Over the past serveral weeks, we've had a number of meetings regarding OnTime 2006 pricing.  The general consensus has been that we would significantly increase our prices for OnTime 2006 accross the board.  We had a lot of really good reasons for the justifiable price increase.  Here are the top two reasons:

1. OnTime 2006 adds a TON of new functionality that's only available in Enterprise-Level systems.  Features such as Process Definition and Enforcement through workflow, Inherited Project Settings, Field Templates for customizing add/edit forms, Custom Reporting, Time Tracking, Email Conversations and much more added to our argument for higher prices.  Such features are typically only available in competing products that cost 5-30 TIMES as much as OnTime.  In some cases, our new functionality is not even available in ANY competing product.  So this new functionality was our first justification for significantly higher prices.
2. When you price a product below your competitors, you risk having potential customers believe that your competitors must be better than you (this point is well illustrated in Eric Sink's article on product pricing: http://software.ericsink.com/bos/Product_Pricing.html).  In our case, the price of OnTime 2005 is less than 1/3 its closest competitor and with OnTime 2006, unless we increase our prices, we would be less than 1/5 our closest competitor.  That's crazy!  Nobody is going to believe we have a better product.  We must increase our prices.

We had a new price target of around $249 per user (up from $149 per user now).  This would still keep us below competitors, but show the world that OnTime 2006 is a serious contender.

We also argued that maybe we should provide some of the new functionality, things like Custom Reports, SCM Integration and  the new Email Conversations features as separate add-on products that would be sold separately.  Custom Reporting modules from some software vendors can cost, $5,000 or more.  A $1995 price for OnTime's Custom Reporting feature would have been very reasonable.

Then something unexpected happened.  Apple released the new iPod Nano followed by the iPod Video and their new iMacs. All of these products replaced an existing product from Apple and in the case of the iPod, Apple was replacing products that already owned > 70% market share.  The new products are truly great and they represent a major enhancement over the products they replace.  What did Apple do when they released these new products with significantly enhanced functionality?  They kept the price the same!

Wow!  I had to order one of the new iPod videos just to see if it was as cool as it seemed and I must say, it's insanely great!  I've been blown away by the new iPod and its video capabiliteis and I highly encourage you to go out and buy one right now.  But I'm going off on a tangent, so getting back to OnTime pricing...

After Apple's release of insanely great products which are huge improvements over their own products, which were already better than everybody else' product with a lower price, we came to the conclusion that hey, if Apple can improve an already great product and keep the price the same, then so can Axosoft!

OnTime 2006 Small Team Edition & Professional Edition Pricing Will Remain the Same!

There are 2 exceptions to our pricing remaining the same:

1. OnTime 2006 Enterprise Server pricing will be significantly lower!  Our price for OnTime 2005 Enterprise Server was $995 for the server itself and $50 for each client.  The new price for OnTime 2006 Enterprise Server will be $495 with no per-user pricing for CALs!  So if you wanted to buy OnTime Enterprise Server for say 20 users, the price has been reduced from $1995 to just $495!
2. OnTime 2006 Customer Portal pricing will be significantly higher.  The price increase on the Customer Portal is mostly due to the fact that we got it wrong in the first release.  We priced 100 customer version of OnTime Customer Portal for only $495, less than $5 per customer.  In some cases, the Customer Portal was replacing full OnTime licenses which would normally sell for $149/user with a $5/user product.  So with the release of OnTime 2006 Customer Portal, we've added significant new functionality to the customer portal, including enhancements to security on a per-customer basis, but we've increased the price from $495 for 100 customers to $1,495 for 100 customers. We have also introduced more pricing tiers that will allow smaller groups to add customer portal at an affordable price.  Additionally, OnTime 2006 Small Team Editions will still include some customer portal licenses to get smaller teams access to this great technology, free of charge.  The prices for OnTime 2006 Customer Portal are still extremely low and we might still need to do another increase before we get it right, but at $15/customer, we're getting closer to a number that works for everyone.

So to review, we've added an enhanced Workflow, Inherited Project Settings, Unlimited Field Templates, Custom Reporting, Email Conversations and more to OnTime 2006.  Old Price: $495 for up to 5 users, $995 for up to 10 users and $149 per user for OnTime Professional.  New Price: $495 for up to 5 users, $995 for up to 10 users and $149 per user for OnTime Professional!  That's right, no change in Small Team Edition or Professional Edition pricing.

The full pricing details and announcement will be available on the Axosoft web site when we launch the OnTime 2006 product.