Hi all! Though I feel a lot has been said already here are my 2 cents for what it’s worth:
While I feel the team has put in a lot of thought into the pricing, it will never satisfy everyone’s needs.
My prefered way would be to keep things simple and simply charge on a yearly base. 99€ seem to be more than fair, even on a yearly base, that would be around 0,27 € per day, including updates. Most software I have on my computer is charged on a yearly base. And sometimes sums are raised I don’t always find justified but that’s for another discussion.
There is one thing though I strongly advise against, and that’s charging for support. The support over here is tremendously helpful & supportive as we pretty much all know and have experienced. I’ve seen enough communities die down over the years - thx to a paywall for support. The results were a torn apart community and knowledge that started to spread elsewhere as people felt left out or forced to pay support. This simply wouldn’t be the one place to turn to when you hit a (kirby) wall. Also, this would mean further administrative hurdles to take, which in effect would mean more resources will be needed to maintain all this.
We had discussed models based on premium support and on feature differentiation, but decided against both of them for various reasons, including those you mentioned @tojai. Subscriptions were out of the question early on as all of us dislike software subscriptions and don’t want to introduce a model that we ourselves wouldn’t want to use as a customer.
In fact it took us over a year to arrive at the model we announced. We agree with you that it’s basically impossible to satisfy everyone’s needs at the same time. We still have the opportunity to fine-tune the licensing model before the launch, but will likely not replace it entirely. You can be sure that we considered many options and ultimately decided on the one we announced.
Hi, @lukasbestle, I contemplated for a while about the subject, and I must say I fully understand the presented pricing, all the reasons behind it, and what you are trying to accomplish. And it is a great pricing model, much better than any already available. But, maybe some fine-tuning is needed for that “corporate” price.
Here are two live examples:
Client: Travel agency based in Serbia. As I explained, they are a mediator, and sell various third-party services (air tickets, tours, excursions, transfers…), and although their yearly turnover is slightly over 1 million, their income is less than 10% of that. And from those 10% all other expenses, taxes, and everything is deducted. And when I tell you they have 6 employees, you can easily count that they are far from being rich. But, the price of 399€ wouldn’t be a problem if they have one Kirby website, but they have 4 Kirby websites. All websites are pretty similar (different colors, design theme), and built on the same “engine”, but they need 4 domains, for 4 different client targeting.
Client: Metallurgy company based in the EU. It is actually a group of 6 companies where 4 of them have slightly over 1 million, but recently struggle because drastic rise in expenses and a sharp drop in the construction business in EU. And for them of course wouldn’t be a problem if they have one or two websites, but they have 10 Kirby websites. And now they are considering whether the transition to Kirby was a good idea.
My question
Have you considered situations when a company that surpasses 1 million in yearly revenue has many Kirby websites, and how do you deal with that?
My suggestion for base “corporate pricing”
Because truly there is no better publicly available information than the revenue, by whom you can estimate another company size (number of employees is definitely a worse solution), but considering that 1 million is not the amount it was 10 years ago (or even 5 years ago), especially for a company, my best suggestion would be to raise the bar from 1 million to 2 or 3 million. Or at least to 1,5 million. That’s primarily based on these live examples, where I see that 1 million of revenue doesn’t make a company rich. The goal of that “corporate price” is not to punish someone but to charge more to the ones that have large success and large profit, where certainly their website built with Kirby has a part in that success, and it is normal they share that with you.
Also, there should be a clear solution for those who have many Kirby websites but drop to that “corporate pricing”.
If we were to include more sites with the enterprise license, it would suddenly get cheaper than the standard license.
Our goal was to set the revenue bar high enough so that the company that surpasses the bar can afford the license price for the value Kirby provides to them, even for multiple sites (as each one adds value, otherwise they wouldn’t build and maintain multiple).
Thank you for your detailed feedback on the revenue bar, we will reconsider it. Do you have a suggestion for a solution for multiple sites or would a higher revenue bar already solve that?
Maybe it’s a silly idea but why not just use net profits as a value to calculate who needs an enterprise license?
