XCP-ng pricing
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@JaredBusch what do you think support from the devs would be worth?
Do you think that the current plan (as far as I've seen) being a flat cost per host is a good way to go about it?
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I can't see myself asking my boss for $1000 per year for something I likely wont ever use.
I feel like a price per ticket or hourly rate is more realistic for this type of support, but at the same time a single ticket could easily cost $1000 if being charged per hour?
I don't know. I've never paid for support unless it was bundled with a license that I had to purchase.
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@bnrstnr said in XCP-ng pricing:
I can't see myself asking my boss for $1000 per year for something I likely wont ever use.
I feel like a price per ticket or hourly rate is more realistic for this type of support, but at the same time a single ticket could easily cost $1000 if being charged per hour?
I don't know. I've never paid for support unless it was bundled with a license that I had to purchase.
This is the rub for SMB. They pretty much "buy" updates and get free support. And enterprises (at least according to Scott - I have no first hand experience) Pay for support and may or may not get free updates.
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@bnrstnr said in XCP-ng pricing:
I can't see myself asking my boss for $1000 per year for something I likely wont ever use.
And here is the rub - The XCP-ng guys can't survive on only open tickets.. they need to sell support contracts to ensure income. At least that's my guess.
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@dashrender said in XCP-ng pricing:
And here is the rub - The XCP-ng guys can't survive on only open tickets.. they need to sell support contracts to ensure income. At least that's my guess.
Right, and the same exact thing applies to XOA, it seems ridiculously expensive for SMB, but is probably easily justified for enterprises. They're seemingly pricing it to land a few big spenders to pay the bills and they will continue to provide enough support in the forums to keep the small guys happy too.
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@dashrender said in XCP-ng pricing:
@bnrstnr said in XCP-ng pricing:
I can't see myself asking my boss for $1000 per year for something I likely wont ever use.
And here is the rub - The XCP-ng guys can't survive on only open tickets.. they need to sell support contracts to ensure income. At least that's my guess.
But comparing this to the existing XOA pricing they're essentially trying to get every customer of theirs to purchase a Ferrari for each of em.
I'm all for support, but at a realistic cost. The $6000 a year for the XOA features that I was using for free previously would immediately eliminate that solution in the SMB world.
And while I understand that "support costs a lot" this isn't that support needs to be 24/7 phone and email with SSH access to a client.
You'd easily be able to setup tiers of support.
Tier 1 - Basic 8-5 hours phone & email support with 12 hour response window.
Tier 2 - Standard 8-5 hours phone & email support with 4 hour response windows
Tier 3 - Pro 24/7 hours " " with a 4 hour response windowetc.
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IE you would setup a per socket or core license costs and then apply a support level fee on top of it.
This way everyone would pay the same per socket/core rate and get to choose the level of support that they want.
You could even have minimums of support based on environment size requirements.
1-4 hosts with less than 32 cores - Tier 1 support
4-8 hosts - Tier 2 supportetc
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Going along the idea of the per socket/core and tiers if you opt to not add on higher support tiers you'd automatically fall into the Tier 1 category.
Unless of course there were support minimums based on the number of sockets or cores.
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Going on another point, have an emergency rate for people to opt to not purchase support at all. Simply have a flat "Call in rate" for the first hour.
Something like $500 for the first hour and then $250 per hour after. Just pulling numbers out of the air.
This would then highlight to the customer that support is key if there is a critical issue that costs more than what a support contract would cost regularly.
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Or as a support tier there could even be a limit to the number of support cases per month or quarter or year as a whole.
Tier 1 might be 4 tickets for a set time period
Tier 2 might be double that number of tickets over the same period
Tier 3 might be double Tier 2.There are so many ways to 1) reduce the cost it takes to provide support and 2) make customers find value in support so as to not abuse the support plan they've purchased.
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And what's more, for customers who do purchase support and overrun their support allotment for the period there could be a per ticket fee that is charged.
Or a reduced hourly rate for customers who need that additional support.
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Which all of these additional fees might be trivial in the grand scheme, but it would greatly reduce the burden of providing support.
