By Rachel Andrew CHAPTER 11offer inclusive support you need to factor that time in when setting your
price.
For SaaS applications, customers usually pay monthly for the service,
so you already receive a recurring payment which generally includes sup-
port. In this case, you need to ensure that the monthly charge covers the
time needed to offer that support.
While we feel that offering free and inclusive support with a license for
Perch is the best solution, other companies in our space have moved away
from that model. The ExpressionEngine^9 CMS used to operate under a sim-
ilar model to Perch but recently moved to a paid model. ExpressionEngine
users get three months of support included when they first buy a license, but
then must pay for continued support with a subscription at various levels.
These support plans are a mixture of a subscription and per incident
support. A plan includes a number of urgent tickets, though you can also
purchase additional urgent tickets if you need them. Ellis Labs published
a blog post^10 detailing why they moved to this system, which gives some
insight into their decision making. The key driver seems to have been eco-
nomic, and they state:
The cost to provide an ongoing service isn’t well-supported by one-time
purchases, and the disconnect only grows more severe as the number of one-
time purchases increases.Based on our experience, I would disagree that offering inclusive
support is impossible. Despite a Perch license being a one-time purchase,
customers return to buy additional licenses. What we have seen is that
we often give far more support for the initial license purchase than would
be expected for the price of a license, yet because our customers go on to
buy a license for each website they build, over time it balances out. I have
9 http://ellislab.com/expressionengine
10 http://ellislab.com/blog/entry/rethinking-tech-support