License Model Change

Hey folks,

I'm very sad about the new licensing model of SmartFTP. It has been a very useful tool for many years, with no cost, but reporting bugs and discussing new features with the authors.

Now, without any warning, there is a cost of approx. 25,- EUR per year.

I undertand, that it's not easy to give support to millions of people for free. Good software, like SmartFTP is one, needs maintenance, not only in free time of a programmer. It seems to be a ful time job for many coders.

At first glance, if I see a price of 25,- EUR/year for a software like SmartFTP, I'd continue to look for a free tool, becaus this software seems to be too big (too many features) for my needs. If I'm looking for a nice and relaible FTP-Tool, 25,-EUR-class seemst to be professional, not for home use.

I'm sure, with a price of about 5,- EUR per year, you can hold many of your customers and make 5.000.000 EUR a year, if you have only one million customers. That should be enough to pay many programmers to build good software and to offer a premium version for 20,- EUR/license with more functions, which are not necessary for home users.

With 25,- EUR a year, I guess that the popularity of SmartFTP will rapidly fall, with a limit of some thousands of users, which is not, what I would call the standard FTP client, what SmartFTP is in my opinion today.

In hope of getting more information about the new lincensing model,
snappy

It's misunderstanding that this is a yearly fee. It's a one time fee and the license term is perpetual. 36.95 USD is the market price for our product. Actually most competitive products are up to 30% more expensive. You can read more about the license model and agreement at: https://www.smartftp.com/purchase/

Regards,
SmartFTP

Yeah, I think the pricing is a little too high too. If it was lower, I would have consider, seeing it was one of the better FTP program. Oh well ,back to xyz

I usually donate €10 for software like this. As a home user the price of $36.95 is way too much.

But with that said, I'm sure SmartFTP will get enough paying users to make it worth to change the license model. There will of course be a great decline in the number of users, but that will also generate less support questions.

Perhaps a free lite version and a bigger version for paying customers would be a smarter solution, at least for me who would have wanted to continue using SmartFTP.

Thank you all for your feedback but I'm closing this thread because a support forum is probably not the right place for a product price discussion.
The reason why for profit companies do not sell their FTP license for 15 USD can be answered by studying the price elasticity in economics. Wikipedia - Price elasticity of demand.
Even if the volume price product is at maximum with a lower price there is still a fixed cost (means doesn't depend on the price) with every sale that needs to be considered.