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@dustinb3403 said in XCP-ng pricing:
Now my reasons for the pricing breakdown there goes with core counting. Olivier is considering a flat cost per host (which makes no sense to me).
I agree, that would be nuts. They should learn from the big boys and model after them where it makes sense.
Pricing should be based on capacity or use or something meaningful. "Number of boxes" is not meaningful. A "box" might be a quad core, 32GB nice desktop from five years ago. Or it might be a 512 core, 4TB monster. Same price for both? That's crazy.
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@dustinb3403 said in XCP-ng pricing:
How would you guys value support for XCP-ng? Is my pricing insanely low, just about right or way to costly?
I valued the support per core, and on the "just right" range per year of
$348/host/yearwould be a 64 core system at $6/core.Obviously this price could change, but that isn't an abnormally large or small server either.
The model is fine, but the pricing seems like. At $6/core you'd have small servers at $24 a year, that's not enough. Maybe $8-$10/core. Or maybe an eight core minimum because at some point, you just can't justify it.
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@scottalanmiller said in XCP-ng pricing:
@dustinb3403 said in XCP-ng pricing:
How would you guys value support for XCP-ng? Is my pricing insanely low, just about right or way to costly?
I valued the support per core, and on the "just right" range per year of
$348/host/yearwould be a 64 core system at $6/core.Obviously this price could change, but that isn't an abnormally large or small server either.
The model is fine, but the pricing seems like. At $6/core you'd have small servers at $24 a year, that's not enough. Maybe $8-$10/core. Or maybe an eight core minimum because at some point, you just can't justify it.
Yeah I was just randomly throwing numbers in the air based on what is available list price for comparable support (xenserver.org).
Up or down a few dollars / core wouldn't hurt in any way.
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@scottalanmiller said in XCP-ng pricing:
@dustinb3403 said in XCP-ng pricing:
How would you guys value support for XCP-ng? Is my pricing insanely low, just about right or way to costly?
I valued the support per core, and on the "just right" range per year of
$348/host/yearwould be a 64 core system at $6/core.Obviously this price could change, but that isn't an abnormally large or small server either.
The model is fine, but the pricing seems like. At $6/core you'd have small servers at $24 a year, that's not enough. Maybe $8-$10/core. Or maybe an eight core minimum because at some point, you just can't justify it.
Yeah I mentioned before the core based model would be best now, but look at how many people can't do simple logic and math and get confused at the MS core based model (which is excellent btw).
I'd be afraid a new company using that same model would have too many scared away customers without being already widely known and used... an advantage MS already had when switching to core model.
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@obsolesce said in XCP-ng pricing:
@dustinb3403 said in XCP-ng pricing:
@obsolesce said in XCP-ng pricing:
@dustinb3403 said in XCP-ng pricing:
@obsolesce so you would favor the existing support model that many businesses already do.
Per socket or tiers of support.
Well, if someone has a server with 4 sockets, and each CPU has 32 physical cores, and they are running some crazy system or number of VMs... that has the potential to be one hell of a support case.
Not necessarily tiers, but it covers the kind of support you may expect.
That everyone no matter what the use case is, should pay the same price of support, I think, isn't 100% fair.
And that is my argument as well for the pricing I proposed.
The customers that exist with massive servers paying for support would end up with a system like you describe would essentially get support at little to no cost compared to a well designed and balanced support plan.
Right, a socket-based server pricing is fine for now, and could change in 5-10 years and go to core based...
Really, core based is best NOW..... but the general population can't figure out how to do core based pricing for some reason, so I can see that being a put-off.
If you can't figure out core, you aren't a viable customer.
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@scottalanmiller said in XCP-ng pricing:
@obsolesce said in XCP-ng pricing:
@dustinb3403 said in XCP-ng pricing:
@obsolesce said in XCP-ng pricing:
@dustinb3403 said in XCP-ng pricing:
@obsolesce so you would favor the existing support model that many businesses already do.
Per socket or tiers of support.
Well, if someone has a server with 4 sockets, and each CPU has 32 physical cores, and they are running some crazy system or number of VMs... that has the potential to be one hell of a support case.
