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Donations for open source projects have notoriously low participation rates - to the point where popular and critical infrastructure projects can't afford to ma

by nikcub 10y ago

Donations for open source projects have notoriously low participation rates - to the point where popular and critical infrastructure projects can't afford to maintain a fulltime employee or two - so don't take it personally. If you want companies to pay you, then ask them to pay you. Keep it as a simple license (not one that has devs asking wtf it is), but offer a commercial bundle with email and dev support, LTS, backwards compat and perhaps authentication modules (for LDAP/AD, OAuth) and I think you'd be surprised by just how many companies make these purchases (I make them all the time). Also, on price - $100-300 is "no-brainer i'll put it on my credit card and expense it at the end of the month" while €800 is approaching purchasing decision territory for a lot of companies.

haser_au 10y ago
Speaking from my corner of a large organisation, this is pretty spot on. $100-300 is "no brainer". LDAP/AD, OAuth is major plus. Support SLAs tiers are also something we would look for, even in Open Source. We don't use Nodemailer, but we might now that I know about it. I'll see if we have a use case.
mgkimsal 10y ago
Was just wrestling with mailing from node this week, and have seen reference to nodemailer. Reading his notice, it seemed like a nicer version of the itext pdf library license change. I completely understand the motivation behind both, but $800 is just out of my budget (and the budget of many of the projects I work on). Slight rant - the itext license change was frustrating because we were using it on a project, and then the license change happened. The minimum price seems to be $2500, and I couldn't tell if it was per year or what. But to have it on a dev machine, and a test server too, drove the price up more - something close to $6000 IIRC (but it's been a while since I looked in to it). I completely understand the motivation behind the pricing changes, and if it turns out that fewer people use it, but they pay... that still works out for most parties. I'd encourage the nodemailer author to consider a couple other options - something under $500 for commercial usage, and a higher price point for some extra degree of support (1 business day turnaround time, etc?). As others have noted, a smaller amount is something I can float or simply absorb - larger amounts introduce hesitation, or pushback from clients on pricing (especially if it's a term/time license).
andris9 10y ago
The high pricing is intentional. If no-one is buying then I can just bring the price down, while it is really difficult to move on the other direction if I start with a low value.
- falcolas 10y ago
  A good choice, imo. You can now offer "sales" and special discounts for people who ask for them. Might want to also offer a premium release for 10x or even 20x, since that falls into the "No Brainer" category for larger corporations who would look at 800 as a sign of low quality.

by nikcub 10y ago

haser_au 10y ago

Speaking from my corner of a large organisation, this is pretty spot on. $100-300 is "no brainer". LDAP/AD, OAuth is major plus. Support SLAs tiers are also something we would look for, even in Open Source. We don't use Nodemailer, but we might now that I know about it. I'll see if we have a use case.

mgkimsal 10y ago

Was just wrestling with mailing from node this week, and have seen reference to nodemailer. Reading his notice, it seemed like a nicer version of the itext pdf library license change. I completely understand the motivation behind both, but $800 is just out of my budget (and the budget of many of the projects I work on). Slight rant - the itext license change was frustrating because we were using it on a project, and then the license change happened. The minimum price seems to be $2500, and I couldn't tell if it was per year or what. But to have it on a dev machine, and a test server too, drove the price up more - something close to $6000 IIRC (but it's been a while since I looked in to it). I completely understand the motivation behind the pricing changes, and if it turns out that fewer people use it, but they pay... that still works out for most parties. I'd encourage the nodemailer author to consider a couple other options - something under $500 for commercial usage, and a higher price point for some extra degree of support (1 business day turnaround time, etc?). As others have noted, a smaller amount is something I can float or simply absorb - larger amounts introduce hesitation, or pushback from clients on pricing (especially if it's a term/time license).

andris9 10y ago

The high pricing is intentional. If no-one is buying then I can just bring the price down, while it is really difficult to move on the other direction if I start with a low value.

falcolas 10y ago
A good choice, imo. You can now offer "sales" and special discounts for people who ask for them. Might want to also offer a premium release for 10x or even 20x, since that falls into the "No Brainer" category for larger corporations who would look at 800 as a sign of low quality.