Sitefinity 4.0 Pricing WAY TOO HIGH
HI,
Since we have been using Sitefinity for a couple of years we actually have very little in the way of support requirements and when we do have a question that you answer, we can apply that knowledge or fix to all our clients, saving you time and money.
This is the reason to have a developer license, but I understand that when you have a developer license you don't get paid per domain, just per developer. Might I suggest that with your 4.x model you implement something in between your old and your new model that would work for people like us.
I'm thinking of some sort of a developer license that is a per-year fee (maybe similar to your old model of $1,250 to buy and half that to renew each year) and then a much reduced fee per license. That way you can keep your per top-level domain licensing but also not lose your shirt on the support.
Let's say that you offered 60% off each domain and support had to go through the developer then a developer would need to buy at least 3 domains before they were saving any money ( (1250+360+360+360)/3) = $777 per domain. This would, however, make your developers very happy, if they are looking to move more clients to your platform.
If a client wanted to move away and take their licence and no longer be under me as the developer, they would need to purchase the difference in the support & upgrades contract from you directly. Otherwise they would be on their own.
Wow, I couldn't agree more!! Telerik/Sitefinity has just lost a very loyal customer.
Thanks for the reply, Phill. Well put. We all love Sitefinity's product and 4.0 looks great, but they are way off on their pricing. Let's hope they reconsider. Otherwise yes, I am looking at Umbraco and other free or much cheaper ASP.NET alternatives.
As a long time user of Sitefinity I was pretty dissapointed after the Webinar today. I was mostly interested in pricing. When I work on larger projects I often ask my clients to get a license to RadControls for any other developers on the project.
My anticipation was that there would be some (reasonably priced) model for those of us that do many sites. A server license or another type of developer license.
This model really pushes the pricing up for any reasonable site from 899 to 2000 and for a busines that will have 6 or 7 people adding content on it during a given day, it's now pushed up to 8000! Dissapointing.
I would, at minimum, prefer to see the idea of 'concurrent users' and 'limited pages' removed. I can see features, like the forms builder, or workflow left out of the lower priced editions, but page limits?
Just downloaded a copy of Umbraco and will be checking that out today. It's a shame to see that Kentico is now a better deal price-wise than Sitefinity.
Nolonger supports Sitefinity or Telerik
I think you guys are way off, read Vassils responses in the other post, you are getting a TON of things for the $2000 price tag. You only need to go $8000 premium if you need advanced workflow, and I really doubt almost anyone but the corporate of corporates needs the source code for the $20,000.
I initially had sticker shock as well, but sitting back and really thinking about it, the SBE fits all my needs for a small business project. I'm just holding out hope that they give 2 concurrent users on that license...so following that I can sell 4.0 to clients at almost 1/2 the price I do now. If I'm going for a larger client then that I think I can sell them on standard just by showing them the page editor which blows away anything on the market right now.
5 Concurrent users means 5 people editing pages, not 5 logged in site users...I can see that being fine in a standard edition...UNLESS the page editing is so cool more people want to play with it.
This will kill our company
...but what are you missing with standard?
Windows Workflow 4 and 5 more concurrent backend page editing users?...literally that's all...if you consider the base to be the $8000 premium, then the $2000 is a bargain.
Do you NEED to pay $8,000 or $20,000?
I know $1000 is a substantial amount of money on a personal level; however, for a business to throw their hands in the air for this seems unreasonable. If all someone looks at is the price and wants the most expensive because for some reason they think they may need everything in it someday, then it now becomes a sales job to explain that they don't. Futhermore in alot of cases there is a good chance a verison that is actually cheaper and has considerable new features may work. Personally, I don't want to have to enquire. I just want to know what the price is.
Seems to me Telerik's target audience has changed. Simple as that.
The new pricing policy aims at larger software houses and larger corporations.
For us mortal beings a $2,000 or $5,000 price tags translate into $20,000 to $50,000 projects we would have to try selling to potential clients. How many companies are likely to buy that?
If I were to dump my old Volvo and go buy a new one, I'm sure I'd have a price range in mind based on what I paid a few years back. If then I'd learn that price range could buy me only a two-seater with a 10,000 mile annual limit, I'd understand that the Volvo company has other customers in mind.
These are marketing decisions.
We now have to deal with it.
I agree I have just quoted 4 customers on Sitefinity which to be honest I am going to have to reconsider. We already apply a rule that budget sites below a certain cost we use Wordpress for and that price band has now changed!
I have developed numerous sites with sitefinity. I mostly deal with small businesses with a small budget. My clients don't usually have more than 100 pages in the sites. I guess telerik isn't targeting this segment at all.
I have built several sitefinity standard for the clients who can afford it (and they have renewed for a couple of years already.), but there are also some small businesses and start-ups those cannot afford (or simply refuse) to pay more than $1,000 for a web project.
While I understand telerik is not a charity and sitefinity is better than the open source alternatives out there. I am not asking you to provide the product for free, but would you consider an "express" edition that is $199 and requires the display of telerik's / sitefinity's logo? Many clients do not actually mind the logo that much. You can keep the $499 small business edition for those companies who have slightly better budget. For the clients who used the standard edition, I guess they will have to settle with the small business edition--they simply won't agree to pay $2,000 for a new license. The renewal would probably cost more anyway.
With many good enough and free open source products out there, it is hard to recommend even the$499 small business edition, especially considering the restrictions it has. I wish I can tell them that they can't get a decent CMS with a $1,000 budget, but there are actually many solution providers who can deliver a decent product at that price.
