Kentico CMS Small Business License - Pricing

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Based on your feedback, we have decided to introduce a new Small Business License option for partners who need to create web sites for small businesses.

We have received lots of comments to our new pricing for version 5.0. Since we have many partners who build smaller sites for small business clients who may not need all the features, but want to have a CMS, we decided to introduce a new licensing option - Small Business License.

I would like to say thank you to all partners who filled out our survey. Based on their feedback, we defined the following feature set for the Small Business License (click the image to enlarge):

 Kentico Small Business Pricing


Number of Users

As you can see, the Small Business License is limited to 3 users per web site + 1 global administrator. It's the typical number of users that you requested for small business web sites and I believe it's enough for most small businesses.

Workflow

Workflow is limited to Edit and Publish steps, so it's not possible to have an approval process, but you can still use preview, versioning and content locking (check-in/check-out).

Number of Languages

The Small Business License supports web sites with content in 2 languages. It's enough to support local businesses in bilingual countries, such as Canada.

I'm sure someone will want 4 users instead of 3 or 3 languages instead of 2, but we have to set some reasonable limits that are sufficient for trully small business site and that will not demotivate clients from purchasing our standard licenses. If you want to ask why we chose or didn't choose some particular features or number of items, please feel free to post a comment below this blog post.
 

Pricing

There will be two Small Business Licenses:

  • 1 Web Site Small Business License at <removed>* per web site

    The price includes maintenance for the first year. Maintenance renewal costs <removed>* per year.

  • 1 Server Small Business License for 50 Web Sites for multiple clients at <removed>* per server

    The price includes maintenance for the first year. Maintenance renewal costs <removed>* per year.

These licenses will be only available to our partners and they are already discounted, so the partner discount doesn't apply on them.

Please note that the 1 Server Small Business License can be used for 50 sites - it means only <removed>* per site! It can be used for multiple clients unlike our higher licenses - the 1 Server Base License and 1 Server Ultimate License - that can be used only for a single organization.

* the actual pricing was removed and is now only available on the Partner Portal


Additional Packages 

If you purchase 1 Web Site or 1 Server Small Business License, you will be able to purchase additional packages (Advanced, E-commerce, Social Networking) for $1,499 minus partner discount for every web site.

Example 1:
1 Web Small Business License (<removed>*) + 1 E-commerce Package ($1,499 before partner discount) = <removed>* (minus partner discount for the E-commerce Package)

Example 2:
The Partner has 1 Server Small Business License and uses it for 20 clients. Now, one of these clients wants to enhance their site with on-line store. The partner purchases 1 E-commerce Package ($1,499 before partner discount) and uses it for this particular client. The package cannot be used for any other web site using the same server.


Upgrades 

You can also upgrade 1 Web Site Small Business License to the 1 Web Site Base License just for the price difference if your client grows and needs more features. It's not possible to upgrade from 1 Server Small Business License to the Base License.


Web Farms

Both Small Business licenses can be used only on a single physical server and can't be used in a web farm.


Cloud Hosting

Due to the nature of the Small Business License, you can use it in the cloud hosting environment without any extra fee.


Price Guarantee

Some of you expressed concerns about the frequency of price changes. We decided to provide you with a public guarantee that we will not increase the price of the Small Business License, Base License and each of the packages at least in the following two years, unless there's a significant change in economic conditions. By a significant change, I mean more than 20% decrease of the U.S. dollar value to our local currency (CZK - Czech Crown) or other significant economic change that we cannot influence, but has a significant impact on our business.

We plan to add additional packages in the future versions, which means that the price of the Ultimate license can be increased appropriately since it will contain all these packages. This increase will be, however, proportional to the value of the included packages and will not mean increase of the Base License.

I hope you will appreciate this step. As always, I'm open to your feedback, so please feel free to submit your comments below. Thank you.

 

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Petr Palas

I'm the founder and CEO of Kentico. I write about Kentico, WCM, CXM, digital marketing and related technologies.

Comments

Per commented on

To Petr:

Don't get me wrong. Staging is an excellent feature that is worth a lot to me as a Kentico developer. I am very glad that Kentico is offering it.

But, our clients are totally unaware of its existence and frankly don't care. So how are we supposed to sell it to them?

We would be happy to pay for some sort of developer license to use the staging module, but we can't pay $1000+ for every client. That just doesn't make sense.

Petr Palas commented on

To Per: We consider staging to be a clearly enterprise-level feature. I have't seen it in any .NET open source or low-end CMS and if you look at Ektron, you will find out that their eSync is available only in the Enterprise edition ($72k per site with unlimited users) or as an extra add-on.

