While writing a quick comment on Paul Boag’s recent post I thought that the issue of pricing online products, and specifically how we approached setting a price for Perch, might be of interest to anyone else considering how to charge for their work.

在对Paul Boag的最新文章发表快速评论时，我认为其他任何考虑如何对其工作收取费用的人都可能会对在线产品的定价问题，尤其是我们为Perch定价的方式感兴趣。

Perch is a content management system developed and sold by my company, edgeofmyseat.com. It is a self-hosted CMS, so after buying a license for £35 (+ VAT if in the UK/EU) customers download the code and install it on their own server. The payment is a one-off with no monthly charges and includes support, updates to future dot releases of that version, and a growing number of free add-ons available from the site.

Perch是由我的公司edgeofmyseat.com开发和销售的内容管理系统。 它是一个自托管的CMS ，因此，在购买价格为35英镑（如果在英国/欧盟为+，则为增值税）的许可证后，客户可以下载代码并将其安装在自己的服务器上。 该付款是一次性的，不收取月租费用，包括支持，对该版本未来版本的更新以及该站点上越来越多的免费附加组件 。

为什么不免费提供该产品并收取支持和/或插件费用？ (Why not offer the product for free and charge for support and/or plugins?)

Every so often we encounter someone who is outraged that we charge money for a Perch license, astounded that we would like to earn money for our work. We could have released Perch as a free product, but unless it is making us money we wouldn’t be able to justify company time spent developing and supporting it.

我们每隔一段时间就会遇到一个愤怒的人，我们向我们收取Perch许可证的费用，感到震惊的是我们希望为自己的工作赚钱。 我们本可以将Perch作为免费产品发布，但是除非它能为我们赚钱，否则我们将无法证明公司花在开发和支持它上的时间是合理的。

Obviously there are products that have done very well as open source, free to download products but these companies have to make money somehow. A common way is to charge for support, however we think that the charging for support model is a really bad one – for the customer. A Perch license includes support, if you take a quick look at our support area you will see that the support offered quite frequently goes way above and beyond just basic installation help. It is in our interests as a business to try and “design out” of Perch, and the Perch documentation, support requests. If we can add some additional help or refine a confusing interface and prevent a bunch of support requests we make each license more profitable. If we make our money by selling support then it is actually in our interests as a company for the product to need support! We would much rather spend our time writing code and help resources to make customer’s lives easier – than supporting people who are frustrated – so the pay for support model was always a non-starter for us.

显然，有些产品在开源方面做得很好，可以免费下载产品，但是这些公司必须以某种方式赚钱。 一种常见的方式是对支持收费，但是我们认为对客户收费是一种非常糟糕的收费模式。 Perch许可证包括支持，如果您快速浏览我们的支持区域，您会发现所提供的支持远远超出了基本的安装帮助。 尝试“设计” Perch和Perch文档，支持请求符合我们的企业利益。 如果我们可以添加一些其他帮助或完善一个令人困惑的界面并阻止一堆支持请求，那么我们将使每个许可证的利润更高。 如果我们通过出售支持来赚钱，那么作为公司的产品实际上需要我们的支持！ 我们宁愿花费时间编写代码和帮助资源来使客户的生活变得更轻松-而不是为沮丧的人们提供支持-因此，支持付费模式对于我们而言始终是起步。

There are also products on the market that have a free basic, core product but then you pay for plugins to make the product more fully featured. We didn’t want to go down this route for a few reasons. Firstly, we want to make the core product as fully-featured as makes sense for a “light” CMS. We didn’t want to be making decisions about chunks of functionality – should x be part of core or should people pay for it? We want to develop the product in terms of what makes sense for the product, not with one eye on how we monetize features. Secondly, we wanted it to be clear what people pay when they decide to use Perch for a site. You buy a license and that is it, you can then download our add-ons as and when you need them without paying additional charges. If we did things the other way round and offered the core free then charged for add-ons we would be having to say to people in support that they needed to buy X, Y and Z to do what they wanted and the cost to the customer starts to creep up, and isn’t clear from the outset.

市场上也有一些具有免费的基本核心产品的产品，但是您需要付费购买插件才能使该产品具有更全面的功能。 由于某些原因，我们不想走这条路。 首先，我们要使核心产品具有“轻量级” CMS所需要的全功能 。 我们不想就功能块做出决定-x应该是核心的一部分还是人们应该为此付费？ 我们希望从对产品有意义的角度来开发产品，而不是单靠我们如何通过功能获利。 其次，我们希望弄清楚人们在决定使用Perch网站时会付出什么。 您购买了许可证，仅此而已，然后可以在需要时下载我们的附加组件，而无需支付额外费用。 如果我们以相反的方式做事并免费提供核心，然后对附加组件收费，我们将不得不向人们表示支持，他们需要购买X，Y和Z来做他们想要的事情以及客户的成本开始爬行，从一开始就不清楚。

为什么不提供多站点许可证？ (Why not offer a multi-site license?)

