So, launching a product or service 101: speak to your potential customers first to gauge their response and limits.
This is a good change. I'm glad they listened to feedback on pricing and removed the header. Had the commercial licence lunched like this, would there still have been unhappy people? Probably, yes, people like to complain and don't like to pay, but I don't think it would have even been on the same scale. Instead, I think the majority of people would have understood that developers need to live.
The pricing change seems great - the startup plan looks good (you can pay monthly!), and the price per instance for other commercial use looks much more reasonable.
This is the real meta-lesson, and particularly that "speak to your potential customers first" doesn't mean just asking sponsors[1], it means asking the entire community that the company hopes to serve.
Before making a significant change in business models, best case, publish a blog post explaining the changes (or a few possible scenarios and their perceived pros and cons) and ask for comments. Not being confident enough to do that is probably a sign that the change is higher-risk than is being acknowledged. And even in that case, pick, say, 100 random users and email them for their opinions.
[1]: Caddy stated that they asked sponsors, but that they incorrectly interpreted silence as support or at least neutrality.
We asked our sponsors about the header, not the pricing. And we did ask people for information about how they used Caddy but virtually none of the commercial use cases came up. For some reason people were reluctant to talk about it, even in private. I'm glad that at least some of them came out of the woodwork this last month. We look forward to more established business relationships in the future.
To be fair they had no idea about their potential customers and assumed most of which were hobbyists. I think it's good they're trying to monetize though, it allows them to keep the lights on a focus on their project full-time without having to hand it off to another major org like Apache or anybody else.
Just want to say: Just because you hand your project over to a foundation doesn't mean it automatically allows full time development.
We've moved our open source bits to the eclipse foundation recently..and surprise! We're still the primary developers.
Granted, this was recently, but apache projects can also go to the apache attic where they go to "retire".
Generally, you still need some sort of revenue stream in there to sustain/subsidize a "community".
A lot of apache projects have a company behind them driving development.
> To be fair they had no idea about their potential customers and assumed most of which were hobbyists.
That's kind of the point though - a quick survey at download time, or a post on a blog describing proposed pricing and the caddy-sponsors header would have given them a lot of the information they needed to make an informed choice. Instead they made assumptions and got it very wrong.
Unlike most commercial launches, they already had a large userbase to gather information from, they just chose not to use it.
Those "quick surveys" that we all either skip (if possible) or just enter random bullshit into so that we can just download the damn file and get on with our work?
Those blog posts that 95%+ of customers never read or, if they do, won't bother commenting on?
> Those "quick surveys" that we all either skip (if possible) or just enter random bullshit into so that we can just download the damn file and get on with our work?
They've already got something built into the download page to configure plugins. All it would have taken was an additional question and a few radio options:
I plan on using Caddy for:
[ ] my personal website [ ] my startup [ ] other commercial
> Those blog posts that 95%+ of customers never read or, if they do, won't bother commenting on?
People already follow their social accounts etc. to be notified of updates. Plenty of people will read a post "We're thinking of charging for Caddy", and even a 5% response rate would be in the hundreds or thousands.
Plenty of people have done it in much more difficult markets with fewer resources. It's never easy, but Caddy had some good options they never used.
Welcome to the world of market research. It's how you avoid launching a bad product at the wrong price. The alternative is getting it very publicly wrong and having to backtrack.
This is a good change. I'm glad they listened to feedback on pricing and removed the header. Had the commercial licence lunched like this, would there still have been unhappy people? Probably, yes, people like to complain and don't like to pay, but I don't think it would have even been on the same scale. Instead, I think the majority of people would have understood that developers need to live.
The pricing change seems great - the startup plan looks good (you can pay monthly!), and the price per instance for other commercial use looks much more reasonable.