It was never set in stone that it would be the case. We ran into some issues deciding on how to price individual add-ons, as well as how things work with how many sites are included with support and updates.
From a management standpoint it was easier for us to do it this way for right now. In the future we may still make them available as individual purchases but it would require us to change our our license management tool works and we wanted to get 1.5 out there and that would have delayed it further.
What we have implemented is Basic Add-Ons (currently Campaign Monitor and MailChimp) are now included with the Business License (formerly Multi-Site License). The Advanced Add-Ons (FreshBooks, PayPal, User Registration) are still Developer Only along with also receiving access to the Basic Add-Ons.
We will revisit the Add-On management in the future and may make them available individually or open up more Add-On access to the Business License. That will be the most likely route as it makes more sense from a pricing standpoint.
From a pricing standpoint it's tricky. We have to price it so it makes sense from a support standpoint. The more advanced the add-on (PayPal, User Registration, etc.) the more questions and issues users typically have... the greater the support burden. So we have to price it to take that into account, but by doing so users may not want to pay what we would have to price it at AND it would be possible to purchase a Single License and pay for a bunch of individual Add-Ons and come out coming close to the price of a Developer License.
So the decision to not go in that direction just yet was one we didn't make lightly, but was something we had to do to move forward and get the 1.5 release out the door as soon as we could. We will revisit it down the road.
Getting the Add-On Browser/Manager in the 1.5 release is the first step to more enhancements and features that have to do with how you can access Add-Ons.
Posted 13 years ago on Wednesday March 23, 2011 |
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