The most common request we get is for a multi-site license, “buy once, install as many times as you like”. We didn’t go down this route because firstly it would make the base price far more expensive. Everyone buying it would be buying the ability to install it many times – what if you only have one site to use it on, or don’t know how you and your clients will get on with it? In addition, we feel that this model is again bad for the customer. Once a customer has bought a license, we wouldn’t see any more money from them. We might need to support them through every install they do, without any additional license fees. If a customer pays a small amount each time they buy a license, the incentive is there for us to keep that customer happy through each install in the hope that they will come back to buy a license next time they have a site to do – rather than going to our competition.

我们收到的最常见的请求是多站点许可证，“购买一次，安装次数不限”。 我们没有走这条路，因为首先这会使底价变得更加昂贵。 每个购买它的人都会购买多次安装的能力–如果您只有一个站点可以使用它，或者不知道您和您的客户将如何使用它，该怎么办？ 此外，我们认为这种模式对客户而言也是不利的。 一旦客户购买了许可证，我们将不会再从他们那里获得任何收益。 我们可能需要在每次安装时为他们提供支持，而无需支付任何额外的许可费用。 如果客户每次购买许可证都支付少量费用，那么我们就有动机让我们的客户满意每次安装，希望他们下次在有站点时会再次购买许可证–而是而不是去竞争。

There is a final reason why we don’t like the multi-site idea and that is that the license then follows the developer. As most Perch customers are design agencies, buying a license on behalf of their client, the license per site model works very well. If the end client wants to move their site to another agency they are able to move their license as well – it isn’t tied to a multi-site license held by the agency. So it ties in nicely with the transparent way we like to work at edgeofmyseat.com – essentially we’re licensing Perch in the way we like to deal with licensed software for our clients.

最后一个原因是我们不喜欢多站点的想法，那就是许可证会跟随开发人员。 由于大多数Perch客户都是设计机构，代表他们的客户购买许可证，因此每个站点模型的许可证都非常有效。 如果最终客户希望将其站点转移到另一个代理商，那么他们也可以转移其许可证-它与代理商持有的多站点许可证无关。 因此，它与我们希望在edgeofmyseat.com上工作的透明方式很好地结合在一起–本质上，我们以希望为客户处理许可软件的方式向Perch授予许可。

为什么不提供供个人使用的免费版本？ (Why not offer a free version for personal use?)

Perch has an online demo but no free personal, non-profit or trial version. This was a deliberate decision on our part and in addition to the usual concerns in terms of protecting our intellectual property it really comes down to our aim to offer exceptional support to all of our customers. If you have a tier of free users of your software or service, the paying users are essentially paying for their support – and in the case of hosted products their bandwidth and resource usage. To offer any kind of free version would mean making paid users pay more, in order that we could afford the time to support all customers.

鲈鱼有一个在线演示，但没有免费的个人，非营利或试用版本。 这是我们的故意决定，除了保护知识产权方面的常见问题外，这实际上归结为我们旨在为所有客户提供卓越支持的目标。 如果您的软件或服务有一定数量的免费用户，则付费用户实际上是在为他们的支持付费-在托管产品的情况下，它们的带宽和资源使用率都是如此。 提供任何一种免费版本都意味着让付费用户支付更多，以便我们有时间为所有客户提供支持。

Almost two years on we haven’t changed the pricing model that we set out with, as we still feel it was the best decision for the product. To some degree, having never launched a product before, some of those decisions were based on what felt right at the time, and the way that we like to work with clients in the service side of our business. It has been nice to see those initial hunches pay off so I thought that discussing some of the thinking behind our choices might be of interest to other people making these decisions. As always, I’d love to hear your comments on pricing models for downloadable software and software as a service. What works for you as a customer, or as a seller?

近两年来，我们一直没有改变我们设定的定价模式，因为我们仍然认为这是产品的最佳决策。 在某种程度上，由于以前从未发布过产品，所以其中一些决定是基于当时感觉正确的，以及我们希望在业务服务方面与客户合作的方式。 看到这些最初的预感很高兴，所以我认为讨论我们选择背后的一些想法可能对其他做出这些决定的人感兴趣。 与往常一样，我很想听听您对可下载软件和软件即服务的定价模型的评论。 作为您的客户或卖方，什么对您有效？