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That's why there's a smaller plan (XCP-ng Standard, it's only half the price, for 5 machines it will be 3K). But yeah, smaller infrastructure pricing is hard,

That's why there's a smaller plan (XCP-ng Standard, it's only half the price, for 5 machines it will be 3K). But yeah, smaller infrastructure pricing is hard, because people tend to have less knowledge and requesting more assistance, so the cost is even higher on the company's side. edit: also I don't remember trying to "adapt" or copy Proxmox pricing, since we're always convinced since the start to not make Open Core but true Open Source! And I respect Proxmox a lot for doing the same :)

tmikaeld 4y ago
Yes, I saw the smaller pricing, the problem is that businesses often prefer a metered approach, but I also understand that subscription support makes it easier to afford having support personel on a salary, which is much harder when it's on-demand tickets. I think many don't subscribe at all, or subscribe when they actually need the tickets. If they could pre-purchase a set of tickets for say, 200€-400€ per ticket (2x-4x the lowest subscription), I think it would be a hit, even if they never use those tickets, they could buy them when they can afford to buy them and keep them as a sort of assurance for future incidents. That sort of model has worked extremely well in the SaaS startup world, with so called "lifetime deals". You buy a set of resources that don't expire and can consume them over a lifetime (of the company or product).
- plam503711 4y ago
  But if you buy only for support when you need, it defeats a bit the purpose of also paying the project to get security updates and new features (and more QA). And to get enough money inside, this needs to get TONS of customers. Check at Proxmox: they have a revenue around 2+ millions EUR with… 15k customers. We can't afford such a low revenue per customer, because having a big customer base takes time. But this is the usual "issue" with Open Source model. A lot of companies selected Open Core and decided that some feature were only relevant for enterprise use case (Gitlab, Mattermost and such). Which I think works OK commercially speaking, but I don't like it regarding Open Source philosophy.
  - tmikaeld 4y ago
    The problem is more on the revenue sources/use cases for proxmox, shared hosting and cheap containers from turnkeylinux. If the margins and use cases are not enterprise enough, there’s not enough margins to pay for licenses/support even if you wanted to. I think that’s why rancher/docker is more successful commercially, it enables configuration and automation instead of management and deployments.
    - plam503711 4y ago
      I agree on the automation part, that's an important objective in our backlog (like we did with Terraform plugin etc.)

tmikaeld 4y ago

Yes, I saw the smaller pricing, the problem is that businesses often prefer a metered approach, but I also understand that subscription support makes it easier to afford having support personel on a salary, which is much harder when it's on-demand tickets. I think many don't subscribe at all, or subscribe when they actually need the tickets. If they could pre-purchase a set of tickets for say, 200€-400€ per ticket (2x-4x the lowest subscription), I think it would be a hit, even if they never use those tickets, they could buy them when they can afford to buy them and keep them as a sort of assurance for future incidents. That sort of model has worked extremely well in the SaaS startup world, with so called "lifetime deals". You buy a set of resources that don't expire and can consume them over a lifetime (of the company or product).

plam503711 4y ago
But if you buy only for support when you need, it defeats a bit the purpose of also paying the project to get security updates and new features (and more QA). And to get enough money inside, this needs to get TONS of customers. Check at Proxmox: they have a revenue around 2+ millions EUR with… 15k customers. We can't afford such a low revenue per customer, because having a big customer base takes time. But this is the usual "issue" with Open Source model. A lot of companies selected Open Core and decided that some feature were only relevant for enterprise use case (Gitlab, Mattermost and such). Which I think works OK commercially speaking, but I don't like it regarding Open Source philosophy.
- tmikaeld 4y ago
  The problem is more on the revenue sources/use cases for proxmox, shared hosting and cheap containers from turnkeylinux. If the margins and use cases are not enterprise enough, there’s not enough margins to pay for licenses/support even if you wanted to. I think that’s why rancher/docker is more successful commercially, it enables configuration and automation instead of management and deployments.
  - plam503711 4y ago
    I agree on the automation part, that's an important objective in our backlog (like we did with Terraform plugin etc.)