We recognize that the value of what we offer is subjective for each potential buyer.  A company that has been disappointed by a dozen other projects before discovering Cerb5 tends to feel we’re not charging enough; while a company with a low-volume of email — who could just as easily use Gmail for free to accomplish their workflow — tends to feel we’re charging too much.

Like any prudent company, we’ve made several incremental adjustments to our prices over the past 8 years to better harmonize perceived value and project sustainability.  That balance is a moving target.

For perceived value, the project is constantly evolving (e.g. streamlined usability, better performance, and “feature completeness” for a given point in time) which provides a higher return on your investment.  Cerb5 can perform more duties for you than past versions, often replacing less efficient patchwork solutions.  It may even free some of your team members from tedious drudgery (e.g. filtering junk, dispatching, answering the same questions 15 times, or erratically jumping between disparate activities rather than grouping similar work together efficiently) so they can do more billable work.  Our features foster collaboration, and the software encourages your team to cultivate your address book like the asset that it is.  We save you time, money, and sanity.  The degree of that production or savings determines how much you’d be willing to pay.  Our software isn’t a commodity or a status symbol, it’s an investment.  It doesn’t start depreciating the moment you install it.  As you grow, the production or savings scale with you while our prices remain relatively fixed.

For project sustainability, prices may rise a reasonable amount over time as the project becomes more valuable.  Income from upgrades reflects that existing users have a better idea of where the project should be headed than new prospects do; and a healthy project isn’t chasing new prospects at the expense of long-time user feedback.  Our team grows and accumulates experience as we support and build.  With more experience comes more opportunities, and if it became far more lucrative for our team to disband and work on other things then that’s exactly what our best people would do.  Developers, idealistic as we may be, are still capitalists with bills to pay and families to provide for.  Commoditization of software would be bad for everyone.

Our prospective buyers tend to fall into one of four opinions, which are probably similar to the breakdown experienced by other software companies:

1. “I paid less for the last version.”
   These people often received a promotional discount to encourage early adoption, or to help them let go of an end-of-life version.  When Cerb4 first released, it was such a dramatic change from Cerb3 that a lot of people in the community weren’t sure what to make of it.  The first release certainly wasn’t our complete vision, but we also couldn’t afford to spend several years perfecting it without some real-world adoption and feedback.  We encouraged early adopters by offering Cerb3 users an unlimited worker licenses for Cerb4 for about $250.  It was a one-time cost, and it included over three and a half years of free updates as we innovated our way toward the present.  It’s hard to blame anybody for objecting to that deal ending; but it wasn’t sustainable.  That worked out to about $71.42 per year.  At that rate, it takes 700 sales to cover a hypothetical $50,000 salary, and the business model discouraged us from implementing the feedback of existing (free forever) users over prospective (“I’ll buy if you do this and that”) clients.
2. “Your prices are way too cheap and my boss is worried you guys won’t stay in business long enough to push out the next update.”
   “If it’s too good to be true…” These people place a very high value on the project.  They’re accustomed to paying a lot more in exchange for less than what we’re offering, and they want to be reassured that we have a sustainable business model before they go through the effort of switching to Cerb.  While we do occasionally lose a sale for a very large enterprise client because our low price disqualifies us, the fact we’ve been steadily improving the project since January 2002 generally overcomes this objection.
3. “Your prices are way too expensive; there are a hundred other apps out that cost less, and just as many are free.”
   Most people don’t go out of their way to tell us about all their alternatives, they just choose one and we never hear from them again.  If someone sticks around to haggle on price they probably have a good idea of the value of the project.  Either we convince them that the value is worth the price, or they convince us that they need special consideration (i.e. the essence of business).  We offer discounts to educational institutions, registered charities, established open source projects, and cash-strapped small companies.  We’re not the cheapest CRM app — there are many cheaper.  We’re not the simplest CRM app — there are dozens simpler.  We don’t want our primary selling point to be over-simplification.  Our goal is to be working on software that you may need to grow into, but that you won’t grow out of.  Even after working on this project for eight years there are still so many possibilities, and so much more work to be done.  It never fails to surprise us how many other projects think the path to enlightenment is making things ever simpler and simpler.  Technology isn’t getting simpler, it’s just getting better at interfacing with humans.  In nature, the human brain is the most unfathomably complex thing we know to exist; and yet it’s fairly easy to interface with the one you have, and its capacity for improvement is nearly limitless.  The road to the year 2010 is littered with the debris of “simpler” alternatives to the pesky complexity of human thought.
4. “The pricing is fair.  While I’d certainly prefer to get everything I need in life for free, this purchase will pay for itself before long.  The sooner I put it to work the better off I’ll be.”
   This is where we’re aiming.

