Ask Joel Spolsky: Pricing – what changed?
In 2004 you stated "I have certain competitors that [...] charge small customers per-user but then there's a "unlimited" license at a fixed price. This is nutty, because you're giving the biggest price break precisely to the largest customers, the ones who would be willing to pay you the most money."[1]
Today fogbugz has a "unlimited" license as well as substantially lower per user pricing if buying 150+ licenses.[2]
What changed?
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html [2] https://shop.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/default.asp?sCategory=HOSTEDFB&sStep=stepEnterEmailAddress&fccmp=_buyfb (click the prepay radio button)
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"Whoops, we're only licensed for 172 users, but we just hired Bob and we now need to get a new license key for him!" causing hours or days of delays just isn't appealing. Saying "unlimited" to the companies that have hundreds of users might be leaving some money on the table, but also might be netting some extra sales you might have otherwise lost due to fear of complex licensing.
(It's also possible that Microsoft's pricing model has less influence on Joel since he's been away from the company for a long time, but that's just speculation.)
Thank you. I will now quote you as if I had though of it myself in future conversations.
..and that is why I come to HN.
As for FogBugz, as another poster wrote "if your competitor is an order of magnitude cheaper, and not significantly worse" you have to respond to that (even if you think they are nutty, and a bit more than significantly worse).
It was probably also starting to be incur noticeable administrative overhead for fog creek
Bear in mind that "Unlimited" usually is not so. Even if his customer has 100k employees, the likelihood is that only a few thousand at most will use it. Why nickel-and-dime them - make the sales process as simple as possible and make everyone happier.
(it might indeed be the realization that there aren't companies with Unlimited employees, but maybe it's some other interesting reason)
They may not be able to execute their plans well, but it gives them negotiation power.
Site licenses are in recognition of those people IMO.
One of his recent articles: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html also reads a little bit like bashing his own product FogBugz and advocating that it's a bit useless:
"Do not allow more than two weeks (in fix time) of bugs to get into the bug database." "Then close as “won’t fix” everything left in the bug database. Don’t worry, the severe bugs will come back."
Maybe they discontinue FogBugz soon and only concentrate on the more hip Trello?
Also, I'm still disappointed that they discontinued Kiln for self hosted servers. They did that silently.
Regarding Kiln for self hosted: At Fog Creek, we've always said we don't want your money if you're not amazingly happy. We're not taking your money right now because we're not certain we can make you amazingly happy... yet.
We found that the installed Kiln customer experience was not up to our standards as a company, so we've deferred taking on new installed customers until we're satisfied that they'll be amazingly happy with our product.
We prioritized on our On Demand environment because that's where the bulk of our customers and revenue are. We still want to find a solution for our self hosted customers as well, but it wasn't our immediate priority and we weren't going to hold up shipping Kiln Harmony until we figured out what we were doing with self hosted installs.