Sitefinity has been the CMS of choice for me as a developer. The UI is much simpler to use than many alternatives and I like how I can leverage my asp.net c# skills to create additional, customized modules for my clients. I guess that means I will have to learn a few more open source products Drupal Joomla N2 Umbraco to stay competitive.
Hey everyone,
I missed the seminar but have been trying to catch up since then. I got ~25 Sitefinity installations running and while the majority of them haven't got more than 50 pages, just the mere fact that the small business version has a page limit makes it harder to sell (to our customers at least).
Somehow it seems easier to tell someone that "if you pay this much you also get these cool features" rather than "if you pay this much we'll let you make more than 50 pages". One is paying for an addition while the other one is paying for "removing a subtraction" if you get what I mean. Same thing with concurrent users, while I'm rather sure most of our customers would be fine with one concurrent cms user, the fact that there is a limit makes it harder to sell when you're competing with free solutions.
More importantly though, I really don't understand the decision to only allow page-level permissions for small-business and standard versions. It's been one of the major weaknesses in previous versions of Sitefinity and I was looking forward to finally have this dealt with. I think I read in the other thread that it would be added to the standard version but I hope it will make it to small-business as well. I can barely believe the feature is missing in the old versions of Sitefinity, let alone the new one. Definately a deal breaker if there ever was one.
Hey Gabe, can you comment on the concurrent limit for users in the Backend Role please? I swear I read somewhere that it only affected users trying to get into the backend...not users trying to log in anywhere.
Limiting the number of concurrent users definitely is one of the drawbacks for my prospects.
For instance, we recently build a local intranet site using DNN that supports 800+ users, and 30 microsites altogether. Each of these microsites has one to three editors that can manage the content. In all, we have approximately 100 editors and our experience is that there could most likely be 20 editing at any one time. However, implementing DNN is a chore even though we purchased the professional edition (those who implemented it would most likely have the same sentiments as me). Therefore, we have earmarked SiteFinity as our main CMS provider for upcoming projects and it seems that with the new pricing, the standard edition will most likely fit the bill. But in the above case, we will need more than 10 concurrent access for editors.
My suggestion is that there could probably be a separate purchase for concurrent usage, maybe up to 2 times or 2.5 times more than the current limit, just to address this particular concern. In this way, you are providing the flexibility of the upgrade, without compromising the value for the particular edition.
Hope you can seriously consider the above option.
As I said on the other thread, I believe that features and modules should be the things that separate versions.
You buy SBE, Standard, Pro, Enterprise, because it has FEATURES that your business can justify spending money on and obviously it's Telerik's task to work out what features are attractive and affordable for each market sector.
However, you should not be locked into buying a higher version just to obtain basic functionality such as Page count, User Count or Security.
Granular permissions should be a given for all commercial versions, but I can't see why it wouldn't be possible to have add-on packs for User and Page counts, so you can extend the use of a version whose features you are otherwise satisfied with.
e.g. If I own an SBE vesion, I might be quite happy with not having Workflow, and have no interest in buy it... but I might well be interested in buying a 50-page add-on for another $xxx... and perhaps a 10 user add-on for $whatever... so that I can tailor the use of the feature set I bought, to suit my needs.
I'm sure Telerik will defend it's new pricing scheme tooth and nail...it's to be expected. However, as a long time user of Sitefinity and other Telerik products, I cannot justify spending (whether on my dime or the company's) that amount on a product(s) that is traditionally very buggy and woefully (as well as admittedly) incomplete in it's documentation. Yes, the support is great, but that is because they have so many opportunities to be great.
You guys can talk about value-per-dollar all you want, but the bottom line is you've priced it too high and decreased user productivity with a concurrent user restriction, and you will likely lose the majority of your strongest supporters. We just got done building our corporate intranet on SF 3.7. The very reason we chose SF over Sharepoint was it's price tag. Now it seems it will be worth it to pay the extra coin for SP 2010. Very unfortunate.
Hi Eric,
simply my humble opinion,
I saw the same thing happen with Telligent’s ‘Community Server’ just a few years back. There was a similar uproar within that community when a similar change occurred with that product.
Note: “enterprise” is now the second word in the product tag line. Also, I don’t think they second guessed themselves much, or ever looked back at the community of “evangelists” that they were seemingly letting down.
But why bid farewell to having solutions attractively priced to the smaller guys?
simple… they can’t ask as much from the large enterprise level customer if there is only a small disparity in usability between the enterprise level solution and the ‘lesser’ versions. It is just business. Some might argue, even a natural cycle.
Company develops community behind product by making it an extraordinary value. When product becomes mature, you no longer need that community, as the product sells itself. The only thing that typically throws exception to this cycle is when there is much broader ‘brand’ loyalty at stake.
What concerns me most about the new pricing is that Telerik seems happy to make feature limitations that are arbitrary. That gives me no confidence that future features that i need will be included in the edition I purchase today.
For example, load balancing and source code are sensible Enterprise requirements, so they are natural features to add to the Enterprise edition. If I buy a lesser edition, I wouldn't expect those features. Allowing fewer concurrent users and limiting the number of content items also seems natural to me. But when you start disabling features, that scares me. How can I be assured that future features will make it into my edition? Perhaps they decide that ecommerce is an enterprise level feature. But by then I will have sunk a lot of time and money into a product that isn't what I expected it to be.
I would prefer to see all editions using the same full-featured product, so we can all experience the same benefits but just on different scales. Keep the content and concurrent user limits, and give the enterprise people the load balancing and source code they need. That would at least make me confident that the product I buy today will be the product I need tomorrow. I don't have that confidence now.
Did you consider taking care of your existing customers by grandfathering them in?
