Firstly,
I am 100% in support for Umbraco as a platform, its goals and overall direction. As part of a company building sites it is great and it is good to see packages developed by 3rd party and the home grown packages from Umbraco.
The concern in general are the ever increasing prices like things like the eCommerce where pricing seems to be heading to Enterprise level territory without the Enterprise level functionality and support.
Things are also pricing out what I am sure many build with for for more medium businesses. A number of the packages from Umbraco direct all look great but we have yet to have even for some larger clients have then feel the cost is justified at all here in Australia.
Umbraco forms is solid, it has evolved but not much over the years and clients have been always happy to pay for it to use what it offers.
Following from recent price increases I have seen the notes with the recent update of 16.1.0 and the license changes and the note that from 17 it will be subscriptions. Looking at that and the cost this is going to rule out so many and I believe that there will be a big drop in use as a result.
I was telling the CEO and management of our company and they were very disapointed.
Struggled to find the proposed pricing and model. Details are here for anyone else who’s looking (I assume this is latest and greatest and includes the current pricing?).
For the clients I have that use this product this is fair price - it will be a limit to mini sites but I would tend to build a custom “contact us” form here as Umbraco Forms would be overkill.
I would hope it will lead to some improvements in support (one I would really like to see are an irregular newsletter / email mail out for updates - especially security related ones). As this is core to many websites and involves visitor data being submitted, stored and processed I think it needs to be treated as a security priority.
But any increased cost / new subscriptions will be a conversation that has to be had for a v17 upgrade and it would be great if we could have a oneliner on why this happening and what “they get from it” *.
*clearly they are getting Umbraco forms which allows them so much flexibility and provides lead generation and is obviously going to pay off the investment but it’s a change.
If you look at this in real terms, you get ~2 years out of it before it starts to cost more than it currently is now.
Forms has always been great value (in my opinion) for what you get, and to be honest, I was pleasantly surprised at the pricing model while looking at the other official packages.
I do think that some kind of freemium model could be implemented, with basic features for free and then advanced at a premium level - then push the price up. This license model has always appealed to me, rather than a broad stroke “one size fits all”.
I am all for Umbraco to do well but for me I can only see more form packages coming out both free and one off payments to counter this and I can only see a drop off for Umbraco forms.
After 2 years as Richard said it will then start becoming more expensive.
If there were some big updates and changes coming as a result then there may be some justifications and while Umbraco forms has seen updates over the years, 16 compared to 7 for example - There is not much really. If the “one off fee” is a stamp on the reason for that - OK, I get that but It is a hard shift and pill to swallow with a sudden shift.
I think a lot of people wont realise and I think the announcement seems a bit under the table as well to seemingly go a bit unnoticed.
If there were some of roadmap to justify what will be an extensive cost increase then that would be a bit easier and I saw a statement in the Github thread on about “Conversion” for business and value and again that is a fair comment as well.
I just think the fundamentals on why Umbraco has been so attractive for years are increasingly eroding away. Goal posts shifting, things with cost increasing in cost quite heavily, barrier for entry for various aspects, quality control…. The way the platform has changed packages multiple times basically pressing restart on the whole affair giving people more than a number of headaches in this regard and many great packages and ideals behind them left at the roadside…
Just concerned.
My view:
Umbraco forms light:
One off fee and license still
Limited out of the box workflows. No post to xml, Slack, POST / GET URL send. Just offer save as node and send email. Still allow custom ones to be build.
Limit the number of form creations to say 20
limit the record keeping. No option for permeant record holding and an always 1 year deletion
limited updates for only security and key things like recpatcha Any big updates that come from being recurring payment like better 3rd party integrations etc wont come with the light version
Umbraco forms:
Gets everything
I think this in general would be a better modal for Umbraco. Help smaller businesses etc as old Umbraco used to feel like doing but offer more when they grow or bigger companies look to use it as their platform.
Deploy for example….
Usync does it offering a free basic model which can be great for smaller use and as we have getting the paid for bigger companies to do more.
Deply Light would help many and a number of companies will likely eventually need more and then need to take a step up
And so on.
Umbraco constantly increasing the costs, reducing the one off purchases.. I am not sure is the right direction.
The ecommerce they bought and instantly raised the price on which then caused a couple of 3rd party ones to soon appear as other options.
I would love to know if the uptick on it continued or if it dropped. We had two clients instantly drop it ourselves and I would be surpised if that for example is doing a huge positive increase in sales.
I tend to be of the opinion that one-off perpetual licenses stifle ongoing development of what is essentially an ephemeral product, and as such, subscriptions are a necessary lesser of evils - the alternative being purchasing upgrades to each major version.
I also tend to find that clients who can’t afford/justify the cost of Umbraco-Forms, are typically candidates for Umbraco-Cloud - where it’s essentially bundled into the hosting fee.
As for the freemium “Forms-Lite” idea… the problem is the default position of bean-counters will always be to use free rather than pay, and then find another free workaround to the limitations created - it’s what they get paid to do.
I think this would be a very good thing - The Umbraco Marketplace is a marketplace after all and if the new pricing model is wrong then we should totally see a competitor arise that does more for less.
I do think that the new pricing is fair, especially considering the other form-platforms out there, and I’m glad to see we’re not looking at per-submission pricing or any nonsense like that. If penny pinching is necessary then embedding some other form-builder is cheap and easy (and sometimes the best option irrespective of cost).
Agree with this - usually you show them Wooforms or similar.
It does “a job” then the horrific styling and jarring UX means that it focuses the mind for either surfacecontroller style custom forms or Umbraco Forms and then the cost is easier to swallow.