’t run on Mac OS X, so I’d have to use their on-line encoding service (very nice) at a (very reasonable) cost of $20-$25 per encoding. I guess I could buy the Windows version at $200.
4. I’d have set up a system to accept recurring payments (not a huge deal).
5. Another minor detail, I’d need to update the rest of my infrastructure to handle the new products.

I think if I were to offer this as an option, I’d probably offer only one or two versions because of the maintenence involved. Maybe 25 user and unlimited user versions? Pricing would probably be in the $15-$40/month range, I haven’t run any numbers yet.

Anyway, my question is: how many of you would prefer to buy a license like this instead of the current options?

This post is part of the project: Tasks Pro™. View the project timeline for more context on this post.