From a very early point in our project history, we vowed to write software for ourselves — not because we’re special, but for exactly the opposite reason.  Trying to please everyone is a dead-end.  We knew there had to be thousands of other companies out there who shared the same frustrations as us, and wanted the same things we did; even if they didn’t know it yet.  We were more right than we ever imagined.

-Jeff@WGM

Happy 2010! We have a lot of confidence in our Devblocks platform as we enter the new year, and we’re working on a major upgrade which will power Cerb5. In the meantime, we have several new applications to release that use Devblocks, and they benefit greatly from the experience we’ve gained from working on Cerb4 over the past 3 years. When we use outside applications in conjunction with our helpdesk, we’re constantly wishing we had features like Cerb4′s customizable lists, workspaces, custom fields, peek, bulk update, permissions, and plugins. We hope to replicate some of Cerb4′s success by approaching these new projects with similar innovation and the same commercial open source mindset.

Our design goals for Cerb5 involve bolstering Devblocks, the web-API, documentation, and the plugin system. We’re trimming down the dependencies that we’ve used as scaffolding (e.g. ADODB), which will speed things up even more, and we’re exploring more optimization ideas. For major features, we’re working on e-mail broadcasting functionality (CRM) and far more flexible e-mail templates. Keep an eye on the project portal for a detailed list.

This month is also our project’s birthday!

We started working on Cerberus Helpdesk in January 2002, so Cerby is turning 8 years old this month. We owe our vitality to all of you! In celebration and gratitude, we’re discounting 5-pack Cerb4 licenses to $250 (33% off; a $125 savings) through January 31st 2010. That’s also nearly a 50% discount from purchasing 5 worker licenses individually. There’s no restriction on the number of discounted 5-packs you can order.

If you’ve been considering purchasing Cerb4, or expanding the number of workers using your existing helpdesk, here’s a link to the shop with the discounted price:
http://shop.webgroupmedia.com/cerb4-on-site.html

Thanks for being a part of the project!

- Jeff Standen, Chief of R&D, WebGroup Media LLC.

We’ve made a couple tweaks to the Cerb4 On-Demand plans:

• Trickle: 5 workers; 5GB storage
• Stream: 10 workers; 10GB storage; added Priority Support benefits; added High Performance Cache (was previously exclusive to Flood)
• Flood: unlimited workers; 15GB storage; added Priority Support benefits
• The Priority Support benefits bundled with the Stream and Flood plans would cost $75/mo on their own.
• We’ve also added back the ability to prepay quarterly (5% discount), semi-annually (10% discount), or annually (20% discount).

Based on community feedback during the ordering process, we’ve made a couple quick tweaks:

• Single Worker License: You can now purchase individual worker licenses for $99.  There is no longer a ‘Starter License’ minimum number of workers.
• 5-Pack License: You can now purchase a 5-pack of worker licenses for $375, which is a $120 discount from purchasing 5 individual worker licenses.  This is similar to the prior ‘Starter License’, except you can now purchase any number of 5-packs to upgrade an existing license.
• Unlimited License: Any license is converted to an Unlimited License after it reaches 20 workers.  Previously the limit was 15.

what do all the new bug tracker statuses mean? Are they just different cryptic categories of wishlist or something more exciting?
- @Layershift (via Twitter)

If you haven’t stopped by the Roadmap/Wishlist lately, this is what Layershift is talking about:

Previously, we had one category called “Wishlist” that contained everything else beyond the current release.  The problem with that approach was we had to dig through the entire wishlist every time we started a new release, even though we knew that some of the items weren’t immediately actionable regardless of how many votes they had.

We also started to have issues from a vocal minority of users (who are passionate enough to care; and we love them for it) who were frustrated that their requests were occasionally pushed from release to next release through several updates.  That was happening because we kept the most interesting feedback — far more than we could possibly do in one update — assigned to the current release so we wouldn’t lose track of it at the bottom of the wishlist.  We wanted to be aware of those things as we decided where to draw the line for each update; and we chose between those items, released the update, and moved the unfinished tasks into the next update to repeat the process.

To set people’s expectations a bit better, we’ve removed the nebulous “Wishlist” category and we’ve added a few more.  We had a little fun with the new category names; because, frankly, sorting through 500+ requests every couple days can be a tedious affair.  We did add some illustrative descriptions to the categories, but JIRA (the software that runs the roadmap/wishlist) doesn’t actually display them where people would notice them.

Here are the missing descriptions:

Rather than gathering *all* the best ideas into the next release, we’ll be using The Yellow Brick Superhighway category to keep track of them.  Those are the ideas that expand the project’s reach; such as expanding the platform (what plugins are capable of) or core functionality.  These are the things we lose sleep over until they’re done.