@KMan: I would prefer to see all editions using the same full-featured product, so we can all experience the same benefits but just on different scales. Keep the content and concurrent user limits, and give the enterprise people the load balancing and source code they need.
I respectfully disagree, and consider separating products based on features to be the norm for software.
I see the problem as being the decision to demarcate the products based both on features AND licensed use, setting arbitrary values for the second of these, and forcing customers to pay for the usage licenses even if they only wanted the features.
Again, offering my 2c worth, I believe that this could be better managed by taking a leaf from Microsoft’s server product pricing book... even if only in concept.
Instead of bundling each version with licensed access/use for an arbitrary number of users, pages and items, the values of “Concurrent CMS Users”, “Number of Sitemap Pages”, “Number of Content Items”, could instead be MAXIMUM SUPPORTED values for each version, but with each version only being bundled with the lowest possible values of each setting, i.e. the free version’s values.
The customer buys the version which provides the features, applications and capacity limits it provides.
The customer then buys license keys to allow use of the version they bought, to match the demands of their implementation environment.
e.g. So, just to create an example... I might buy a copy of Professional simply because I want a specific feature it offers. It also has higher maximum capacities for CMSUSERS, PAGES and ITEMS, but, it only comes packaged with licensed values of CMSUSERS:1, PAGES:25, ITEMS:250. I pay more for the Professional version than the Standard version because of the extra features and maximum capacities it provides, but I don’t pay an excessively inflated price for an arbitrary packaged license of users, pages and items. Instead, I work out how many CMS users, pages and items I need to provide access for, and I then buy the appropriate usage license keys (in blocks) to match my requirements. I pay for what I need, both in features and usage, and I don’t pay for unused license fees of users, pages, items that my installation may never require.
This could allow Telerik to reduce the nominal price of each version, while allowing them to charge for higher use of each version.
Obviously, Telerik’s challenge would then be to develop features and applications that would be of benefit to each market sector, and use them to separate the products, along with the capacity limits they consider appropriate to each version.
This is the conceptual approach that Microsoft take with their server products... each version of a product offers varying features and capacities that create implicit usage limits, and is priced accordingly. However, each version only comes with a minimal access license, and you purchase additional access according to your needs.
I know telerik had argued that it wasn't feasible for it to maintain two editionback in the sitefinity 3.x days. I am wondering why it didn't look at a different licensing mechanism for 4.x. I think most of us are more concerned with the lack of flexibility instead of merely just the price. It seems that we are forced to go with a higher price edition rather than to pay for what our customers want. It is very difficult to sell to the customers that way.
Has telerik considered the licensing model below?
For example, all editions can share the same code base, but one needs different sets of license keys to unlock certain features. Each edition comes with a pre-packaged license key that unlock multiple features, and users of may buy additional features a la carte. You can buy the analytics package, 50-content items pack, 100-content items pack, etc.
For instance, inputting a small business edition license key will unlock the appropriate number of content items, etc. The pre-packaged edition offers better price than that of a la carte options. Heck, I won't be opposing restricting certain features (ie: load balancing) to certain base package.
This way, we will have the flexibility to buy what our customers really need, while at the same time it gives us room to grow as needed. It also makes it easier to market to our customers. Instead of buying a package that with many features they don't need, the customers now have the options to buy what they need in additional to the base package. The upgrade pricing can be proportion to the items one has purchased so that telerik won't be losing renewal money under this scheme.
I suppose that telerik might be worried about pirates who might create keygens and refuse to buy the product. Perhaps you guys can withhold certain binaries (and comment out the appropriate sections in the web.config) until they have paid for the more advanced features?
@thelyrist
I think its a bit lat in the process for such a discussion. This was a strategic descition way back then made by Telerik and we have to live by it.
If you take the car business its exactely like this.
You buy a car with basic functionallity: It drives you from a to b
Then you buy upgrades, Better radio, navi, day lights, sun ruf, leather seats as far as you need it or can afford. This way every one can drive a car.
But then again there is the High End car market where you simply have every thing in it for a base price. That's why not every one is driving a 250'000 USD car.
Again - The business model is a up to Telerik. The problem is that you have been driving a certain car for the past 20 years (if you take car years to it years) only to find out that your next car will cost either 8 times as much as your last car or you end up without the radio you allways took for granted in your car.
But as live goes on - you might be buying another brand of car.
It's just the history you are sorry about. Loved Telerik, Loved Sitefinity and now the end of a long lasting relationship might come.
There are other products on the market that will drive you from a to b. But probably none with such a great support team behind it.
Just my 2cent on this.
Markus
PS: Sure hope to keep driving the same car, sorry CMS I have been driving the past years :-)
I just don't understand the limitations on concurrent users, especially with the Standard edition. A user being able to log in at will and create/edit content is at that very core of why a CMS is needed! I can understand 1 user for the Community edition, it's free and that's fine. Small Business Edition should have at least 2, but for the Standard Edition, costing $2000, that should definitely be unlimited. That's my $.02.
I'm curious to know if Telerik talked to any non-profits about these prices?
Hello Robert,
This was a question we've had when we announced that we are stopping the Community Edition for the 3.x versions. We've heard you back then, and have introduced a free Community edition for the 4.x versions. We hope that it will help for that purpose.
Best wishes,Maybe one way Telerik could soften the blow a bit would be a time period in which the old pricing is still applied to the standard version. 900 USD instead of 2000 USD
4.0 will not be really feature complete. Lots of stuff will be added after release (even some stuff from 3.7 will not be ready in January if I recall correct). Some things will never be the same as in 3.7 (concurrent users)
So you kind of pay up front for featurs you will receive some time later (might be a month or a couple of month)
It's like buying a car and the dealer tells you the radio, electrical windows and remote lock will be added when you bring your car in after 10'000 miles (and right, you go from unlimied CD to 3 CD)
So to make the switch a bit more attraktive this could be one way to go.
