I am also very interested in this.
Was about to sign up for AEC or JoomSuite member but all I need is members to pay to sign up.
I am reading your payment structure in the
newsletter posting
and am very concerned as some other people.
Subscription models work very well for code.
I pay you a yearly fee to keep cranking out code.
The more people subscribe the more you can code/enhance.
Transactional based models are based on special "value add" or "hard to do as small biz" services.
Usually they are either huge transaction companies (paypal, etc.) who get paid to manage a massive infrastructure of financial trust, OR % of ROI.
You help me sell a product better, so I give you a % on selling that thing better.
Usually value propositions are very hard to do, and they require very specialized consulting services to convince the customer to pay for them.
You are currently offering a codebase that lets users create communities.
You are coders, good ones at that.
I don't see the value proposition to give you the right to make money off my community.
You are far to removed from my community(ies) and its/their needs to help me monetize them any better.
What you are really selling is a community code-base. In many communities there is no financial gain to having 100 members or 10,000 members - at least not in CB itself. We might sell more ads to 10,000 members, but that's got little to do with the core community codebase.
So I feel very very uncomfortable forever giving up revenue stream to you based on the number of members i have in my community.
I need to pay you to make good code. My site members are my business and should have no financial relationship to you.
If you choose to offer ONLY the transactional cost system you have sofar proposed, I will have to unfortunately look elsewhere for community tools.
Please note: Go look at newsletter emailing services as a model. They are increasingly moving away from pay-per-email pricing as the competition increases.
If you must use that 'old' model, then you might as well base it on total number of CB members max., with FIXED pricing to use the CB tool for communities of 1-1.000, 1.000-10.000 etc.
I would not like this either, but it's more palatable than your deriving revenue from each and every one of my community members on an ongoing basis.
The other thing I am concerned about is ioncube usage.
Encoding code goes against a lot of GPL principles, which we don't need to argue about now.
It seems to me that the massive user base you have built is what will ensure/protect your great code.
If someone swipes it and forks it, the community will shoot them down over time.
Let's not forget the lesson of the Mambo Foundation...
Post edited by: emagin, at: 2009/01/09 01:26
Post edited by: emagin, at: 2009/01/09 01:29