Licensing and pricing change on 19th Feb. 2018

Official news and announcements
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Tomas
Posts: 1206
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:33 pm

Wed Nov 15, 2017 1:23 am

Hi everyone.

We will be updating our pricing, and changing our business model on 19th Feb. 2018.
In this post, we want to share all the details of this change.

How will this affect current customers?
It will not.

Customers that already purchased Unimus licenses will not be affected in any way.
The licenses that you purchased are yours to keep forever, just like you were promised when you purchased them.

What is changing?
Starting on 19th Feb. 2018, we are switching to yearly-licensing.
This means pricing will be per-device, per-year.

If you bought (or buy) any licenses before February 2018, they will be permanent, and there will not be any yearly cost for them.
Yearly payment is applied only to purchases after February 2018.

What is the new pricing?
$4.5 per-device, per-year.
Example: 160 devices = $720 yearly ($60 monthly).

The unlimited license will be at $6900 per year.

What about support?
All licenses will come with support.
'Support hours' will not be purchasable anymore.

As you probably know, we are very dedicated to providing top notch support.
This change will allow us to be even better - more in the next section.

How will support change?
We will start offering phone-based support for customers on the unlimited license.
This means that there will be a phone number you can call at any time, and a person will pick up, and help you.

Why are you doing this?
When we started selling Unimus more then a year ago, we did not feel justified asking yearly payments.
However, as you can see by our release history - we have been steadily releasing monthly for over a year now.

Unimus is now also much, much more than it was a year ago.
If any of you remember the early Beta versions, you know how far we have moved since then.

We hope we have proven that we can deliver updates to Unimus on schedule, and we can keep improving it consistently.
We have big plans and ideas, and we want to deliver them to you.
That's why we are switching to yearly payments - to help us with that goal.

The 2nd consideration is support.
Any of you that ever emailed or chatted with us will know that we are extremly dedicated to offering the best support possible.
Up until now, we tried to sell support hours, but in the past year only 7 support hours were purchased in total.
We spent hunderds of hours providing support in that year, and as you can imagine, the costs add up.

The yearly payment model will make it possible to provide even better support.
If you ever run into issues with Unimus, we will be there to help.

Since payments will be yearly now, what will improve?
As we mentioned in the previous segment, support will get even better than it currently is.

We also want to hire more developers.
Unimus currently has 2 full-time developers, and me.
I deal mostly with support, the forum, and business related things.
(altho I still code a day or two a week)

Getting more developers will speed up the development pace of Unimus greatly, getting more features to everyone faster.

TL;DR?
We are switching to yearly licensing on 19th Feb. 2018.
$4.5 per-device, per-year.

Current customers will NOT be affected.
All previously purchased licenses stay permanent.

We are doing this to:
- improve Unimus by hiring more developers
- continue offering high quality support as we have up until now

Final words
We would love your feedback on this - positive or negative.
We also want to be as transparent about this as possible - if you have any questions, I will be glad to answer them.

Thanks for getting this far everyone!
We really hope you stick with us and continue to be as enthusiastic about Unimus as we are even after this change.
User avatar
Tomas
Posts: 1206
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:33 pm

Wed Dec 06, 2017 6:54 pm

Original post updated - we are moving the licensing change date to February 2018.
smccloud
Posts: 15
Joined: Tue Oct 17, 2017 2:46 pm

Thu Dec 07, 2017 4:21 pm

There will still be a free license for up to 5 devices, correct?
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Tomas
Posts: 1206
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:33 pm

Thu Dec 07, 2017 4:21 pm

smccloud wrote:
Thu Dec 07, 2017 4:21 pm
There will still be a free license for up to 5 devices, correct?
Yes, free tier stays unchanged.
SeanCTS
Posts: 60
Joined: Thu Nov 02, 2017 7:29 pm
Location: Orlando, FL

Thu Dec 07, 2017 4:35 pm

So basically if we want lifetime licenses, we better get them before Feb.
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Tomas
Posts: 1206
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:33 pm

Thu Dec 07, 2017 4:36 pm

SeanCTS wrote:
Thu Dec 07, 2017 4:35 pm
So basically if we want lifetime licenses, we better get them before Feb.
Yes ;)
JAz
Posts: 43
Joined: Thu Apr 26, 2018 11:06 pm

Sun Apr 29, 2018 5:36 pm

Tomas,

I realize I'm a little late to this party but I have a small bone to pick with the licensing scheme. Actually just the "stepping".

