activeCollab Listens to the Community
Several days ago, I expressed my dissatisfaction with activeCollab’s new pricing model. Well, since then, it appears that the team has listened to their community and adjusted their pricing model accordingly. It’s only fair that I blog about this as well. After seeing the new pricing model, it is clear that Ilija Studen and the team are interested in staying in business.
Read a few of the comments from the first pricing announcement here. You will notice that the general vibe from the community was negative when the original pricing model was released. Here’s why I was turned away.
- The project used to be free and open source. Any price increase will turn away customers, but going to a massive fee from free is a large and dramatic jump. Many people were using this as a free alternative to Basecamp, and since it’s no longer free, those customers are lost.
- The up front cost is pretty high. Not only is the initial price not appealing, but some people just can’t plain afford it.
- Upgrades & support was expensive. On top of the initial large expense, it was expensive to maintain your software. Upgrades are imperative as security holes can present a problem with your website.
- Limitations were useless. The versions limited the number of projects which was pointless because it didn’t cost aC any more money if you hosted more projects because the script is hosted by the customers.
The last three of these issues were resolved in the revised pricing model. One of the mistakes I think they made with their first pricing model was that they tried to make their project appealing to both the open source world as well as the proprietary world. That’s tricky to do if not impossible. In the most recent pricing model, at the time of this writing, addressed that. Ilija decided to drop the free version, and as it did turn away some people, I believe it was the right thing to do. It is clear that they are more focused on making money off of the non-free version, and as they said on the website, someone else will pick up the slack in that area.
So although it’s not free, I find this pricing model more plausible as a solution for me and several others out there, but the most commendable thing was the fact that they were willing to make such a change based on the commenter’s suggestions and complaints. Good job, aC.
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 11:23 am and is filed under Entrepreneurial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
