couriers,

Understand fully your point of view, and respect it fully. Thank you also for having respected ours too, highly appreciated.

Without wishing this thread to go out of topic into a discussion on that interesting subject, I just need to clarify 2 points that you have raised, to avoid a false general impression:

1) this is *not* a "new route" that we are taking, it's rather a single exception to the general route that we have. You will very soon see new CB plugins released, which, as you will see, are all open-source non-encoded.

Our general "route" has always been, is and will be:

- All our projects are open-source, community-driven, and most are free. We like them that way, like you

We have now one exception which is commercial and not open-source at this stage: CBSubs. There are many good and fair reasons for this choice for this application at this time. I will go in more details when time permits, but not in this general thread. Just to mention one of the main ones which is important for lots of users of business-critical E-commerce solutions: As the code is signed and checked each time it's used, you are pretty sure that nobody, in good or bad faith, has tempered/hacked/broken your business-critical revenues-generating part of your server-code. There is no other PHP-only solution to solve this problem properly to the best of my knowledge.

We do plan to open-up the powerful CBSubs API and important parts of the code, as soon as finalized and as needed for users to be able to leverage and customize its power for their uses.

There is no other non-open-source exception planed currently.

We strongly believe that this is not a problem for most customers, to the contrary, given the nature and benefits of CBSubs and of its fully commercial model. Those who need strictly open-source solutions already have alternatives and there is enough room for every solution for every need.

2) ioncube-(NON)-issues: only a single ioncube-related technical issue so far (no ioncube loader for obsolete G5 64bits Apple servers), compared to a few more small issues for other prerequisites like OpenSSL and CURL. Most hosters have ioncube nowadays installed standard, and there is a free loader for almost any platform available (except G5 64bits) if the hoster didn't install or for your localhost.

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back to topic

Phantom.Knight wrote:

I agree with Polarwolf, I have been waitng for this extension for such a long time, but because of the high price I can not get it. If you could make the starter free or really cheap we could start using it and build our customer database and when it reaches 500 I would gladly pay the 125 €

Or even a free 250 user version???

It's never too late to re-consider pricing you know

Post edited by: Phantom.Knight, at: 2009/04/17 15:51

We hear those saying it's to expensive for their business or business model, and understand their point of view and suggestions given. We had initially proposed a pricing model to the community which had taken this in account. However, community voice was 99% against such a (imho fair) "Pay-as-you-earn-and-grow" model. So we listened and adapted our model to the "Pay-upfront-and-then-earn-as-much-as-you-like" model that was requested many times. We even adapted the model to have "levels of growth" in it. Now discussion is done, product is released, and pricing is fixed.


CBSubs is certainly at the higher-end featureset for social membership systems, for a very reasonable price, given its broad featureset and great flexibility, which should allow easily to implement creative ideas to grow the business.

To give you a single unique feature that can easily double revenues, it's not demoed here yet: when user selects a plan, you can automatically nicely unhide sub-plans as upsel proposals ! There are many many more features in 1.0 to allow you to grow your business flexibly, and many more to come in next versions


My point of view was always and still is that if a business or a non-for-profit can't afford to "invest" a hundred Euros or dollars into a money-making application, then the probability that the problem is not in the cost of the investment, but elsewhere might be quite high, and that the question of viability should be solved rather sooner than later. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not critisizing any business model here, just trying to warn in a friendly way that starting a business requires many investments, most are way higher than 100 EUR, and are way less in the directly productive money-inflow path...


Happy to reply to any other on-topic non-pricing related questions