New Pricing Plan Designed To Make XML Content Management More Affordable
You pay for parking this way. And for psychiatric help. And long distance telephone calling. Now, thanks to an innovative new pricing plan from DocZone.com, you can pay-by-the-minute for XML content management, too.
The new pricing option, which becomes available today, allows DocZone customers to purchase blocks of minutes for a fixed per-minute rate, with discounted rates available with the purchase of larger amounts of usage time. There are no restrictions to the number of users that can share the purchased minutes within a customer’s DocZone environment. This approach is similar to the programs offered by mobile telephone carriers today.
DocZone.com is the first content management system vendor to introduce pay-per-minute pricing. More on this story to follow.
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Interesting. My initial reaction was horror. As one who spends most of my working day creating, editing, managing and working with content then this would seem foolhardy.
Still not sure it makes that much sense either, isn’t there a danger that users of DocZone will just push their creation/collaboration stage to, say, a Wiki, and only push into DocZone for publishing… which whilst it will be cheaper for the end user, loosens the ties to DocZone and … well i guess they’ve done their sums and figure they’ll still make more money this way than with a traditional license model.
Will be interesting to see how this one pans out.
Gordon,
Thanks for your comments. As you mentioned, you are someone who spends most of your day working with content interactively, so this type of plan may not make the most sense for your situation. For this reason, we still continue to offer our traditional “floating license” plan for individual users.
However, we created our new Pay-Per-Minute plan to address a different type of user profile, who we felt were not being properly served by the industry: small to mid-size businesses, or companies where documentation/training materials may only be updated occasionally (once or twice a year). We wanted to put together a solution for these folks that would make it affordable for them to enjoy the benefits of migrating to XML, and the idea of Pay-Per-Minute seems like a good way to address this.
There have also been a recent discussion thread here in the Content Wrangler blog about the expense of doing a Proof of Concept. We feel that with our new Pay-Per-Minute plan, we now can make a great departmental proof-of-concept environment available for less than USD$1000/month. This will hopefully encourage many people who are interested in the idea of moving to XML/DITA within a CMS to actually take the next step and try it!
With regards to the possibility that users may do the bulk of their work outside of DocZone and then only use our system to publish…well, that certainly will be interesting to see. We feel that once users get comfortable with the ease of use and intuitive nature of a truly “all inclusive” environment that we provide within DocZone, that they will find it a much more efficient and comfortable experience to just use DocZone for all of their tasks…and we’re willing to take the risk that some users may choose to do much of their work in an “offline” mode. The benefits we offer, such as the integrated translation memory system and the collaborative XML review/annotation features, are hopefully compelling enough to encourage these users to stay within the DocZone environment.
Just to be clear: this isn’t about DocZone “making more money this way than with a traditional license model”. This is about giving the flexibility to end users to decide which pricing model makes more sense to them. We’re happy to sell our solution either way!
Dan Dube
Managing Director, US Operations
DocZone.com