But then again - I just looked at another CMS with much more features for the same price, but its just not Sitefinity. So maybe its better to buy a BMW with the readio delivered later then buying a Skoda with the CD Changer in from the start :-)
Love Sitefinity and hope 4.1 will be released very very soon after 4.0
Markus
Hello,
While you are right that some features are missing, you cannot just close your eyes on the features coming with the Official release - Search, with an option to combine different type data sources to go to the index, without the need to create custom indexes (!!!), Browse and Edit feature, Custom Content Fields with UI - so you don't have to work with code (!!!), Start-Up kits, that you can use right away with any edition of Sitefinity, SDK and comprehensive guides for each type of users (content writers, administrators, power users, designers, developers). Another thing is, we are certainly listening to your feedback (as always) on the concurrent users, and will do something there in order to achieve more balance (more satisfaction for you, more flexibility from the CMS side). The official release will bring javascript optimizations - most of the scrips will be combined, something that you had to do manually with the previous versions.
We are aiming to produce more documents like this one - Developer Productivity Outline - that will show what is under the hood, not just features that you can see on the surface.
Marcus, I like the association you did :)
Oooh, Bambooey
Dear Georgi
Well the best feature about Sitefinity is the support you get. I was born in Munich so I for sure will try to get the BMW because I trust they will put in a radio thats mutch better then any other brand :-)
You are right that SF is under the hood probably just way better then any other CMS. But then again go shopping for a car with your wife (or a CMS with a customer) and they will never ever look under the hood.
Am am glad to hear that the CD changer (conncurrent user) is back in discussion.
Looking forward to great new things to come but I think you guys wont have much time of between X-mas and new year if you realy want to deliver all those things till January 14.
But there is one thing we allways say. A day has 24 hours and if this is not enough you can work at night too.,
Regards Markus
PS: I don't have my eyes closed - I just don't see browse and edit yet :-)
@steve
What does this mean? Oooh, Bambooey
Hi Markus Berchtold,
You do not see it because we are releasing mainly fixes with our weekly builds. The build with the features is coming soon :) The Browse and Edit is currently in testing phase.
Kind regards,@Stormy: "I expect a release candidate to be feature complete with some bugs"
No, an RC should be feature complete and contain NO KNOWN BUGS. i.e. It is considered ready to release for sale, but subject to final fixes, should the RC turn up any previously unknown bugs.
Beta is normally a feature complete stage but with known bugs still to be hammered out and perf tuning to be done.
Alpha (these days often euphemistically labelled as "community technical preview" - CTP) is normally a development stage with missing features, known bugs and obvious performance issues.
It's very hard to see the current release as an RC, and even to see it as a Beta you have to squint and look at it in the best light, giving it a large benefit of doubt.
@MB - Of course you'r correct... I was trying to be charitable in my rant :)
After receiving the "renew your expired license now to get your 4.0 at discounted rate" email from telerik, I decided not to worry about the cost and tried to welcome 4.0 with open arms.
There are still quite a few bugs (I only tried the image library section and it was not really usable at all--that's for another thread), and I agree that the 4.0RC is not of RC quality yet.
What really bugs me is that after a few years of development (between 3.x and 4.0 RC), there is still no easy way for the users to order the images in the image library!
In the 3.x days my client always asks me how to make sure a particular image is shown as the thumbnail of the album or re-order the images in the album. I have to tell them just save the image you want to appear first last! It is very counterintuitive. I know I can add an extra ordinal field, but ultimately drag and drop sorting will be most welcome. For a $2,000 CMS, I think this functionality is a no-brainer.
I am still on the fence as for whether to recommend my client to renew the expired 3.x license, but with the new price tag I am expecting a little bit more from 4.0. At this rate, we might not see a usable version of 4.x until next summer.
We are planning on a restructure/redesign of our government website and I was suggesting to one of my bosses that we go the CMS route and get Sitefinity. I used a community version a while back testing it out and liked the way it worked. There were some minor things that I didn't like such as form creation and they mentioned they were working on adding that in a later release of the "real" version of the 3.x. I knew it was $899 and my boss was stating that we can see about using it since we use Telerik ASP.Net controls already and like their products. I just showed him the new prices this morning and he said there is no way we are doing it now. How can something go from $899 for the CMS to various versions where we would actually have to have at the very least $8k version since the number of concurrent users is 10 and hopefully we don't have anymore on at that same time or someone isn't going to be able to use it. We would also need load balancing support. So, yes, argue it all you want Telerki people. You lost another potential customer as that is way too much of a jump and not worth using.
I stumbled upon this thread and thought I'd add a note.
As a mostly happy RadControls developer I've recommended that package to my clients. Looking to invest further into all things Telerik I took a look at SiteFinity a few months ago. I found the pricing model completely unrealistic and uninviting. I'm sticking with Drupal based on LAMP and will call off-site to my ASP.NET server to provide RadControl content.
My suggestion is that Telerik offer a free single-user developer edition to get us hooked on the product. Then offer a pay-as-you go licensing model so that we can deploy small sites without a prohibitive entry-level cost for smaller sites. I propose something like $20/month for limited usage. Ala-carte features can be activated separately or Telerik can build in a phone-home model to monitor and bill for usage. The more I use it, the more I will pay, but I'm not going to spend thousands of dollars up-front, per site on any software.
