My vision for Open Source pro support

https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/05/06/my-vision-for-open-source-pro-support/

by plam503711 • 4 years ago

23 14 4 years ago

tmikaeld3• 4 years ago

Really nice that they adapt the proxmox model for support, it's worked excellent for us in our labs. It would have been nice to have emergency tickets as an option though, even if it costs hundreds per ticket. Because small businesses often can't afford the 1.2K commitment per machine, when they already pay for clusters of dedicated servers. Even a small cluster of 5 machines is 6K, a lot of dough for a small company..

plam5037117• 4 years ago

That's why there's a smaller plan (XCP-ng Standard, it's only half the price, for 5 machines it will be 3K).

But yeah, smaller infrastructure pricing is hard, because people tend to have less knowledge and requesting more assistance, so the cost is even higher on the company's side.

edit: also I don't remember trying to "adapt" or copy Proxmox pricing, since we're always convinced since the start to not make Open Core but true Open Source! And I respect Proxmox a lot for doing the same :)

tmikaeld3• 4 years ago

Yes, I saw the smaller pricing, the problem is that businesses often prefer a metered approach, but I also understand that subscription support makes it easier to afford having support personel on a salary, which is much harder when it's on-demand tickets.

I think many don't subscribe at all, or subscribe when they actually need the tickets. If they could pre-purchase a set of tickets for say, 200€-400€ per ticket (2x-4x the lowest subscription), I think it would be a hit, even if they never use those tickets, they could buy them when they can afford to buy them and keep them as a sort of assurance for future incidents.

That sort of model has worked extremely well in the SaaS startup world, with so called "lifetime deals". You buy a set of resources that don't expire and can consume them over a lifetime (of the company or product).

pikdum3• 4 years ago

Seems like a neat project, but I was turned off by how they handle Xen Orchestra. Feels weird to have an open source project, but then try and push a separate proprietary product to install it that also gates features between payment tiers. Found a community maintained installer/upgrade tool on GitHub that gets you everything, but guessing they don't officially want to make it easy so they can make more sales.

plam5037117• 4 years ago

Xen Orchestra is not proprietary at all (fully aGPLv3!). It's just a different approach, mainly for historical reasons, when it was only on top of Citrix Hypervisor/XenServer.

So the concept is that you can build it yourself from Github with all features (see https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/installation.html#from-the-so...) OR deploy a turnkey VM with everything pre-installed (targeting companies) with support on it. Yes, the turnkey VM is having tiers, but it's logical since you have various perimeters in terms of supported features. And it's flat priced :)

Obviously, the turnkey VM (called XOA, Xen Orchestra virtual Appliance) is only meant for businesses and not individuals.

I hope it's more clear.

pikdum3• 4 years ago

Yeah, but feels like there's a conflict of interest. Xen Orchestra is made more difficult to deploy than it needs to be, since it'd reduce sales of XOA if it was easy. It's also not obvious on https://xen-orchestra.com that it is actually open source, seems like it's intentionally made confusing to get you to use XOA instead.

john_moscow• 4 years ago

It's worth noting that the fixed-price unlimited support only works if you are charging north of $1000 per year. This limits your users to those who actually know what they are doing, and value their and your time.

Try doing the same for a $100/year product, and you will get very quickly overwhelmed by freelancers trying to push 100 different issues from their customers on you. And reasoning with them won't work because they have all day to try rephrasing the same problem in 10 different ways, hoping it will get them to a different agent.

Needless to say, the most entitled people will be the free tier users believing that the sole fact of them paying attention to your product is enough for you do drop all what you were doing and start rewriting it to their vision.

plam5037117• 4 years ago

This. This is VERY true. Pricing is capital if you want to have some respect. The worst "customers" are often those paying nothing or the cheapest price.

My vision for Open Source pro support

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