As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been going through our address book to invite back thousands of former beta testers for fresh look at Cerb4’s progress.  At the same time, I’ve also been reaching out to several hundred of our most active (and vocal) community members to ask for their thoughts about the new Priority Support service; as well as asking them what other services they’d like us to provide to existing and happy Cerb4 users.

We’re learning a lot from all these new conversations.

Most people have no problem with our change to per-worker pricing.  We’ve been happy with the change as well.  Our “Starter License” and “Unlimited License” orders have been evenly distributed since we introduced them; and we no longer have any basis for concern that people might abuse our SmallBiz discount.

Our average initial order has been a Starter License (3 workers) with 2 additional workers — for a total of 5.  We’re constantly walking people through the ordering process to show them how to add the ‘additional worker’ option to their shopping cart and increase its quantity to 2.  To simplify things, we’ve bumped up the limit on Starter Licenses to 5 workers.  We’ve tweaked the price to reflect that change, along with a couple other things.

When talking to our most vocal users, so many of them told me that they didn’t see the value in Priority Support because our free level support was already “really fast and really good”.  Alright, that’s fair enough.  We’re not going to start dropping the ball on support just to encourage people to buy Priority Support plans.  Several organizations did take us up on the Priority offer and we’ve already started rushing to their aid ahead of everything else we’re doing.

We’ve decided to make a couple minor adjustments to our pricing; based on these conversations, and the fact we’d like to grow our team a bit, and the fact the one-time $99/199 pricing is untenable in the long run.

Here’s a summary of the changes with full disclosure (all prices are in $USD):

• Starter Licenses ($375/$188): These now include 5 workers. The commercial price is $375 and the SmallBiz/Edu price discounted price is 50% off ($187.50).  The commercial per-worker cost is $75 for 5 and it used to be $66.33 for 3.  If you do the math, it’s a total of $26 higher now. Our entry-level price was $99 (~50% of $199) and now it’s $187.50 — an increase of $88.50.  The discounted cost per worker is $37.50 for 5 and it used to be $33 for 3.
• Unlimited Licenses ($1200/$600): Unlimited licenses were previously priced at $999 for commercial users and they were discounted to $699 for SmallBiz/Edu.  Any license that grows to 15 workers is still converted to an unlimited license at no cost.  The commercial price is now $1200 and the discounted price is $600 — which is the result of consistently simplifying the discount to 50% off.  Commercial users will be paying $201 more and small companies pay $99 less.  Phrased another way, the cost is now $80/worker (for 15) commercially and $40/worker charitably.  We feel this is still very reasonable, considering we don’t charge for upgrades or support in the 4.x line.
• Additional Workers ($99/50): Additional worker licenses were previously priced at $75 for commercial users and discounted to $49 for SmallBiz/Edu.  They are now $99 and $49.50 (50% off) respectively.  If you do the per-worker math on Starter Licenses they offer a discount of $120/$60 for the first 5 workers; and if you do the per-worker math on Unlimited Licenses they offer a discount of $165/$82 over the cost of a Starter License and 10 additional worker licenses.

Any time we make a change to our pricing, we have people crawling out of the woodwork to say they were “just about to order before these crazy changes!”.  If that’s you, we’ll happily honor the previous pricing until the end of the month if it would have been cheaper for you.  Shoot us an e-mail and we’ll send you a coupon.

(And, hey, we had a couple people telling us we should multiply everything by 5 so their bosses would take us more seriously.  It almost makes me want to try the Radiohead model so the same people could hypocritically pay $5!  We’ll stick with trying to be accessible for most people.)

Keep that feedback coming!

-Jeff@WGM