Telerik if you don't like my numbers or the details, let's talk about it, but we need to negotiate somewhere from where you are to a point where I and lots of people like me will consider the cost/value to be equitable. Right now you're just off the table and not open to negotiation. This is what I mean by uninviting. I'm not even considering this product and not looking at ads or update notices because I consider the product so outlandishly out of range for my use and for my prospect audiences.
I want to use and recommend your software, but you need to be realistic about the value you provide and the price that end-users will pay for such value - especially when we're faced daily with the "but it's free" mantra of people comparing commercial tools with FOSS. I strongly encourage you to consider making this a lower-cost, higher-volume product rather than the current high-ticket low-volume product that it seems to be. You can try that model as an experiment and if it doesn't work, plan for and advertise that after the special promotion that the cost for new sites will go back to current pricing without affecting existing sites. I think most of us can deal with that.
I hope that helps.
"FOSS is only free if your time is worthless."
Oh common guys this is cheap, and look the most popular is the professional version at a meager ($8000)-
http://www.sitefinity.com/purchase.aspx. Don't worry the future of cms will show its head soon. The experience is far from smooth in Sitefinity, too. It seemed promising at first but not much better than crappy DNN.
Funny, that as a response to the biggest recession in recent history prices are more than doubled.
Don't get me wrong, I like telerik. I just can't afford them.
I think we All love Telerik & Sitefinity, which is why we are trying to get them to be more reasonable with their prices instead of just going elsewhere, but yes, it is becoming very difficult to afford them and I think a lot of us feel that we helped them build up and now they are leaving us in the dust for bigger fish and more profits and that sucks.
The current pricing forces people to buy more Sitefinity than they really need, for any given site... i.e. In order to meet your actual requirements, you are often going to end up buying massive capacity over-kill and multiple unused features - which is difficult to justify to an accountant.
As I detailed earlier in this thread, I believe that the pricing needs to be more modular and based on license-pak units that you add-on to a common base, to unlock features and increase capacity. This would allow people to buy the features and capacity they need for each site, and allow them to meet the budgets of each more easily.
I guess the SME market is simply not very profitable for Telerik.
I haven't really followed too closely with the latest development at Sitefinity lately. I deal mostly with SME myself. I have a couple 4.2/ 4.3 installations. Since the new pricing I have been recommending Umbraco to my clients. They simply don't have budget or appetite for a $2000 CMS, yet the small business edition is often too restrictive, especially there are open source solutions out there. (While I don't do PHP myself, my competitors do and their Drupal, Word Press, etc solutions are at least $500 cheaper right off the bat)
We had some 3.x licenses and we decided to upgrade to 4 when we were still eligible for the whatever promotion they had at the time. I left a forum post complaining the bugginess and incomplete features of the earlier 4.x versions (I am thinking 4.1). I have done several implementations with 3.7, and the early 4.x versions were a pain to work with. (bugs with navigation, hide from navigation from pages, unusably slow speed, etc).
Then I received a call from a gentleman (the NA sales manager I think). He apologized for the delay of 4.x and the problem i had. He reassured that telerik offers excellent support I won't find in open source community (which I tend to agree; telerik's service and support has always been one of its brighter spot) I told him that I am tired of workarounds (which are often broken when telerik fixes the bugs in future versions) I asked him about the new pricing structure, suggesting a $1000 version, but he kept on telling me that there won't be a product at that price point, as it will severely hurt the sales of their standard edition.
I commented that, the SME won't pay $2,000 (when their website budget is only $2,500, and I don't work for free), and the small business edition is too restrictive, They are effectively pricing themselves out for the SME market. He said they couldn't compete with Umbraco in price, but their features, track record and support are superior. Also, he commented that (i don't remember the exact words he used, but the idea is like) usually the small vocal few made up of 80% of the complaints. While I don't disagree that it is more difficult to serve us independent consultants, the bigger consulting firms simply moved on without commenting. At my day job, our CMS that serves millions traffic per month moved away from 3.7 to their competitors (think we would probably have bought the be the enteriprise license had we stayed). I proceeded to ask him, the bottomline, is the 4.1 version better or worse than 3.7 in terms of features and stability. He had no answer for that. He was a nice guy and I felt sorry to ask him such a question, but as a consumer, that the most logical question to ask. You wanted double the money yet offered me fewer features and stability? No matter how great your road map was, the transition to 4.x was really painful as features got dropped. The price increase was the added insult. The reality is, the early 4.x versions were buggier, slower and less featured-rich than 3.7!
I know sitefinity has released 4.3, 4.4 and 5.0. I upgraded one client to 4.3 and it was much more stable. It should have been the 4.0 version! Yet, it was still missing some features in 3.7 and certain features already available in other CMS (even the free ones)
In terms of ease of development, I personally find Umbraco was much more easy to work. I think the architecture in general is more well thought out. What Sitefinity has for it is the UI is more polished than Umbraco, and its Editor is more reliable than Umbraco's for sure. However, for some NGO, etc (which i usually work with), that doesn't justify the $2000 price tag. (and if we go cheap with the small business edition, we might as well use Umbraco as its features ar way less restrictive.
Now that both platform is at version 5, it will be interesting to see how they stack up against each other.
I commented because I love telerik and I care. I might give 5.0 community edition a try to build my new blog, but it takes a bit more to convince me that sitefinity is again a viable choice for my clients. Not sure if telerik cares and I think it has all but given up the SME.
I just decided to revive this post because I was sent a promotion asking me to spend $3000 for some small perk.
Something worried me a little as I checked back on the general forum 2 hours later on a Monday Low an behold my post was the last post received with " replied 2hours ago " marked beside it. That doesn't say much about a community--not concerned about my rant being replied to, but there were no other posts at that time.
