4 ms·
Dual licensing is a great option. I.e. don't wait for someone to be "generous" and "pitiful". Demand money. Make it a business. Screw OSS, because after all, yo
by lukaseder 10y ago
Dual licensing is a great option. I.e. don't wait for someone to be "generous" and "pitiful". Demand money. Make it a business. Screw OSS, because after all, you're not doing it for the philosophy or Richard Stallman's beard, you're doing it to support your family. And you worked hard for it. The only reason why you should pick OSS is because it gets you more market traction more quickly (but also, you're commoditising your own product by making it free, so how to increase its value again?)
We've been quite successful with it for jOOQ (http://www.jooq.org http://www.jooq.org). Here's some reading on how we fared (and why we should've done it earlier):
- https://opensource.com/business/14/1/how-to-transition-open-source-to-revenue https://opensource.com/business/14/1/how-to-transition-open-...
- https://opensource.com/business/14/1/5-lessons-open-source-revenue-based-model https://opensource.com/business/14/1/5-lessons-open-source-r...
- chuhnk 10y agoThanks for sharing your experience. Curious to know, how did you determine pricing for jOOQ?
- lukaseder 10y agoThere are different things we did (emphasis on "we". YMMV): - Check prices of other products in the same market (by market, I don't mean ORM in our case but all libraries, including UI libraries like Sencha's products, or ZK) - Never compare with prices of products from other markets (e.g. tools in our case. The value proposition of a library cannot be compared to that of a tool like IntelliJ, or a database like Oracle). - Ask existing users (that's gold!) - A bit of this: http://dilbert.com/strip/2010-10-20 http://dilbert.com/strip/2010-10-20 - Testing different price plans (express, professional, enterprise) - Testing different subscription terms (monthly, yearly, perpetual) - Testing different discounts (hint: don't offer discounts in a B2B product) The biggest win (for us) was to introduce tiered pricing (check the bottom of https://www.jooq.org/download/price-plans https://www.jooq.org/download/price-plans), as this got rid of discount discussions which are humiliating for both parties without adding real value, and helps high volume customers keep admin work low. They don't want to count the exact number of licenses needed. What we don't do: - Offer special reseller discounts (I don't see why we should, resellers would work with us nonetheless - they can add their margins on top of our price) - Have country-specific pricing (that's just too complicated to track and validate, at least for us) - Raise prices for existing customers (not yet, and no plans yet), even when they purchase more licenses. - Probably tons of other things we hadn't thought of (yet)