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:
- 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.
- I’d have to release a new version every month and leasing customers would have to upgrade their version every month.
- 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.
- I’d have set up a system to accept recurring payments (not a huge deal).
- 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.
The question I would ask myself if I were you is why would someone want to lease the software rather than purchase it.
With the 5 user licence starting at $125 I can not see the price being a huge issue for someone who is actually considering the software. Even the $500 unlimited user licence would not be an issue in most corporate settings.
So, what is the benifit of leasing vs. buying. I can only see one thing: the possibility to get your hands on the source code. Of course if the code was encrypted it would not do you any good. This, in my opinion is one of the downsides to PHP scripts. Don’t get me wrong, I love PHP and use it for many things, but as a non-compiled language it does present a challenge to developers such as yourself.
I have been using Tasks for a few weeks now and I am very impressed. I have just receintly signed up for a demo account for Tasks Pro and have been equally impressed. So, impressed that I will be recommeding that we upgrade to Pro in the near future.
You know, you get what you pay for and this is a solid product, well worth the $$.
DJA
The scenario this fellow wanted to use Tasks Pro in was for a web hosting company, He would have 2-3 internal users and potentially 50-200 occasional external users. I think he was trying to find a way to keep the initial costs down.
It’s an interesting idea, I’m just not sure how many people would really use it.
I personally like the Monthly fee model like you will find with BaseCamp. Not everyone wants to bother with maintaining software… that is the beauty of web-based products.
That is a hosted service, that is totally different than a leased license. With a leased license you still install and maintain it. You actually have to maintain it every month…
Basecamp’s pricing makes no sense to me – paying by the project? Crazy…
Have you considered doing a hosted service? I would imagine that would expand your customer base as not everyone can install php/mysql applications.
I can’t imagine that many people using the leasing option. Most good software costs more than you’re asking for.
Josh
I’d have to do a major rewrite of Tasks Pro for it to support a multi-tenant system (like I hacked together for the Trial) to set up a hosted service, but I have considered it.
Or you could set up a licensing sever per se. You would only have to encode that. Your key’s would have an expire time built into them and Tasks Pro would just always check with the license server to see if a valid license exists.
Then a person could just enter a new license key into the server once a month or year. No re-installs required.
Or potentially you could run the license server and Tasks Pro would have to crosscheck with your server for validity. Though each installation of Tasks Pro would have to have it’s own unique id – to use while communicating with your server.
This would avoid having to constantly encode your source code.
I actually think Basecamp is very reasonable, espescially considering the quality of the product.
I agree with Ryan but would like to expand on one of his points. You could run a key server that checks a client hash against your db. Since this is a web program, every time someone logs in or hits the page it could do a quick check to make sure their key has not expired. This COULD be done from an encoded distribution or from a hosted version. You could even set this up to work with a shopping cart or paypal so that once they pay the fee it adds x number of days to their expiry date; LOW maintenance!
I think the guy Alex was originally talking about was actually looking for a hosted solution and didn’t realize there was a difference in terminology.
I thought the guy was asking for a hosted solution, but he wasn’t. It took him a little while to get that through to me too. 🙂