Re: Recently we've been investing heavily in product develop
Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2015 1:59 pm
Hi folks,
Raising prices may not instantly be popular. However its the right move here and it is in your interests. Here is why.
We have a responsibility to our whole community to ensure the viability and stability of the platform. The fact is that we have spent multiples (yes well over 2x) of what we raised on total crowd funding campaigns on developing the new technologies so far. That's in addition to our regular spend on normal maintenance and bug fixing. While progress has been good we have still not quite completed all the goals we intended.
The sheer size of the redevelopment task, taken with a couple of customer service incidents of late, has highlighted to me just how overstretched we are as a team. I want us to run an organization that keeps all its promises and frankly that has been harder to do that of late than is right or fair to some individuals on our team.
At the same time the survey data has highlighted just how much value we are already providing to the many commercial customers and how little we charge relative to that value. It is clear there is a solution in here that allows us continue our unwavering commitment to open source, serve our business customers better and maintain the resourcing levels we need to properly service the size of community we now have.
I am a passionate believer in open source software. If I wasn’t we wouldn’t be an open source company. LiveCode cannot be the success we all want without being a strong open source platform. We are not removing anything from open source. All the Kickstarter goals will go into open source. HTML5 will be dual licensed with an open source version just like the rest of the platform. As you know from the long list of KS features, when completed that will result in an extremely capable and complete platform. Those using it for teaching, for hobbyist projects and so forth are going to find that the open source version of LiveCode 8 is *extremely* capable.
At the same time, there are a number of features which are more business focused and which have not been promised or even mentioned within the Kickstarter. Many of those will go into all versions including open source. Some will make their way into Indy and/or Business. That is entirely fair, reasonable and in total alignment with our public commitments. By doing that we will be able to serve serious businesses who are making serious money by using LiveCode and generate sufficient income for ourselves to have a sustainable platform. That just benefits everyone. The larger and more healthy we are, the more we can service our free open source platform.
This price increase is hardly going to break the bank. Its clear from the survey that most of you are willing to pay it. We have never made a public commitment to price in a given way. And indeed it might be worth noting that at the time of the Kickstarter campaign our prices were $499 a year. To ease the burden we have allowed you to continue to lock in the current, lower prices. I’m not sure I’ve seen other companies let you lock in the pricing in the way we’ve just offered to do! We recognize the support that our community has shown and we wanted to reflect that even during this very necessary change.
My only regret is not doing this sooner. Had we done so we would have been much further along in our goals and avoided the recent service issues that have so badly affected a small number of you. I’m sure those affected would be far happier if we had done so. For that I do apologize, we will be more nimble in the future whenever necessary to ensure that our service is where it needs to be for all of you.
Kind regards,
Kevin
Raising prices may not instantly be popular. However its the right move here and it is in your interests. Here is why.
We have a responsibility to our whole community to ensure the viability and stability of the platform. The fact is that we have spent multiples (yes well over 2x) of what we raised on total crowd funding campaigns on developing the new technologies so far. That's in addition to our regular spend on normal maintenance and bug fixing. While progress has been good we have still not quite completed all the goals we intended.
The sheer size of the redevelopment task, taken with a couple of customer service incidents of late, has highlighted to me just how overstretched we are as a team. I want us to run an organization that keeps all its promises and frankly that has been harder to do that of late than is right or fair to some individuals on our team.
At the same time the survey data has highlighted just how much value we are already providing to the many commercial customers and how little we charge relative to that value. It is clear there is a solution in here that allows us continue our unwavering commitment to open source, serve our business customers better and maintain the resourcing levels we need to properly service the size of community we now have.
I am a passionate believer in open source software. If I wasn’t we wouldn’t be an open source company. LiveCode cannot be the success we all want without being a strong open source platform. We are not removing anything from open source. All the Kickstarter goals will go into open source. HTML5 will be dual licensed with an open source version just like the rest of the platform. As you know from the long list of KS features, when completed that will result in an extremely capable and complete platform. Those using it for teaching, for hobbyist projects and so forth are going to find that the open source version of LiveCode 8 is *extremely* capable.
At the same time, there are a number of features which are more business focused and which have not been promised or even mentioned within the Kickstarter. Many of those will go into all versions including open source. Some will make their way into Indy and/or Business. That is entirely fair, reasonable and in total alignment with our public commitments. By doing that we will be able to serve serious businesses who are making serious money by using LiveCode and generate sufficient income for ourselves to have a sustainable platform. That just benefits everyone. The larger and more healthy we are, the more we can service our free open source platform.
This price increase is hardly going to break the bank. Its clear from the survey that most of you are willing to pay it. We have never made a public commitment to price in a given way. And indeed it might be worth noting that at the time of the Kickstarter campaign our prices were $499 a year. To ease the burden we have allowed you to continue to lock in the current, lower prices. I’m not sure I’ve seen other companies let you lock in the pricing in the way we’ve just offered to do! We recognize the support that our community has shown and we wanted to reflect that even during this very necessary change.
My only regret is not doing this sooner. Had we done so we would have been much further along in our goals and avoided the recent service issues that have so badly affected a small number of you. I’m sure those affected would be far happier if we had done so. For that I do apologize, we will be more nimble in the future whenever necessary to ensure that our service is where it needs to be for all of you.
Kind regards,
Kevin