Not necessarily tiers, but it covers the kind of support you may expect.
That everyone no matter what the use case is, should pay the same price of support, I think, isn't 100% fair.
And that is my argument as well for the pricing I proposed.
The customers that exist with massive servers paying for support would end up with a system like you describe would essentially get support at little to no cost compared to a well designed and balanced support plan.
Right, a socket-based server pricing is fine for now, and could change in 5-10 years and go to core based...
Really, core based is best NOW..... but the general population can't figure out how to do core based pricing for some reason, so I can see that being a put-off.
If you can't figure out core, you aren't a viable customer.
Right the only reason people cannot figure it out is because people are too stupid to do basic math.
MS core pricing is very simple. You pay for what you have with a couple minor minimum requirements.
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@jaredbusch said in XCP-ng pricing:
@scottalanmiller said in XCP-ng pricing:
@obsolesce said in XCP-ng pricing:
@dustinb3403 said in XCP-ng pricing:
@obsolesce said in XCP-ng pricing:
@dustinb3403 said in XCP-ng pricing:
@obsolesce so you would favor the existing support model that many businesses already do.
Per socket or tiers of support.
Well, if someone has a server with 4 sockets, and each CPU has 32 physical cores, and they are running some crazy system or number of VMs... that has the potential to be one hell of a support case.
Not necessarily tiers, but it covers the kind of support you may expect.
That everyone no matter what the use case is, should pay the same price of support, I think, isn't 100% fair.
And that is my argument as well for the pricing I proposed.
The customers that exist with massive servers paying for support would end up with a system like you describe would essentially get support at little to no cost compared to a well designed and balanced support plan.
Right, a socket-based server pricing is fine for now, and could change in 5-10 years and go to core based...
Really, core based is best NOW..... but the general population can't figure out how to do core based pricing for some reason, so I can see that being a put-off.
If you can't figure out core, you aren't a viable customer.
Right the only reason people cannot figure it out is because people are too stupid to do basic math.
MS core pricing is very simple. You pay for what you have with a couple minor minimum requirements.
Totally agree, but look how widespread that stupidity was, and still is. Windows Server 2016 licensing is one of the top hits on my blog, still!
Are you sure you don't want ANY of those people buying support for or using XCP-ng?
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@obsolesce said in XCP-ng pricing:
@jaredbusch said in XCP-ng pricing:
@scottalanmiller said in XCP-ng pricing:
@obsolesce said in XCP-ng pricing:
@dustinb3403 said in XCP-ng pricing:
@obsolesce said in XCP-ng pricing:
@dustinb3403 said in XCP-ng pricing:
@obsolesce so you would favor the existing support model that many businesses already do.
Per socket or tiers of support.
Well, if someone has a server with 4 sockets, and each CPU has 32 physical cores, and they are running some crazy system or number of VMs... that has the potential to be one hell of a support case.
Not necessarily tiers, but it covers the kind of support you may expect.
That everyone no matter what the use case is, should pay the same price of support, I think, isn't 100% fair.
And that is my argument as well for the pricing I proposed.
The customers that exist with massive servers paying for support would end up with a system like you describe would essentially get support at little to no cost compared to a well designed and balanced support plan.
Right, a socket-based server pricing is fine for now, and could change in 5-10 years and go to core based...
Really, core based is best NOW..... but the general population can't figure out how to do core based pricing for some reason, so I can see that being a put-off.
If you can't figure out core, you aren't a viable customer.
Right the only reason people cannot figure it out is because people are too stupid to do basic math.
MS core pricing is very simple. You pay for what you have with a couple minor minimum requirements.
Totally agree, but look how widespread that stupidity was, and still is. Windows Server 2016 licensing is one of the top hits on my blog, still!
Are you sure you don't want ANY of those people buying support for or using XCP-ng?
It's a trade off, do you want to lose a few people from a pool that have a near zero percent chance of considering the product? Or do you want to alienate your core potential user base?
XCP-NG is a product for smart IT people, not fodder that can't handle Windows licensing. No product can be made for everyone, this one isn't made for them from the get go, catering to them in the pricing wouldn't make sense.
