3cellhosting wrote: Hi Guys,

While I am happy at the general changes I need to explain to a client why their 'lifetime' upgrade last year will need to be replaced by an annual fee of €149

They don't care that they get unlimited users and can use it on unlimited sites as they only have one site. Their membership base is limited so the arguments about upgrades due to numbers don't stack up either.

What would you suggest I tell this client?

Upgrading my own membership to Developer at a cost of €395 a year for 3 clients at present seems like overkill. (Which when I started the process the system showed a starting price of €304 and not €295 as advertised, which pro-rata means a final bill this year of €204.)

Hi David,

First of all with lifetime maintenance, the upgrade itself is free for 12 months from now. So the GPL subscription yearly renewal pricing starts only in a year from now. Still needs an explanation to the customer:

An open-source GPL license has many benefits for everyone, including your customers which do not need unlimited users or need only 1 site for now. Simply they are not aware of them yet, because probably they were not aware of the issues with proprietary software...until their next request or need or strategic business review , thus it requires a bit of explanation of the benefits and why each company should steer into using as much open source as possible. Some of the GPL benefits are outlined in our news article, some of them in our replies in this very interesting discussion thread, and there are many articles of open-source advantages. One of them is the French government directive to public administrations to priviledge open-source, which has an excellent analysis, but it's unfortunately in...French, there might be some translations. But it's a good point and a good idea for a blog or article to help you "selling" open-source.

Regarding the €304 and €204 compared to current list price of €395 and current special offer at €100 off for €295 for Developer Membership (which are all very reasonable, given that it allows you to share this modest yearly cost among all your customers): it's not the pro-rating which turns discounted €304 into €204, but the special offer discount. €304 is prorating of your current Professional Membership compared to list price of €395, and then there is the special offer discount of €100 that is applied, giving €204, which is correct in your case. Hope that's understandable

But as you have a high number of CBSubs licenses, it is certainly one of those special cases that our standard GPL upgrade offer doesn't take in account and which needs a personalized offer as stated above in this thread. You have been a very active community member and CB+CBSubs integrator with quite a few CBSubs installations over the last years, Thank You!: Thus please click the contact link at bottom of our pages, so that we can, depending on non-GPL CBSubs licenses and their individual maintenance periods statuses, make you a fair personalized offer.

ozneilau wrote:

nant wrote: ... Yup, glad you agree that CBSubs is not a Joomla extension ...

And yet it has been listed in JED today.

Well done, this is great marketing!

Neil.

Thanks for noticing and sharing this with us here.

For others reading I have underlined the key items as a rebuttal to your implication that we have incorrectly communicated something with you.

As you can see the CBSubs listing is currently in the Extension Specific -> Community Builder Extensions area on the JED.