One of the things I've always valued most is hearing from a customer. They help reset your point of view so that it more closely matches reality.
Well, this morning my reality is probably a little off. I had wanted to write about customer feedback on pricing, but I don't have any hard data points or evidence. It's never something that I really wrote down as it happened. So this post may be kind of weak. Please forgive.
For my first shareware product, customers didn't really complain about the price. It was priced at $79 per license, extremely low compared to other version control products. And it was targeted to the Borland Delphi market. They got what they paid for and that was pretty much it.
At TurboPower, which targeted the same market, the price per license was higher. But there was an underlying feeling that some people in that market were extremely price conscious. After TurboPower, that was one of the feelings that stuck with me. Again, no hard data points. Just feelings left over from telephone conversations and newsgroup posts from customers.
There was one time when one of our customers pleaded to give us more money. At the time, I was the lead engineer for TurboPower's client-server database product named FlashFiler. Julian Bucknall had put together version 1 and was moving on to a management role. I was brought in to lead a small team and put together version 2. The product had a small but loyal customer base.
Version 2 was a big step forward but still needed some work. A customer in France had experienced problems with its initial release. We took car of the problems and, in a subsequent conference call, they offered to give us more money beyond what they had paid for licenses. At TurboPower, we had almost two dozen products. The customer thought we weren't charging enough for FlashFiler. If we charged more, or accepted money from them, we'd have a darn good reason to put more time into the product.
When we started ComponentScience, we made the conscious decision to charge a higher price. ComponentScience's target market is software developers using Microsoft Visual Studio.NET. We had felt the Microsoft market would be more favorable to higher prices. We didn't want to gouge anyone. We just wanted to make sure we're paid fairly for what was provided to the customer. And we wanted to make sure we could afford to put the quality into our products that needed to be there.
I'm proud to say that I never heard a ComponentScience customer complain about price. We posted our pricing on our website. For all our products, we asked the customer to buy 1 license per developer or QA person using the product in Visual Studio.NET. No runtime or per server licensing.
Now, how many times do you think somebody called us to ask whether they had to buy server licenses for our ASP.NET products? Plenty. I think they couldn't believe we'd sell a developer license and not ask for royalties on distribution. The feedback from customers is that this was always good.