The story so far

[Kevin Miller]

Hi Folks,

This has been a busy week and there has been a lot of discussion on here. Thank you to all of you who have contributed to the debate here on this list. I thought I'd post a quick summary of where our thinking is at so far.

I obviously spoke to several dozen of you personally prior to making this change. We've now had the chance to speak to hundreds of you which has helped us to gain an even better understanding of our new model and the way forward. This is a big change and no matter how many people you speak to in advance, we expected to learn more after we went live. We are grateful for all the feedback we have had.

The new entry price of $440 or $660, which is on average a reduction as it includes a lot more has been well received across most customer groups. It continues to allow hobbyists access to the platform too.

The Application Payments model, for those of you creating apps to sell (or as freeware) has been well received. We've had very, very few objections to it and so I think we're pretty confident at this point that it's about as good as it can be. I'm proud of the way we've innovated here to allow small independent vendors to continue to use the platform in a way that most other low/no-code SaaS platforms haven't.

We've had a little feedback on making the platform free for public high schools, which has been well received.

After an initial misstep (sorry!), we tweaked the lifetime license policy past 2027 and that now seems to have been well received.

We still have a couple of outstanding questions about how our model applies to Server for a couple of use cases we didn't come across in our initial consultation and we'll work through those soon.

The Internal apps model (for people building apps for use within their own organization) has gone over well in many cases. However I think there is perhaps a bit of a split between those who want to use the new Cloud hosting and data back end and those that don't want to use it, either because you have your own data back end or because you are creating smaller utilities that don't use data. Looking at the market as a whole and including new users, we've spoken to hundreds of people who do want to use the back end and the model and it is sitting pretty well for that group. For those of you that don't, my question is whether we have the volume discounting correct or whether we want to introduce a lower cost model at scale for that specific group.

I'm not talking about changing the per-seat-for-commercial-end-users model, we're confident that's the right way forward. Our entire IP is in each standalone, and we have to scale with the value we create to have a successful business. We've learned that in our 20 years of history and the feedback this week has been ok on this point overall. I'm also not talking about changing costs for smaller numbers of seats. The question is whether we as a business want to also serve a segment without the Cloud hosting, at a better volume discount for higher seat numbers.

This is a harder question than it looks, because so much of the benefit from the new platform comes from the new data back end. Giving new users a choice early in the process complicates their initial journey with us and potentially creates a confusing decision around one of the best new capabilities. It also has an impact on product engineering and the decisions we take there. On the other hand we want the platform to go on being practical for as many of you as possible. We appreciate your support over the years and this remains very important to us. There is a subset of you who are clearly not going to use the Cloud and for whom the new Internal model is presenting a challenge at scale. We will be reflecting on this question in the coming days.

The other lesson from this week is that we need more text based content for those of you that don't want to consume information by video. We'll do some more worked examples on the mini-site next week in that form to help with that.

Other than that, I would say this. If you only read this list you might be forgiven for thinking that the new pricing model hasn't been well received. While that’s certainly true in a number of cases (I'm sorry if that’s you!), the vast majority of responses (out of the many hundreds we have had now) are getting on board and generally the sentiment has been good. The initial feedback on the new Create builds from those of you that do now have access to it has also been good. I would ask if you've emailed in to please bear with us, we will get back to you as soon as we can.

So overall we've taken an important step forward this week that will enable us to better serve our customers into the future and broadly it has been a success so far. We still have some questions to work on and we will continue to look at those.

Kind regards, 

Kevin 

Kevin Miller ~ kevin at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/ 
LiveCode: Build Amazing Things