$4.50 a year per device imho is very fair. No gripe there. Where I think there is a problem is that the per seat license ends at 500 seats. This creates a huge "step" from 501 seats up to around 1500 seats.

Here's what I mean:
$4.50 per seat x 500 seats = $2250
$6900 / 501 seats = appx $13.75 per seat. This is approximately a tripling of per seat cost.

I see many vendors do this and I don't understand it. Imo this is a sort of "shoot yourself in the foot" type of thing. Not trying to be critical here, just laying out my thoughts and hoping you will consider it for improvement.
Personally, I'm not big enough to actually hit this cap (at least not any time in the next few of years) but it def. makes me stop and think and I imagine it's a definite consideration for some in the "between" area. If I was starting or considering Unimus, and had 750-1000 seats, my costs would be between 2 and 3 times the "$4.50" per seat price, I might not justify the full $6900/yr and might have to take a pass.

Just food for thought.

One more thing.
I recognize that support costs money. No question or qualms there. Consider though that anyone with a few hundred routers might want/need access to priority support. The "step" from $6900 to $13900/year might be hard to justify. So perhaps consider a block "add on" for prio support at whatever license level one is at. Maybe $1000/yr up to 100, and then base + some percentage (50%?) of license costs up to "the cliff"
For example:
user A has 50 seats, pays $4.50 x 50 = $225/yr + $1000/yr for prio
User B has 220 seats pays $4.50 x 220 = $990/yr = $1000 + ($990 x 50% =) $470 = $990+$1470/yr

As above, the "cutoff" numbers should stay favorable up to or at least very close to transition point to unlimited plans. This makes more sense (imo) than "penalizing" the users that fall in between these extremes.

I think it's a good concept and product you've got going here. Consider that these points might be barriers to growth. Again, just food for thought.
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Tomas
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Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:33 pm

Mon Apr 30, 2018 9:20 am

JAz wrote:
Sun Apr 29, 2018 5:36 pm
I realize I'm a little late to this party but I have a small bone to pick with the licensing scheme.
We are always happy to hear everyones opinions, so first of all thanks for your time and ideas!
JAz wrote:
Sun Apr 29, 2018 5:36 pm
I have a small bone to pick with the licensing scheme. Actually just the "stepping".
We talked about this with the team today, and we agree the stepping can be a bit unfair in the 500-1000 devices range.

Therefore, we have agreed to extend the per-device pricing to up to 1000 devices.
This should be more fair to mid-sized networks.
JAz wrote:
Sun Apr 29, 2018 5:36 pm
Consider though that anyone with a few hundred routers might want/need access to priority support. The "step" from $6900 to $13900/year might be hard to justify. So perhaps consider a block "add on" for prio support at whatever license level one is at.
We talked about this as well, but we decided not to change how the support mechanism works for now.

24/7 priority support is meant for corporate / enterprise clients that really require the ability to make a call and have support right there and then. As you can imagine, keeping a person available on-call 24/7 is not trivial, so the pricing reflects that.

Introducing an option to "step up" support would also bring much more complexity to the pricing model, that would need to be explained to the users clearly. Keeping with the spirit of Unimus itself, we tried to make the pricing and licensing model as simple as possible, and we feel this would make it quite complex.
JAz
Posts: 43
Joined: Thu Apr 26, 2018 11:06 pm

Mon Apr 30, 2018 9:34 pm

Thanks for a considered and thought out reply Tomas. My intent was food for thought (esp. since it's not likely to affect me anytime soon.)
I'm glad the stepping idea makes sense and you're moving on it. I think it's a good compromise point :)

I also get the issues with support. Again, just meant to make you think.
As long as it doesn't hurt the project's growth and longevity (since I'm going to commit as a user), fair enough.


Oh and kudos for being responsive and listening. Already you demonstrate more than many of my other vendors and so-called "partners". They could take a lesson....
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