On Tue, 26 Nov 1996 19:58:55 -0500 (EST) Merrill Cook <mcook@ecunet.org>
said:
>The pricing I've seen suggests that they want to make money selling a
>few copies. If they wanted to sell lots they wouldn't be charging so
>much.
LISTSERV Lite goes for $500-2000 OTC (corporate), with a free edition for
non commercial use.
It isn't possible to sell "lots" of copies of a mailing list manager, at
least not in the meaning normally associated with PC software. There are
thousands of copies of the freebies in use, not millions, not hundreds of
thousands, not even tens of thousands. That's with a retail price of
$0.00. I think this will change, but it hasn't changed yet, and we have
bills to pay now. Another thing is that supporting the high end of the
market is extremely expensive (that's another reason for the Lite
version). It's easy to write a simple list manager and write some hype
that refers to existing products as "primitive", then make a spam or
three to advertise it, and the sad thing is that you'll fool the low end
of the market easily, because they just don't know better. But when you
talk to sites that have lists with over 500,000 subscribers, plan to have
millions of subscribers on the same machine and need delivery times in
the 200,000 per hour, including bounce processing and, needless to say,
without any failure or lost mail, suddenly everything starts getting a
lot more difficult and lining buzzwords on a web page no longer cuts it.
The market for this is in the hundreds, not even thousands, so the prices
have to go up.
Eric
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