So if a company is making, I don’t know, more than 250k in profits they need an enterprise license. I’m saying 250 but could easily be 100k or any other threshold you find reasonable.
This would be the best and fairest solution, but @lukasbestle says there are some companies that shift their profit to low-tax countries. Although Lukas’s statement is correct, this is a subject that could be reconsidered.
In a sense, are there really that many companies that offshore profit vs the number of companies that will be punished for their turnover (although their profit is smaller than many that buy regular license) with new pricing?
Shifting profits for tax evasion is only one example. There are a lot of ways to “optimize” profits for different purposes. It would get a lot harder to find a standard definition for profit than it already is for revenue. Also it’s often easier to see from the outside whether a company is above or below a revenue threshold than a profit threshold. Our system is based on trust as we don’t want to request business documents like the annual accounts as a proof. So it helps both you as agencies and freelancers and us to have a system that allows to “sanity-check” the right license without much digging.
I think raising the bar for “corporate/enterprise” licenses a bit and adding volume discounts will make everything fairer, keep Kirby corporate users content with it, and will bring you an extended budget.
I don’t have anything constructive to say about the pricing but wanted to express my gratitude for not switching to a subscription model. I think this is the worst. You should be able to buy something and therefore own and use it indefinitely (at least as long as outer circumstances allow).
I’ve really thought a lot about the pricing model now and I’m sure you have too.
First of all, I’m a big fan of Kirby, trust the Kirby teams competence and decisions insanely. It’s just wow. Great product, great developers, great community.
I find the pricing model all logically understandable, except for one point:
Why does this approach worry me?
A price is usually related to a service. That’s not really the case with this pricing model. There are, so to speak, two prices for the identical product: €99 and €399. Here, the price is related to the licensee’s revenue. For me, it’s more like a tax for “established” companies. You make more revenue, you have to pay more. Mind you, the more revenue is not necessarily linked to a Kirby website. If it were, I think it would be a little more understandable. The sports shoe of type XY in the store costs the same for all customers - even for those with a lot of money. Nobody wants to pay more because of some personal characteristics. Such a pricing model always feels unfair to a certain group.
What I personally would find better:
If you link the 399 € pricing model to services or an argumentation that is comprehensible for most. This argumentation helps agencies and developers to represent this special price to their customers. Because it is primarily the agencies and developers who first decide for Kirby and then develop a website with Kirby for someone else. Please assist the community here, if you stick with it.
A new balanced base price for ALL customers, e.g. 249 €. Back to “Let’s keep it simple”.
Additional to a license price: crowdfunding of further development for specific features. Allows the Kirby community to support you financially for the development of specific features.
Please never stop developing Kirby and find exactly the pricing model needed to do that. If you have already found it, even better. Thank you all
My two cents on this topic. I think the proposed pricing model is pretty fair.
Especially compared to some other CMS’s where you end up paying way more if you just need the most basic feature enabled or just a second user account…
Kirby is one of the few that do not cripple the functionality of their software to force you to pay for a bigger licence just because you need two user accounts or whatever. I really appreciate that approach.
And at least for the projects that I worked on in the past that would have required the 399 license.
The license costs are marginal compared to ongoing costs like hosting, third party services or development time. It is about 11€/month for the 399 license (over the three years). For ongoing projects this might as well be a rounding error at the end of a month just from time tracking.
I get that this is not the case for every project though!
And may also depend very much on the economic situation in your region
But having the licence not tied to the application but to the client/company/person makes it possible to create complex applications (becasue of the full feature set) even for small businesses. And I think this is a good thing.
I appreciate that Kirby is trying to find a pricing model that is in a best case cenario tied to what a company could/should be able to afford. But this is more about finding the right threshold and condition (revenue vs profit) than about the pricing model itself in my opinion.
I get that the licence is a harder sell (if you need to disclose it) because you don’t get any “real” benefits out of it. (Except for the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting the project and keeping it alive. But clients might not care about that )
Perhaps the phrasing could make a difference here. So the 399 licence could become the (forced) “Supporter Licence” or something like that. Where you get the additional option to have your company/project listed as a official supporter on the website/github…
What about paying less because of some personal characteristics? Is that fair, and if yes, where’s the difference?