Just to be complete here was my offer
We would like to let you know about a great offer, which is available until the end of this week:
For a limited time, place a Sitefinity order worth $3,000 or more and get complimentary coaching from a Sitefinity Partner Solution Consultant with it.
Deal: Place a Sitefinity order worth $3,000 or more and get 4 hours ($400 value) of Sitefinity coaching with it
Super Deal: Place a Sitefinity order worth $6,000 or more and get 8 hours ($800 value) of Sitefinity coaching with it
Hurry!
That reminded an offer from the gentleman I spoke with. I made it clear to him that I wasn't looking for any perks when I complained, but he was generous to offer me... something that has been in the work...
drumroll... Free trial to "Telephone support from developer"
Seriously. telephone support? Is it the best value they can offer to a customer? They will probably ask me for my sample code, project and db backup anyway. One extra support incident would be 100x more useful. Oh yes, I tried not to submit any tickets because the small business edition comes with a number of incidents only. Tried not to waste the quota....
@All
I have been using SF for quite some time and work mostly with small business. The 500 USD for the SBE are well worth it. I know how hard it is to convince small businesses that 500 USD for something you can have for free is worth it.
But do yourself and your clients a favour and install Jommla or Typo3 next to Sitefnity and you will see that SF is simply usability wise 5 years ahead.
Concerning the features. Yes SF might still be a bit behind. But I rather sell my clients a car without the sun roof if they can drive it.
Yes there are some things I miss in the SBE (nag nag nag - multiple backend languages and so) but in general 50 pages has been enough for my clients.
Concerning the rest. In the past 12 month SF has come to where it should have been when 4.0 was released. And yes SF still has a lot potential so stay tuned for new great stuff to come.
I am sure 2012 will be the year when Telerik with SF will deliver again more then we expect.
Markus
Hi Markus,
This thread is pretty stale at this point (started in 2010). Although I certainly recognize that pricing continues to be a point of contention for some projects. However, I haven't overheard any internal conversations about changing the pricing or licensing. I think everyone is reasonably happy with how we're positioned in the marketplace. We're certainly not priced at the high-end of the market, nor are we priced at the low-end (free) of the market.
We, too, just as Ben Alexandra, feel we've contributed to building this product (in our case providing a language pack and user controls) and then tossed in the dust for not fitting the profile of the newly-defined target audience.
But you got to simply deal with it, as pricing is not going to change.
We provide our own simplified CMS to smaller companies, but continue upgrading Sitefinity for bigger companies -- mostly because their users got used to working with Sitefinity, but also because over the years we've added so many custom user controls that switching to another system would be bad business for us.
Let's hope version 5 delivers on the promises.
We're all interested in Telerik's success. While consensus here is that there is a lot of room for improvement (increased revenue and adoption), if the company is comfortable with their current positioning, there is only so much that people like us can do to present a case for change.
I think people there need to internalize some concepts: Some people here like myself are saying we're simply not using, supporting, or advocating Sitefinity purely based on price, regardless of features or quality. I don't bother to look at the feature set because I can't imagine trying to sell it to any company that has a clue about the CMS industry. Others are saying they're limiting the scope of their usage and advocacy. Again, if you're really comfortable that these losses are acceptable then we can't argue, but will respectfully disagree and leave you to conduct your business as you see fit. While I do see both sides of this I have a deep sense that your management is betting on quality of quantity. That is, profit per installation is preferred over having more installations to support, which can increase support resources and the cost of business, thus perhaps reducing profitability. In this case I don't believe that's a good strategic position.
Even if the company is targeting just a high-ticket corporate audience, you need a healthy community based around the offering. Googling for "sitefinity" reveals virtually no community, only press releases, case studies, third-party sales and support. No one is blogging about this software to sing its praises. No one is asking questions in public forums. Sure, large corporations don't hang out in blogs or forums, but without that sort of marketing support from neutral third parties, it's hard for corporate decision makers and their staff to justify a purchase of a product that's virtually unknown outside of Telerik fandom. Now, compare this to any other CMS platform which has huge community support, and you see that Sitefinity isn't positioned in a context that agrees with the current marketing strategy. You need just enough people out there raving about the platform to overcome potential sticker shock. I'm not suggesting that you need a base like Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress to lend credibility to the product (though that wouldn't hurt). But (IMO) you shouldn't rely on marketing only to people who don't experience sticker shock - and yet that seems to be exactly where the company is positioning.
I'm sorry folks, I think you're going to have to learn a hard lesson here and I just hope no one blames the software for it. That's usually what happens - the tech people get blamed if the product isn't adopted even when people like us in the field cite obvious (to us) issues with the distribution model. Why am I even commenting on this? Because issues like that may affect the technical staff you keep or release if Sitefinity fails, and as a RadControls fan I don't want my tools of choice affected by some other unrelated product, profit center, or management team.
Thanks for the opportunity to voice an opinion.
@Gabe
I appreciate that Telerik needs to make a profit if the product is to survive, develop and be supported, but I think that the arguments put forward to justify the pricing policy miss the point entirely.
As I see it, Telerik are choosing an extremely inflexible approach to their pricing, forcing developers to look elsewhere when their project won't fit into Telerik's pricing model, and then trying to justify their policy by arguing that the product warrants the extra expense.
It's a bit like trying to sell a Mercedes SLK to buyer with a budget for a Hyundai, by explaining that the Mercedes is a better product... that's a valid argument in itself, but if you ain't got the money, you ain't going to buy, no matter how good the Mercedes might be.
As I keep arguing, Telerik could address much of their problem in this area, by having a more flexible and modular pricing policy... allowing people to buy as much Sitefinity as they need for each project, rather than looking elswhere when their budget won't stretch to the required edition of Sitefinity.
