Re: [IMail Forum] Upcoming Pricing.

[Matt]

John, You are vastly underpricing the smaller levels at which you claim to be, and overpricing the higher levels.  One thing that you share bare in mind about those that have unlimited licenses is that these are often owned by ISP's and hosting providers.  These companies have over the past half decade experienced severe pricing pressures and rapidly shrinking markets while also having the problem of spam and viruses dumped on their lap requiring significant additional expense and huge investments in time.  It doesn't make much sense to be charging such companies more, especially when other companies are offering mostly comparable products for a small fraction of the price of IMail, and open source continues to gain ground. There is something in economics called the Price Elasticity of Demand ( http://www.quickmba.com/econ/micro/elas/ped.shtml ).  I think that we all know that Ipswitch broke this curve when they forced packaging of features mostly undesired by it's customer base as a justification for significantly higher pricing, even though they only needed to maintain about 1 out of every 5 sales in order to keep on that curve.  This demand also doesn't react to price in a vacuum, it reacts to the marketplace as a whole, and commoditization ( http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/commoditization.asp ) has been occurring.  When a product becomes commoditized, there are four ways that I can think of to counteract the effects; 1) added-value, 2) efficiency, 3) perception (marketing), and 4) leverage.  I do see Ipswitch working on adding value, but it seems that the company should be able to make plenty of money without raising prices, especially since other companies are able to do so at much lower prices.  If they skip over efficiency (or don't do enough to address it), they may still be breaking the price elasticity of demand. Another mistake that Ipswitch has made in the past, and in another respect has fallen victim to, has been the maturity of plain vanilla E-mail servers.  Sending and receiving E-mail is decades old at this point, and people are plenty happy running older software (I haven't installed an update in over a year).  They slipped majorly on critical features, namely their Web mail, and that gave customers little reason to upgrade.  Unlike other companies in the space, they also slipped with a lack-luster anti-spam solution, something that could have generated almost as much revenue for them as the base product itself if they tied advancements and/or even data to their software subscription, but bearing in mind that a lower price could generate enough extra volume to make up the difference and then some.  Anti-virus was also a very sore issue, with the Symantec offering being priced very high for the industry as a whole, and no attempt to integrate cheap command line scanners like F-Prot and Clam-AV like most other servers of this type do.  All you have to do is look at the market that Scott Perry and Declude created out of their shortcomings for proof of them leaving massive amounts of revenue just sitting out there for others to grab.  This was a lack of leverage and a lack of added-value.  People either spent their money on other software to plug into IMail, or they left for other solutions that gave them those capabilities. It's because of these things that I feel it is entirely within Ipswitch's power to make money on their product without simply playing with the cost of subscriptions and the base product alone. Matt John T (Lists) wrote: First, I have no affiliation with Ipswitch what so ever. I am a small one person business and in fact I only have about 350 e-mail addresses that my Imail server process e-mail for, so I am small potatoes compared to most of you. I do have the Professional SA and will go towards the unlimited as I hope one day when I have the time to increase the number of e-mail addressed processed on my server to a thousand or so.   In spite of others opinions, I do agree that the pricing for a unlimited SA should be higher, as figure what you get out of it. Here is what I think the levels should be and the associated SA pricing for Imail standalone: (note difference in levels after a comment by Kevin)   100 User        $75 500 user        $150 1000 user      $400 5000 user      $750 Unlimited user $1200   I also think there should be a clustering option for the 5000 user and unlimited user levels, whereby you pay say 50% for the second (3rd 4th 5th whatever) license but one SA covers all the servers in the cluster. (There would need to be some way of making the activation and use of the additional licenses dependent on the first one. If SA was renewed, all would accept updates, upgrades.)   John T eServices For You