Per commented on

To Petr:

Right, that works. But it's a tedious process. I prefer to synchronize changes with one mouse click.

Do you consider staging of system objects to be a feature that our clients should be paying for?

If you ask me, it's a developer feature that makes it easier to develop websites using Kentico. But our company can't pay $1499 (- discount) for every client to use this feature.

Petr Palas commented on

To Per: If you need to synchronize changes of objects, you can still export changes made after some date on your development machine and import them on the live server.

Per commented on

Yes, that looks like a good compromise. Thanks!

However, why can't staging (at least of system objects) be included in all licenses? We use this feature for all our website projects... I can't see clients paying $1499 (minus discount) for the Advanced Package just to make my work easier.

Petr Palas commented on

Hi David,

both Small Business License and Base License contain the E-commerce module with all features, but they are limited to 100 products as shown on the first figure. It means if you need to build a small store for a few products, you will often be able to do that with Small Business or Base License.

However, if you want to build a larger store with more than 100 products, you need to purchase the E-commerce package that costs $1,499. It means the total price is $999 + $1,499 = $2,499 for Small Business + E-commerce. Or you can purchase Base License + E-commerce at $1,999 + $1,499 = $3,498.

Please let me know if you need any further clarification.

Petr Palas, Kentico

David Scott commented on

I am not clear from your promotion what you get for the 1 Web Site Small Business Licence. It would appear from the table above that e-commerce functionality is included, however the 2 examples below indicate that you would have to pay an additional $1,499.

Please clarify.

Tom commented on

This is what I call CRM :) Thanks a lot!

Mark commented on

I'm delighted with this compromise - it means i can continue to work with Kentico.

I applaud Kentico for being smart enough to listen !

Douglas Lim commented on

Thank you Petr for listening to your customers and taking action. We are so relieved because we were on the verge of switching to another CMS. Thank you.

Elijah Taylor commented on

Thank you for this compromise. The new license is a nice balance of features vs. price. I’m relieved to know I can continue to choose Kentico for future projects!

Dom commented on

Thanks for listening Petr. This looks like a good pricing structure which I hope will allow you to maximise your income from a great product whilst keeping all customers happy! It would be geat to look at selling modules (eg additional languages) as add-ons in the future, but the most important thing is that you have providied a pricing structure which we can carry on working with. Thanks.

Martyn Roberts commented on

Many thanks for listening to the community, Petr. Whilst I am in full support of your vision to move Kentico toward the enterprise CMS space, this license allows us to keep the momentum gained on smaller projects.

JimS commented on

Thank you very much, Petr, for not taking the CommunityServer road :-)

Dimitris Rakopoulos commented on

Great news. It is good to know that you listen to your partners!

Keep up the good job.

Cheers,
Dimitris

Richard Pendergast commented on

This is awesome news. An annual license that allows for 50 client sites not only gives agencies a way to stay in the game, but the maintenance fee generates the repeat business for Kentico that will allow the regular fixes and updates to continue. Very cool :)

Have to say, without this I was worried about the Australian market. Being so far outside of Europe and the US, we are essentially a whole bunch of small businesses and small business service providers.

ralph commented on

Hi Petr,

I think that this is a fair compromise. There is a lot that can be done with this license and the server license model will help smaller agencies to continue using this CMS.

The price guarantee is definitely the right answer to all the questions the new license model has raised.

Thank-You for listening!
ralph

Carl Dean commented on

This is a really positive response to the feedback we've seen following last week's price announcement.

The Small Business Server License is exactly the kind of license a medium sized web development company like ours needs. I'm pleasantly surprised by the feature set and price. You could easily have made the server license fee an annually recurring charge but you've stuck to your guns and kept the 30% maintenance fee instead.

I think that rather than lose business this will only increase it for you and with the welcome price guarantee we can comfortably pitch for projects well into the future.

Well done for listening and I hope everybody signs up to this.

Carl

Marc commented on

That sounds much better, especially the 50 sites-package. Maybe you will be able to add "options"-licences in the future (if this doesn't get too complex), at least for partners. An option would be an individual function added to another licence (eg. user contributions) for a price like $300 or so.

Thanks for listening to your partners. I am personaly convinced that the market for small to medium internet agencies serving (lots of small) to (few) large companies with one single product is the most interesting niche for Kentico. There are enough (too) expensive CMS for large enterprises out there which we would never buy - not even for large projects who could afford such expensive CMS because of our learning curve.