Our return to flat-rate pricing has definitely been better received than our foray into per-worker licensing.  We’re glad to be back.

When we were having those pricing discussions, a lot of the same interesting ideas kept coming up.  So here’s what we’ve done:

On-Demand Trials

We have been hosting our “instant evaluations” on separate machines from our standard hosting service, but this has led to overloading and abuse.  Beyond that, people were just being dumped into a new installation without any introduction, and we didn’t have a good way to know who, of the thousands of people, would actually like to hear from us (and who was just taking a curious peek).  It ate a lot of time we could have been spending better.

So we’ve done two things to improve this:

• We improved our shared online demo so it has a constant influx of simulated tickets and spam.  We’ve created a much more believable (and instructive) sample environment of Groups, Buckets and Filters.
• We’re now offering a free 14 day trial period on our Cerb4 On-Demand (software as a service) offering.  This doesn’t just help people who were considering hosting with us; it also allows evaluators to test an instantly working installation on our servers so they can decide if they’d like to move forward with Cerb4 before investing in hardware and headaches (e.g. mailparse).  While the previous instant evaluations served this purpose, we’re now setting up all evaluations on our premium hardware and network instead of our spare evaluation and Q.A. machines.

Lease-to-Own Licenses (Standalone)

Many people, especially smaller web hosts, have been asking us for a way to break up the Cerb4 purchase price over a few payments.

We’ve added the ability to break a purchase up over 3, 6, and 12 months.  To curtail a needlessly delayed accounts receivable — and the risks and hassle associated with having to charge a credit card up to 12 times to get paid — we’ve added a small markup to the total cost of a license purchased on installments.  The fewer payments, the less of a difference over paying up front.  Still, it’ll be much more efficient to allow people to choose these options from the website opposed to having people contact us for a custom invoice every time.

On-Demand Prepayments

Our 20% discount on annual payments for the Cerb4 On-Demand service has been pretty popular.  We’ve also had people expressing interest in smaller discounts for shorter prepayment cycles.

We’ve added a 5% discount for 3 month prepayment, and a 10% discount for 6 month prepayment.

New Free Licenses

By far, the best way to spread the word about Cerberus Helpdesk over the years has been by offering a non-crippled free version — something that really allows people to use it with no strings attached.

We’ve had some minor criticism that our 4.0 free version, with its e-mail tagline on outgoing mail and cap of 3 groups, was betraying the history of a usable, entry-level free version.  On reflection, we agree.

So here’s the tradeoff.  At the end of a new installation, we now show a short survey that allows a new organization to quickly introduce themselves (and tell us what they’re looking for, and what they’re measuring as a successful helpdesk evaluation).  Anybody who fills out this survey will receive a registered license for 3 workers by e-mail for free.  This removes the group cap, and the Cerb4 advertising tagline at the bottom of outgoing e-mail.

This keeps our stream of constant feedback alive.  We’ll only contact people about Cerb4 and their experience with it.  Free users are still welcome to skip the survey and stay in stealth mode, but they’ll keep the other limitations.

Conclusion

We’re happy with these latest tweaks.  They’re a lot more utilitarian than changing the entire approach toward pricing every few months.

Keep the feedback coming!