Price Hikes

Just quick note about some proposed pricing changes that are happening at Adaptavist over the coming months...

Not only do I want to give existing clients advance warning of the hikes, I also want to explain why they have arose. A key company goal at Adaptavist is to keep prices low enough so that smaller companies are not priced out of the enterprise wiki arena and we're making sure these price hikes are in keeping with that goal.

Even though our company is growing quickly, it's not growing fast enough to keep up with demand. As such, there are going to have to be some price hikes in various areas

Currently we maintain a good level of balance within our company by not having a sales team. In order to get more new clients, our staff have to take a break from their usual activities to deal with sales enquiries, etc.

The benefit here is that when our staff are very busy supporting existing clients, we're less able to take on new clients - the result is that existing clients (who keep giving us more work) are well looked after.

For Adaptavist, looking after existing clients is more important than getting new clients. It's the reason we have 1000+ clients in 50+ countries - happy clients are our sales team.

But, even though we don't do any real advertising, the number of sales enquiries we are getting is rapidly increasing. In many cases we're turning down work because we don't have the resource to do it but even the time spent turning down work is starting to cause a major drain on our resources.

We normally try and find one of our competitors and introduce them to prospective clients that we've declined on the basis of being too busy.

A quick "aside":

Unlike any other market sector, we've actually become great friends with our competitors. We don't see each other as competing, merely as working towards the same goals. We even share code and ideas with competitors to reduce the amount of duplication in our efforts.

The problem is that all our competitors are also now too busy to take on much more work.

In short: Demand is exceeding supply.

I've noticed recently that Atlassian have hiked prices for their bespoke services (which are often outsourced to companies like Adaptavist) and unfortunately we're going to have to do the same.

We're not looking to bring in a sales team - that would break the balancing effect of our sales process and start to impact our commitment to existing clients.

Instead we'll be looking to bring in more developers who can actually do the work. As our support desk is manned by those same developers this will also further improve our highly-acclaimed customer support services.

We've recently taken on Huw Evans to help out on the hosting side of our business (which is also growing rapidly) and will be looking for Java developers over the next year who can help with plugins and some of the more complex areas of application support.

Skilled people come with skilled price tags. So, what's the effects going to be on our prices?

Summary

• Bespoke Solutions - discounts removed, possible increase in hourly rate next year
• Confluence Support - prices to stay the same, but with the addition of a new "fix now, price is not an issue" tier for our largest customers
• Hosting - prices to remain the same for foreseeable future
• Plugins - sliding scale licensing model, generally more expensive

Bespoke Solutions

The observant amongst you may have already noticed that we've had to ditch our discounts for 3+ days of bespoke work.

We originally offered those discounts because a project that lasts for more than 3 days has already covered the cost of sale.

However, as we've grown, we've found that project management and client communication overheads have increased and the discounts were having an adverse impact on those activities. The removal of discounts should have a direct benefit on that service.

Confluence Support

There are no planned price changes to our Confluence Support (which will likely get renamed to "Application Support" at some point) at present.

That being said, it's possible that a new tier will be added to our support services for our very largest clients who need even more responsiveness than our current support contracts provide. For example, we have clients who need any number of tasks "completing now, price is no barrier" - this includes support and also plugin development, etc. We're currently discussing this internally but if you have any feedback, let us know.

Hosting

The prices for our Dedicated hosting aren't going to change for quite some time. Although energy costs have increased and will continue to do so, we've worked very hard with our energy provider (via our up-stream providers) to keep the costs below market average. That being said, we're investing heavily in additional equipment for our hosting environment - our own UPSs (uninterruptible power supplies with inline power filtering), PDUs (power distribution units), out-of-band terminal servers, etc. However to balance that servers are getting cheaper and are using less power.

Our Shared Hosting and Remote Hosting pricing is also likely to remain at current prices for the foreseeable future for the same reasons.

By foreseeable future I mean "at least a year, most likely 2 or more".

Theme Builder and Community Bubbles

Sales of Theme Builder are going crazy. We're roughly doubling the number of sales on a month-by-month basis.

Interest in Community Bubbles (as yet unreleased but already in use by some of our larger clients) is soaring and we have a long waiting lists of clients who want to purchase the plugin the second it's released.

The amount of developer time that's being going in to these two plugins is immense.

Because we subject our plugins to extensive beta testing (both internally and with clients worldwide), the support load per-client is very low. Generally we expend roughly 2 days of support time for every 20 new clients. A small percentage of the clients are pushing the limits of the plugins and submit feature requests plus the occasional bug. Once the client has the plugin set-up, we generally don't hear from them again until they come to extend the maintenance period (support and upgrades).

With each successive release of our plugins, more bugs are fixed, performance is improved as is usability, etc. - so the support time per 20 new clients actually decreases as the plugin matures.

However, sales are doubling each month! Back in the days where we used to only get 20 new clients per month, we'd spend a few days supporting them. Now, however, we're spending weeks.

This has had a very significant impact on the rate at which we release new versions of existing plugins and roll out completely new plugins (like Community Bubbles). If sales continue to grow at their current rate, it will also start having an impact on support and sales. We'll effectively collapse under the weight of our own success.

As such, there are going to be some pretty major price hikes for the plugins, but on a sliding scale so that smaller deployments will actually become less expensive whereas the biggest deployments (for which a lot of the more advanced features were developed) are more expensive.

To implement this sliding scale, we've decided to create a licensing model almost identical to that of Atlassian.

So, here is our current proposal (feel free to contact us with any comments or ideas):

As you can see, Workgroup licenses and above are now more expensive. The smaller licenses are the same price or cheaper. As usual, the plugins will be free for any clients Shared-hosting with us.

The site license is still under heated discussion.