Re: Kentico for Small Businesses

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Read the summary and conclusion on the Small Business licensing here.
<p> In November, I <a href="/getdoc/e9af6a89-711a-49d1-84e5-4722c93369dc/Kentico-for-Small-Businesses.aspx">asked the blog readers</a> if they wanted to see a &quot;Small Business&quot; edition of Kentico CMS. Here are the results:<br /> <br /> First, I&#39;d like to thank all of you who filled out our survey on Kentico <a href="http://www.kentico.com">CMS</a> licensing for Small Businesses. Unfortunately, it seems there&#39;s not much interest in such edition. We received answers from only 18 people out of 478 people who read the blog post (3.8 %) and out of 1,200 clients&nbsp;using Kentico CMS (1.5 %).<br /> <br /> The answers on what features should be included in such edition were very different and there was basically no pattern, except for the branding requirement of Kentico CMS Free Edition.<br /> <br /> So we decided not to release a special edition for Small Businesses at this moment. However,&nbsp;we understand the concern of those who use the Free Edition that having&nbsp;the <i>Powered by Kentico CMS</i> logo on each page may break the design of&nbsp;such sites and since version 4.0, we will&nbsp;require just a link &quot;Powered by Kentico CMS for ASP.NET&quot; in the footer of all pages in the Free Edition and we will provide more (smaller) logo options. This should help those who wish to use the Free Edition without big logos. (Of course, there&#39;s no logo requirement for clients who use paid editions.)<br /> <br /> Again, I appreciate the feedback we received.</p>
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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

Bearnie commented on

I think this is a big mistake. Mainly startups just can't afford a $ 5.000 CMS in their first months of existance and also $ 1.000 for a single-site-license is too much when the customer is only a small company (which, in fact, is the case in the most startup-scenarios) that only needs a small site. So most startups (like me) will go and search for another solution, maybe in the Open Source market. Startups that might be very good customers in the future when their company grows and bigger and more customers come along. But at this point they have already choosen another CMS. In my case for example, the Free Edition would be a perfect deal for our first project if just there would not be this 100 member limit as there might be 200 of them (everything else like the admin and editor limit is just fine for a free edition). So, no way for Kentico. I think you really need some Basic Edition that costs about $ 300 per site, doesn't include support, but have not such limiting barriers like the 100 members limit. In one year maybe we would have enough customers to take investments in the $ 5.000 area just for the CMS, but for now and for starting with some small projects, this is just not affordable. :(

eyesea69-gmail commented on

I think that the offering the free version for community use and actually not really limiting its use other than the logo placement is very generous.
I appreciate that you have taken the time to listen to users on the licensing issue. I must say, that even a the new prices Kentico CMS is quite a value. Especially considering the level of support offered with the paid editions.

Kurt Farrar commented on

I agree with above... it's a small price to pay for having a free CMS to have the current Powered by logo. I, and my customers don't have any issues. The design should incorporate the logo at the outset.

Car Rental commented on

I don't really see an issue in having your logo, if its a free version then you should demand it, if it breaks there design tell them to buy a paid edition ;-))