Enabling the features you need, and buying the capacity you need, via incremental add-on license/feature paks is an approach that Microsoft have used successfully for many of their products.
@MB
I am the first to embrace car examples. However I have never read a post on a Mercedes forum that the SLK is priced to high :-)
As in the realworld there are cheaper or free CMS like Joomla (Hunday) and there is Sitefinity (Mercedes).
And this is what SF is for me a very good quality CMS :-)
Markus
PS: I like Audi better then Mercedes so at the end it's often a personal choice and not everyone can drive a Porsche ;-)
I think if SF were a new product and came into the market at $2,000 - $8,000 with the features it had it would be a different story that what actually happened, which is that it was $899 for all features and then it suddenly jumped to $8,000 for 10 concurrent admin users! Some of us loyal users who built significant portions of our business around this suddenly were left out in the cold and got priced out a product we were loyal to.
I think Ben hit's nail on head here. It's not just that it's too expensive, it's that it went from a product that many built businesses on, years of experience and suddenly the price was out of reach. In addition, at this new out of reach price tag it suddenly had fewer features, far, far more bugs and the hosting requirements are now 5-10 times more. For me it's been a tough and embarrassing year. Many of my clients who I convinced to go with SF over Open Source solutions, and who now love the product, are now told that in order to get the latest the price is now out of their budget. I've not had to retrain myself from primarily a .net developer (90%) to a php dev as I've now changed the majority of my development to using the MODX CMS. I was always a supporter of Telerik and still will be if the budget permits. One thing I've learned in my switch to Open Source is that if a product is solid then you don't actually need all the Support that Telerik provides. If there weren't so many bugs requiring so many work arounds then the Support that is such a big selling feature of Sitefinity would be obsolete.
Man, many of you are much nicer and loyal than I am. I understand the business decisions. What I take issue with is how Telerik handled its existing customers that got them to where they were. In our case, we were promised something by sales, but that tune changed with the new version and licensing model. I also thought Vassil was very arrogant in his posts on the forums.
As a result, I simply do not think Telerik operates with a lot of integrity and have ceased to recommend their products to many, many people, regardless of how many great features there are.
@Markus
The (perhaps poor) car analogy was simply to make that point that no amount of 'feel the quality' will work, if you don't have the budget.
Telerik's inflexible pricing simply puts it out of the market, except where the requirements happen to exactly match the edition specs. Of course, there are cheaper CMS and Telerik is losing sales to these products, when a more flexible pricing policy could allow it to be more competitive. I know that I have been forced to use alternatives to provide solutions.
Anyone who has studied Marketing knows the 4-Ps
- Product
- Price
- Promotion
- Placement
Telerik have a good product, but they have a bad pricing policy - and Marketing 101 says that is a sales killer.
@Phill
You know I love the car analogy.
QUOTE
p.s. Markus, I always love your car analogies. However consider this, with SF 4 we weren't sold a Mercedes, we were sold a broken down car with only 3 wheels and a Mercedes body carefully placed on top, made to look like a nice Mercedes until you touched it. Oh and they threw in a bent bike rack and broken trailer that we didn't want in the first place.
UNQUOTE
You might be right with the above. But this is spoken from a mechanics point of view. If you think about the every day driver (end user) it simply a car thats easy to drive.
Other Hyudai CMS might work perfect under the hood but I found out that my drivers (customers) have a hard time just getting into the car. They are not used to the manual gear shift and simply moving around in the car is so complicated that they give up soon.
So I stick with SF because time after time I realize that after just 2 hours of driving lessons they can take the car to the city :-)
@MB
I don't know to much about marketing but I assume the 4P will add up to a sum. And if Telerik feels the the sum is right for them, who are we to tell them how their Ps should look like. Just waiting for some thread tellin telerik where to put banner adds on the web ;-)
@All
I also had to bite the bullet of higher prices for my small business clients. But I am more then willing to pay the price if the product is right.
I am rather missing small widget then big features. I could have done without forum but needed other stuff more for my drivers. -> no need for towing boats but cup holder would be nice.
Bottom line (after my name, since it has to be on the bottom)
Markus
I love Sitefinitys usability. Support still rocks. And if Telerik focuses on bugs, speed and small improvements like breadcrumb widget I am more then convinced that I made the right choice sticking with SF.
@Markus
"if Telerik feels the the sum is right for them, who are we to tell them how their Ps should look like"
Yes, that is absolutely correct, and I'm not disputing it for a second - if they believe it's working, then more power to them.
My comments are limited strictly to the context of this thread, and people (including my own customers) stating that they are not choosing Sitefinity because of the pricing - in that context, the pricing policy is self-evidently an issue.
However, it's entirely Telerik's perogative to decide if that market sector is of value to them and/or how to best market their product.
PPPP basically says that if you do the other 3 well enough, then Price has less impact - Apple is built on this approach.
I also noticed right away and up front that Sitefinity was so ashamed of their prices that they NEVER publish any of that on their website. Big mystery, Why? You are coming across like a used car salesman who wants you to hand him the keys to your car while you take him for a test ride. Only to come back and have them tell you that they sold your car during the 30 minutes of looking at their possible sale.
This website smelled like a rat nest from the very opening. Maybe I hsave lived 76 years to long?
I learned more from this psudo review that I did on all of the Sitefinity pages.
No Thanks I will pass and delete from my system. Just thought you should know.
Hello Houstin,
Thank you for sharing your feedback. I'm really sorry to hear about your experience, and just wanted to check back with you and see if I can address some of your points.