Normal price is 399€, but if you’re a small business owner you get a 300€ discount. If it’s for a nonprofit or a student project you can apply for a 100% discount. That sounds much nicer, doesn’t it?
No longer the “small project CMS with resentment for the rich”, but suddenly “the serious business solution with solidarity pricing for the poor”*
* Yes, I work for an advertising company
Unlocking features, like “number of plugins” by paying more: I don’t really think this would even be considered by the team, but: no, please, no. For so many reasons.
I think the biggest pain point is when, for some reason, you need multiple licenses for a single project.
In those cases the sum adds quickly up to something that has a real relative impact on project costs.
Maybe something could be done for these cases, equally for both licenses.
AFAIK the “one base url” rule is meant to protect from the abuse where people use Kirby as site generator: essentially using one license for many sites. Not so much to protect from an additional landing domain serving a single page and redirecting to the main site (for example).
Looking at other paid CMSs and aligning the pricing for 3 years, taking the option with support and full feature set:
Expression engine: 347$/3yr (+127$/3yr each additional site)
Statamic: 377$ per “site”/3yr
Craft: 417$ per “project”/3yr (doesn’t define what a “project” is though)
October: 936$/3yr (unlimited projects)
Hubspot: 42’480$/3yr with “additional root domains”.
I like the new pricing overall, but am a bit concerned about the €400 price tag for larger companies. Especially the optics of that price tag being 4x the normal price.
My days of working in agencies are a few years behind me, but it was common to work for large clients (definitely above €1M yearly revenue) on some of their smaller projects, not their main website(s). Budgets for those smaller projects were often small. Still better than the budgets for small businesses, overall. But I kinda worry that those clients might look at quotations and be like “wait, why do we need a €400 license for this small project?”. And if you explain to that client that they have to pay the “it costs 4x more because you’re rich” tax, I worry about the psychological perception of this.
I’m also assuming that freelancers and agencies will have to pay the license cost up front, and charge it back to their client as part of their invoice. Mostly because big companies that qualify for the higher price tend to have big administrative hassles for paying for anything (e.g. the project manager might have to file an internal request to register “Content Folder GmbH & Co. KG” as an approved provider). Integrating small licensing costs in the main quotation and invoice makes things simpler. But in this case it means the freelancer or agency would be effectively lending €400 to their client, until they get paid weeks or even months later. Feels a bit icky. (But maybe not much of an issue if you also invoice 30% at the start of the project.)
I dunno, the 4x multiplier looks like it could create some friction, that would lead to Kirby being rejected for some projects, in a way that a smaller multiplier (2x, or maybe even up to 3x) might not. Maybe not, and a smaller multiplier would just be leaving money on the table. Time will tell.
I haven’t read all posts but here is my take: I like the new model despite it may be more expensive to me in future. I don’t know how much y’all charge for your services but the 399EUR will be a small part usually of the web dev work. But we all rely on nice people building the system we make money with.
On the point that pricing based on revenue is “charging the rich” that is how fair pricing should be. Most systems nowadays offer a personal license for free or much cheaper than business licenses. Most of them don’t offer any other advantages other than you’re able to be a “team”. Of course Kirby could tie the license to users but wouldn’t that the wrong way? Right now you can get a free license for non-profit and ecological websites. That works when others pay for it, otherwise Kirby’s devs pay for it.
399 for three years means 100EUR per year. We pay that for the hosting as well. Most of us offer 1.5 – 2hrs of our worktime for that. For small websites, Kirby could be cheaper than before. Squarespace charges nearly double the price, Statamic is also much more expensive for any non-personal site, CraftCMS as well. The ZeroOne theme costs nearly the same. Why should a template system be as or more expensive than the system itself? For small customers, this would right now already be the case (30 per yr for Kirby + 75 for theme).
I get that this seems unusual to the current users/customer base of Kirby. But it definitely isn’t new to people working with other CMS as well. Edge-cases will be there, I guess you can’t please everyone. For all those mentioning the edge-cases — what would be your alternative at the moment?
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