The Sea of 1000 Wishes category is the incubator for new requests, where they receive comments and votes until they move to the near-future roadmap. It includes everything from big ideas to “It would be nice if you moved this button 3 pixels to the left”.  I wouldn’t take the sarcastic category description too seriously, as everything on that list is something we’re committed to doing if enough people ask for it.

Cryostasis is a category we’ve needed for a while to contain great ideas that just aren’t possible at the moment.  In many cases the ideas may seem simple enough, but there’s something we’d like to do with the platform (such as switching to jQuery, or performing a refactor that affects the API) that would make the requests much easier to do properly.

With Everything Looks Like a Nail, we’re finally able to sort out all the good ideas that we just don’t see ourselves making a mandatory part of Cerb4′s core.  This includes everything from “I want a live chat feature” to very subjective workflow tweaks.  We built Cerb4 on top of our Devblocks framework so we could deliver tweaks and features to segments of users — or even to individuals — without making a mess of the app and forcing an amalgamation of 1000 opinions on everyone; pleasing no-one.  Because of its subjectivity, this is the best category for sponsors to pay for the development of things they want to get them done immediately.

And lastly, An Ounce of Prevention is the category where we’re quarantining ideas that introduce too much complexity or that go against the spirit of the project; such as: locking things down to the point it hurts collaboration, editing customer email after the fact, making tickets parents of other tickets, etc.  We’re keeping those requests here in the open rather than deleting them so people are free to build their case in support of them.  This helps us manage expectations; so people don’t see one request sitting untouched for a year and think everything is neglected that way.

Ultimately, we have some big ideas for transforming the Roadmap/Wishlist into a far more interactive community meeting place.

Thoughts?

-Jeff@WGM

Cerb4 (4.2.3) was released as a stable update on August 3rd 2009 and contains 23+ improvements from community feedback.

Here’s a great page on the wiki that covers the highlights for this release:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/4.2.3

The standard upgrade instructions apply:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Upgrading_to_Newer_Versions_of_Cerberus_Helpdesk_4.0

-Jeff@WGM

We’ve received a network maintenance notice from one of our data centers (SoftLayer) for 1AM on Friday, July 31st.  The window is between 10-60 minutes and it will affect connectivity for a subset of Cerb4 On-Demand users.  This is part of ongoing network renovation at SoftLayer and the previous maintenance so far has been quick and painless.

Here’s a copy of the notice:

Date: 07/31/2009 (Friday)
Start time (PDT): 01:00:00 (1:00 AM)
End time (PDT): 02:00:00 (2:00 AM)
Services affected: Public network
Device: FAS02.SR01.SEA01
Location: Seattle, WA
Duration: 1 hour

===================================================
SoftLayer Engineers will be replacing the upstream front end
aggregate switch that provides connectivity to the rack level
switch to which your server is connected.

Customer Impact: During this maintenance, customer servers
will not be reachable on the public network. While the
maintenance window is set for an hour, we expect no longer
than 10 – 15 minutes of downtime.
===================================================

If you have any problems after this time frame with regard to connectivity, or if you have any questions regarding the maintenance at any point, please open a ticket in the customer portal.

We appreciate your patience during this work and welcome any feedback.

Thank you,

Network Engineering
Softlayer Technologies, Inc.

-Jeff@WGM

Cerb4 (4.2.2) was released as a stable update on July 17th 2009 and contains 47+ improvements from community feedback.

There’s a great page on the wiki that covers the highlights for this release:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/4.2.2

The standard upgrade instructions apply:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Upgrading_to_Newer_Versions_of_Cerberus_Helpdesk_4.0

-Jeff@WGM

We’ll be using Facebook to release live updates and tips in the same way we use our @cerb4 Twitter account.  We’ve found Facebook to be much better at facilitating conversations; where Twitter is mostly sound bytes.

If you use Facebook and want to connect with other Cerb4 users, add yourself as a fan:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cerb4/118691379459

(We’re pretty late to the party!)

-Jeff@WGM

Cerb4 is a great tool for responding to a flood of e-mail; but did you know that it’s also handy for proactively building relationships with your community?

In this video I explain how to use the Cerb4 “toolkit” mentality to import new opportunities from various community resources: prolific contacts, blog commenters, top forum posters, most-active contributors, etc.

There are several reasons you might want to do this:

• You want to offer Priority Support the people who would benefit from it most (the people who already request a lot of support, or groups of people who say they wish they received faster replies).
• You want to invite past customers back for a look at the recent improvements in your products and services.
• You want to follow up with leads who are evaluating you.
• … and countless other situations

Cerb4 – Opportunity Cookbook from Jeff Standen on Vimeo.

-Jeff@WGM