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> Ferrocene will be available for purchase by individuals and companies later this year at €25 per month per seat (or €240 per seat if paying annually). Purchas

by kats 3y ago

> Ferrocene will be available for purchase by individuals and companies later this year at €25 per month per seat (or €240 per seat if paying annually). Purchasing Ferrocene will grant you access to the pre-built binaries and packages of our qualified compilers, and the rendered qualification documents for all versions of Ferrocene. That's very low pricing. They won't be able to afford to support development if they price that low. It actually decreases confidence that their company is legit to see prices that are that low.

AlotOfReading 3y ago
On the contrary, it puts it within small team budgets, so you don't need to go through the enterprise purchasing pipeline.
- kats 3y ago
  Well, customers need support. Having a lot of small customers is harder and more expensive than having 1 big customer. They should sell to e.g. a large automotive or industrial automation company, and then not worry about the small customers till later.
  - hgomersall 3y ago
    It's the same as the normal rust compiler. The support demands are pretty much identical to open source rust.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    I work for an automotive company you've probably heard of. The per-seat pricing being within budgets is exactly why we're considering it as soon as the certification stuff is available. Yes, there is nominally an enterprise sales pathway, but ferrocene wouldn't succeed there. That has a lot of difficult prerequisites and specific timelines that involve convincing manager's manager's (managers) that X is worth the cost and isn't going to have weird licensing terms e.g. preventing us from compiling open source code (a real limitation I've seen). The quickest way through that pipeline is if we already have a bunch of internal usage on prior projects to point to, or well-known public usage.
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kats 3y ago
e.g. lets say that the big initial cost of certifying the first version of the toolchain is $2 million. It will be more than that, but (probably?) less than $10 million. And this doesn't include any salaries or costs beyond the time to get the big up-front work done. Let's say they were to sell just that one compiler version for 5-10 years. Then they need 800 licenses (which for developers of certified products, is actually quite a few) to make back the 2 million over 10 years. Suggestion: maybe a better possibility would be: find one customer who will pay at least a few million dollars. Then list the pricing as 'contact us' while they find a couple other large customers. Don't publish the low price/seat or the bigger customers may ask for lower prices.
konstantinua00 3y ago
On the other hand, I heard "our current toolchain would cost 10x less" at least from one person in one firm in the industry

by kats 3y ago

AlotOfReading 3y ago

On the contrary, it puts it within small team budgets, so you don't need to go through the enterprise purchasing pipeline.

kats 3y ago
Well, customers need support. Having a lot of small customers is harder and more expensive than having 1 big customer. They should sell to e.g. a large automotive or industrial automation company, and then not worry about the small customers till later.
- hgomersall 3y ago
  It's the same as the normal rust compiler. The support demands are pretty much identical to open source rust.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  I work for an automotive company you've probably heard of. The per-seat pricing being within budgets is exactly why we're considering it as soon as the certification stuff is available. Yes, there is nominally an enterprise sales pathway, but ferrocene wouldn't succeed there. That has a lot of difficult prerequisites and specific timelines that involve convincing manager's manager's (managers) that X is worth the cost and isn't going to have weird licensing terms e.g. preventing us from compiling open source code (a real limitation I've seen). The quickest way through that pipeline is if we already have a bunch of internal usage on prior projects to point to, or well-known public usage.
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kats 3y ago

e.g. lets say that the big initial cost of certifying the first version of the toolchain is $2 million. It will be more than that, but (probably?) less than $10 million. And this doesn't include any salaries or costs beyond the time to get the big up-front work done. Let's say they were to sell just that one compiler version for 5-10 years. Then they need 800 licenses (which for developers of certified products, is actually quite a few) to make back the 2 million over 10 years. Suggestion: maybe a better possibility would be: find one customer who will pay at least a few million dollars. Then list the pricing as 'contact us' while they find a couple other large customers. Don't publish the low price/seat or the bigger customers may ask for lower prices.

konstantinua00 3y ago

On the other hand, I heard "our current toolchain would cost 10x less" at least from one person in one firm in the industry