Why is Confluence plugin pricing not on our web site?

We occasionally get asked this question and, to be honest, we struggle with it ourselves every day.

But Atlassian is a fraction of our overall business albeit an important fraction and frevvo is sold primarily through partners/resellers who are free [within reason] to price frevvo as they desire. Our resellers have a wide variety of business models and they prefer that we don’t dictate pricing by publishing it on our web site. Obviously, we have to be accommodating since doing otherwise would defeat the purpose of establishing this reseller channel. That’s the simple reason for our business decision - there’s no devious or shady intent and we’d actually like nothing more than transparent pricing. And, often, you can get the best price from one of our partners.

Why is the frevvo-Confluence plugin licensed by Confluence users?

Many customers ask us why our plugin license is directly tied to the Confluence license.

We have far more users for Confluence than for forms. It would be better to license a [smaller] group of users as having access to the frevvo Plugin.

It’s a reasonable question/complaint. Why should I pay for 500 users when only 20 will be using forms?

The main reason for this is economics. We’re a small company; likely a lot smaller than most of our customers. We constantly face the every-day challenges of running a small company, especially in the current economy.

The reality is that our product is more complex than many plugins. Of course, it provides more complex functionality (workflows in Confluence are just harder than charts, graphics or other macros). We’re also intensely focused on customer support and it’s very likely that you could never get the kind of support and attention you’ll get from frevvo from a larger company.

However, all this requires people and money and we have to be able to afford it. We make most of of our money on the larger licenses. That’s our “bread and butter” and if you could always just buy licenses in much smaller chunks, we would not have a viable and sustainable business model for the Confluence plugin.

We’ve also found that many customers will deploy the plugin and quickly find that all kinds of users want access to it. Once business users discover that they can quickly create their own registration forms/surveys and download submissions to Excel, they want to do it. Once IT realizes that they can simply point business users to a Tutorial for these basic needs, they want nothing else.

I hope this explanation, at least, partially explains our reasoning. It’s the only way to ensure that frevvo can have a viable Confluence business and continue to provide great features and support.