You're correct in noticing that we don't publish our prices on the website. I don't think it's such an uncommon practice, nor something to be ashamed of. I think it's a business decision, which does not limit in any ways the customer's ability to get a price quote. Actually requesting a quote means a lot to us, and we want to make sure you'll get the proper attitude and advise from us for the interest you've shown in our company's products - usually a process that involves more than providing just the numbers.
I agree with you that having the ability to know a product's price before trialing it (or vice versa) is very important. Please correct me if I'm wrong here but I believe the journey on the website does not explicitly restrict to either of these options preceding the other - you can easily request a quote and do a trial in the order of your preference, and in both actions we want to make sure you get the best experience to make your objective decision.
I respect your opinion about the website - after all despite that we were never known as one-size-fits-all type of company, and we always try to address our customers's specific needs through our products and marketing assets, at the end of the day the UX we offer is judged against everyone's personal preference. I'll be glad to provide any specific information you are interested in about the Sitefinity product, which you weren't able to find on the website - this would also help us find out how we can improve our customer's experience, and I want to thank you in advance for giving us this opportunity.
Regards,
Boyan Barnev
Telerik
I think Ben's opinion is a little extreme but he does have a point. I'm a developer who frequently downloads trial products and tools and recommends them to my company. That's what I did 5 years ago with Sitefinity. When a company does not publish their price I find it highly annoying. When I don't see a price I move on and find a similar product that does include prices. I do get the same "used car lot" feeling so I certainly understand Ben's position.
What I find worse than not including prices is that you guys launched a free (Community Edition) and a low cost (Business Edition) edition. Only to discontinue those versions later on. You might not like to hear this but that is the ultimate bait and switch tactic. At least with a used car lot you can walk away when that happens. It's not so easy after you built your application with Sitefinity and now you have to spend an additional $10,000 or so every year to keep using it.
I received a couple emails to notify me of activity in this discussion. I completely forgot about it. The comments from 6 years ago still apply today. I love Telerik but never once seriously considered Sitefinity for any client requests. In 2010 I was working with Drupal. Since then I've moved on with WordPress, and the phenomenal CMS that it's become.
With the entire core and perpetual updates all free, and a thriving third-party market of plugin and theme developers, the WordPress platform has come to dominate the CMS industry. Why didn't Telerik adopt that model? Why didn't we get an opportunity to participate in an ecosystem like that when it seemed so obvious that the Sitefinity business model doomed this fine product into obscurity? I'm guessing the CFO and team at Telerik/Progress figured $100 (for a component) @ 10,000 (units) is equal to 100 units @ $10,000 - so why bother with dealing with high volume, low-ticket offering? Well, if those ratios are accurate, that's true. But if you look at the actual numbers for WordPress, the CMS market is exponentially larger than that - and Telerik simply blew it by not providing a platform that we can put forward in that ecosystem. (managewp.com/statistics-about-wordpress-usage)
Again, I completely forgot about Sitefinity given the situation here. That's now 6 years during which I have only recommended this product twice, when I have recommended and implemented countless others (including the Telerik Platform). What does it mean for Telerik/Progress revenue if even the people enamored with the brand completely forget about this offering? Speaking of the Platform, with Telerik experience with Cordova and Xamarin, I'm hoping they have a taste of the profitability associated with working with bigger names - with embracing global trends rather than hunkering down in their own little island and expecting others to pay the price to visit.
I understand that the Sitefinity model, which I would phrase as follows: "Provide a high quality product at a business-class price, that eliminates the common burdens of FOSS, including independent developers who lose interest in critical components, and random security flaws and inconsistencies associated with components from a number of random developers." That’s a fine model, one which is embraced by IBM for AIX and RedHat for Linux. But the questions which follow include: Is there really that much Value associated with the price? Can Telerik quantify and compare that model for an average business site, with the amount of time=money spent on freeware to get roughly equivalent functionality? I don't see that. I don't see a Value Model for Sitefinity to compare with what we're getting in the FOSS world (as poor as it can be at times). I put the blame for that squarely in the lap of Telerik/Sitefinity Marketing.
Or perhaps to summarize all of that, a price can only be Way Too High if we have something to compare against. We are looking at pure numbers and everyone measures Value differently. Sitefinity pricing wouldn't be High if we were convinced that the actual ultimate cost was Higher for solutions like Drupal and WordPress. This is purely about marketing and has nothing to do with the technical prowess of the platform.
The game isn't over. There are still opportunities for Sitefinity to do better. But given the competition it's much harder to break out of the box now than before.
Ahem, thanks for your time.
I think the guys at Sitefinity decided not to go on competing with the free PHP-MySQL crowd any longer. They chose to compete with high-end products offered by IBM (the former WebSphere platform) and Oracle, for example. It's a limited market, but I think overall it produces less headache and requires less support personnel. It was a legitimate change of policy, but for us who helped launch it many years ago was pretty irritating.
@Chanan - The question was directed to Telerik. You do not work for Telerik. Unless you have an answer that resolves a specific problem please do not speak for them. I really want to hear what Telerik has to say.
Why are we still reviving a Sitefinity 4.0 pricing thread? I was told by Telerik that SMB was no longer its intended market. I was the one who had to break the news to my clients (SMB and NGOs) that the CMS I recommended had increased the price so dramatically that it was no longer a good fit for them.
It was a tough decision, but I had to move my clients to WordPress. I personally love Umbraco, but my clients prefer WordPress for its ease of use (visual composer sucks, but the clients love it). I personally hate coding in PHP as C# is so much more elegant, but WordPress allows one to set up a SMB site quickly and easily with lots of free plug-ins and themes support. There are not a lot money to be made building SMB websites anymore, but I'd gladly build them for cheap and make (very little) money through support and hosting instead.