Hi @Shaw, Thanks for sharing your concerns. Appreciate your honesty.
Some thoughts that guided us to this model:
Which CMS’ feature set and style suits each project best, remains a question only the developer can decide upon. We think it’s most times actually independent of the price, especially when talking about clients with a revenue of 1 million euros per year.
Kirby is still cheaper or around the same price as many competitors, e.g. Craft and Statamic which you mentioned. A lot at 99 euros for 3 years, but even with 399 euros for 3 years. If you look at that 3 year lifespan, those other systems often add up more than their initial price point. We think it’s a more realistic approach to our customer’s projects, a healthy lifespan where projects don’t need to add money again after just a year.
There will always be some projects that a new license model doesn’t cover. We’re sorry about that, but there’s no way to keep everybody happy when everyone hast such a diverse set of projects, expectations, budgets etc.
In the end, we need to make a call which we think is sustainable for Kirby to be around for many years to come as well as for our customers’ projects. We decided, we would really like to try charging larger businesses a bit more - we think many can achieve - and not raise the price for everybody to something in the mid-100s, which we think would oust many more projects we care about. We hope this works out, tbh we can never be sure. But we believe it meets our community at a level where they can see us being earnest about trying to find a fair model - it’s also in their interest that Kirby development won’t ever stop.
As you mentioned the v2 personal license: This was abused/confused as it had really not a very clear definition, so that many customers didn’t quite understand it (arguably some also didn’t want to properly understand). We think the new one is quite straightforward. We’re hearing the first feedback and questions which will surely help to iron out the phrasing of some aspects for the launch - to make it as clear and easy for customers. We might still get some people who abuse it, but we don’t operate by this fear. We meet our customers with (what we think is) a fair deal and trust that the majority will understand it and pay back some of the value Kirby allows them to generate. Taking the other perspective, putting our code open source on GitHub wouldn’t be a good idea either. Why pay at all then? We believe both can work and don’t need to contradict each other - and the last decade has proven us right.
I think the support is amazing on the forum. @texnixe goes way beyond any time I have a code issue. That said, perhaps a further revenue stream is to charge for “Premium Support”. I would pay for it. Frankly, I think only having to pay 99 EUR once every 3 years is very low for the quality of the software and support combined.
Appreciating everyone has a different perception of value.
It’s not like we have never talked about the topic of paid support. But we always have a hard time to anticipate what expectations this would set, what can be promised, how not to alienate non-paying community members etc.
If someone has good thoughts there, we’re always happy to hear those.
I get it, the difficulty is what do you get and what is the limit? That is always tough.
So perhaps what you get with premium support is really simple:
Ttitle - Premium Support
When someone pays for Premium Support and posts on the forum they get priority answers
and continue to get priority answers until the issue is resolved.
doesn’t have to be much, the cost could be paid monthly for those who just want a bit faster and more frequent help initially or annually for someone like me who will want to always keep it just in case.
It would of course need to be limited in the sense someone can’t post " I want to build a comments system for my blog posts, here is my site, give me all the code to do it…"
I am okay with everything, but this sounds a bit too fast.
v4 has not yet been released, and there is a v5 announcement for 2024.
v3 is here for almost 5 years.
Not sure developers working with Kirby will be able to keep up with that amount of updates. Even now, it is a bit hard to keep up.
We’ve announced earlier this year that we are changing our version number system. So far, we had
generation.major.minor.patch
(e.g. 3.9.7.0) and that was always confusing.
Now we plan to move to true semantic versioning. major.minor.patch
(e.g. 4.0.0)
This means that in our old way of thinking, the step from 4.0 to 5.0 would be the same as from 3.8 to 3.9.
We actually reduce the speed of such big releases with it. With v3, we released 2-3 3.x releases per year and we got the same feedback like yours. It’s too much.
After v4, we want to reduce the amount of such bigger releases to one per year.
This also means that v5 won’t be the same big step like v3 to v4.
I hope this helps to better understand this. The version number change is unfortunately a bit confusing right now, but I think it will really help to make things easier in the coming years.
Yes, exactly. With the version change, it does no longer work to have paid upgrades with every major release. Otherwise you would need to get a paid upgrade every new year according to our plan. That’s why we switch to the 3-year model.
Great, on the first look, now when I think I understand it fully, it looks pretty reasonable.
One note to people, because two of my clients were a bit concerned about the new 399 euros for 1+ million in revenue. Both of them somehow mistake turnover for revenue.
Ravenue = profit
One of those clients is a travel agency, and companies in tourism branches have large turnovers, but often small revenue percentages (from 3-15%). And although their turnover suprases 1 million, their profit is 10 times smaller.
Sorry to disappoint, but revenue is the same as turnover or net sales (sales - returns/discounts - value-added taxes). Profit is revenue - cost of sold goods - operating expenses - interest - remaining taxes. We have decided to base the license price on the revenue as the profit is hard to define with different international business and tax law.
Well, that is unfair, especially to some companies.
As I said in tourism, because they are resellers of services, they can sell air tickets in the amount of 10.000 euros and earn 100 euros on that. Those 100 euros of revenue is what will be taxed, and deducted for operating costs, interest, and so on. They just forward 9.900 euros to the flight company.
I am sure there are also other branches that operate as a mediator, and have a large turnover, but a low percentage of income.
In your example, is 10.000 actually their revenue/turnover or do they collect 9.900 on behalf of the airline and get the 100 worth of commissions? Money collected on behalf of someone else is not considered revenue.
If they get 100 in commissions, their actual profit will be even lower because they also have operating expenses.
They get 100 euros of commission. Yes, their profit is lower than that.
But in their accounting books, everything will be displayed. Full turnover. The whole amount goes through their bank account. That’s why there are a bit special government rules for travel agencies.
Okay, then here is just about correct naming things.
Then 399 euros license is for companies making over 1 million in net revenue, not gross revenue? Is that correct?
I think that article mixes up the difference between gross and net revenue with the special case of agents.
We realize that the distinction between the standard and enterprise licenses is getting quite complex with special cases like agencies. Thanks for your feedback, we are discussing solutions for this that keep the system easy to understand.
Well, what pricing model do you decide we must pay, that’s the fact. But it would be good if it is fair.
It is not only about travel agencies. Most companies that sell products they don’t produce themselves (supermarkets, pharmacies, all kinds of merchandise shops…), have a turnover that doesn’t reflect their profit. Their income is averaging around 10% (of course there are some that put margins much larger than that, but there are some like supermarkets and pharmacies that have lower than that even as low as 3%), and from that 10% they deduct their expenses (salaries, taxes, operating costs, rent…). So, it is pretty tricky to base company size/success on gross revenue.
It is really hard to find a system that is fair for everyone. If we base it on profit, international companies that shift their profit to low-tax countries have an advantage. If we base it on the number of employees, companies in certain industries (take hairdressers) will have a disadvantage compared to solo businesses earning good money (take lawyers).
If you have ideas for fair pricing models, please let us know.
I think is too complex to choose sales as the basis for selecting the license model. This would not be verifiable in an easy way. In addition, too many questions will arise, or groups of companies will feel disadvantaged. It is also not a common practice.
A well-known and working concept is additional services. This also gives the customer the feeling that they are getting more for the extra charge. Additional services can also be better communicated to clients. Otherwise, €399 feels more like taxing the rich
I could very well imagine different models:
Kirby.light 99 €
Includes all standarfuctions to create a simple website
Answers to questions in the forum by the user team
1 year version updates
Kirby.plus 199 €
Use of up to 5 plug-ins
Answering of questions in the forum by the Kirby team
Kirby.light 99 €