Licensing Recomendation

I understand you guys are in the process of reviewing how licensing is going to work moving forward.

It would be cool if you had a Paid Community edition that did not require the Sitefinity Logo to be present. The support could be the same as it is with the community edition. It would be a cheaper alternative to the full Sitefinity edition, which would help Agencies be able to standardize on a CMS platform for big and small clients.

Another thing to keep in mind is a Software as a Service model licensing, for those Agencies or providers that would like to offer Sitefinity under a SaaS model to their clients.

Thanks!

Hi James,

Thank you for contacting the Sitefinity Team!

I have now logged and escalated your recommendations. Those sound like quite reasonable ideas and our team leaders will discuss them on a meeting that's going to be held later on today.

I would like to thank you for your feedback, as this is the best method for the successful development of Sitefinity and the only way to ensure that you, the people who use our software, are happy with what it has to offer!

Please do get back to me if more suggestions come up!

All the best,
Grisha Karanikolov
the Telerik team

Was this suggestion discussed at the May meeting?  Has any decision been made about this suggestion? 

I use SiteFinity to develop sites for my customers who do not want to update the site themselves.  From other posts, I note that the new community edition will only be available for non-commercial sites.  I would prefer to continue to use the newest version of SiteFinity for sites I maintain for commercial clients who do not want to maintain their own sites.  This would allow me to standardize on SiteFinity for all sites, even those mentioned above.  Having an option for a paid community edition with only forum support would be extremely useful in that regard.

Hi Glenn,

 We have discussed your suggestions back in May and a decision has been made. As a result of yours and community feedback through our forums we have decided to bring back the Community Edition for Sitefinity 4.0. However, the Community Edition will not be suitable for commercial websites. It could be used for personal websites and blogs that have no commercial purpose. We will announce more details on our pricing and licensing for Sitefinity 4.0 with its Release Candidate planned for October this year.

Don't hesitate to contact us, if you have any other questions.

Oh no!

Community version is not going to be available for commercial use?

That is really quite a blow. I suppose I can see how it might not be commercially viable to juts give the product away, but the $899.00 is a little bit too steam for a lot of small businesses that could use this great product but are only really going to build a very simple web site with a few pages.

What would really be good is some sort of cheaper cut down version at a lower price.

It appears from Anton's previous reply that (1) small clients who want a CMS and (2) developers like me who use the Community Edition to support customers not interested in doing it themselves will have to opt for another CMS for those sites.  Or possibly switch all future sites to another CMS that can be used in all scenarios.

Hello Glenn, Andrew,

I would like to ask for your patience until we officially announce the pricing & licensing policy to the public. This is going to happen in October and I do believe it makes no sense of discussing a decision that has not been announced as final as of yet. As you know we strive to always deliver more than expected, so we will make sure to suit as wider range of customers as possible.

I am usually quite patient, and I understand your perspective as well.  My difficulty is that I am preparing proposals for customers' web sites, and it is difficult to consider my alternatives when this information is mot available now.  If I assume for a small, five -page site that I can use an updated community edition, and later discover that I cannot, then I am stuck using the previous community edition,  absorbing the cost of the low-end standard edition, or finding an alternative CMS. 

I used the community edition to develop my own site and had planned on using it and the standard edition exclusively for future sites for my customers.  Even if my company administers the CMS, I prefer to use a single package for my site and all of my customers, no matter how small or how big their site may be.  Therefore, the lack of information is disheartening.

Hi guys,

Thank you for sharing your experience, Glenn, I can understand your situation much better now.
Obviously, providing a stripped-down version of Sitefinity 4.0 at a lower price would involve a risk of cannibalizing the market for the standard version, which is just the reason for discontinuing the Community version of Sitefinity 3.x.
Unfortunately I cannot provide more info on the licensing changes, however if I could add my 2 cents here, it would be this:

• There apparently will be a community edition, which will be provided for free, but will be limited only for non-commercial websites;
• Currently a Sitefinity license costs $899 and allows you to upgrade to Sitefinity 4.0 at no additional cost.