Will it ever arrive?

15 years 2 months ago #84710 by emagin
Replied by emagin on topic Re:Will it ever arrive?
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

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15 years 2 months ago #84792 by nant
Replied by nant on topic Re:Will it ever arrive?
@emagin:

first of all thank you for your well thought-out post.

And thank you for supporting CB by subscribing to the documentation service. This will certainly help the CB Team to continue improving and enhancing the Community Builder suite and the peripheral plugins.

The CBPay system is imho much much more than the alternatives you have mentioned. It is also very functional rich compared to other non-Joomla subscription systems. We have been trying to do our homework and we are always open to suggestions (thus this open discussion).

The thing is that there has been some major investments made in CBPay. CBPay is a tool used to increase website revenues.

My opinion is that the most fair approach should be some mechanism of depreciating this major CBPay investment proportionally distributed somehow based on actual revenues generated from these CBPay powered money machines. So the Pay-as-you-grow model was proposed. We did not want to based this model on the generated revenue - most (myself included) would view this as partnership. So, we focused on a very small per transaction fee. Perhaps even this is not very fair but if you have something better to propose in this direction, then by all means please do ;)

Another approach would be to have a single fee with a yearly maintenance contract for upgrades and minimal forum support. This fee would have to be kind of steep to even begin to offset the initial investment and to be able to sustain further development. Thus, it would be viewed as a very high (and maybe a barrier) for small entrepreneurs. The previous model would basically serve as a "we will invest and take some of the risk with you" model and "when-if you are successful we will expect something more".

CBPay is not CB. CB is free and it is opensource and will remain opensource. In order to protect the huge investment in CBPay, a decision has been made to encode core code.

I respectfully disagree with your statement "What you are really selling is a community code-base". This is true for CB and CB is free. CBPay is much more. CBPay enables you to make real money from your content and your CB powered site. I am currently in the process of wrapping up the CBPay manual and I myself am in awe of how powerful this thing has become.

Your proposal to have a fixed price based on the actual membership size will most likely find similar opposition from people with different business cases.

Wish there was a way to please everyone...

As stated before thank you for your comments and we are open to alternative proposals that would:

- have a relatively small entrance fee
- be able to adjust as success in measured
- allow future development and maintenance

B)

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15 years 2 months ago #84800 by emagin
Replied by emagin on topic Re:Will it ever arrive?
Valid points all. Not having seen this "money machine" in action, I will reserve judgement.

I hope you find the right model to recoup your investement!

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15 years 2 months ago #84819 by MADKing
Replied by MADKing on topic Re:Will it ever arrive?
beat wrote:

2 bugs left, and 1 feature to complete are left. :)

We are targetting 2008. :) No joke.

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15 years 2 months ago #85362 by Diesel9a1
Replied by Diesel9a1 on topic Re:Will it ever arrive?
Any updates regarding this component?

I have looked at Joomsuite, but I think it is a bit extreme - Joomla within Joomla! Still holding onto CB by my finger tips at the moment, unless something else crops up that is!


Pete

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15 years 2 months ago #85750 by abo
Replied by abo on topic Re:Will it ever arrive?
I agree pretty whole heartedly!!!

Now, as I have pointed out before - a transactional fee is both a major shift of doing business, but more important very heavy on sites with plenty of subscribers with small sums, and yet an absolute bargain for sites with few subscribers and big subscription prices. This is not quite the open source idea.... (even though I am not at all opposed to propriety extensions within the open source market)

Again - my main concern is that this thing is not out yet and news on what is happening is way behind.... I know, bugs can take time, but please keep us posted!

And, yes, please reconsider the transaction concept. My hunch is, it will create more uneasiness (as well as technical problems) than satisfied customers....

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