Price Increases
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Hi,
Thank you for sharing your perspective; I appreciate the time you took to explain your concerns. However, there are some misunderstandings in your message that Iād like to address and clarify.
First, regarding pricing: contrary to what you've stated, we havenāt raised prices; in fact, for small infrastructures like yours, costs have decreased with our new bundles. The details are explained in this blog post: https://vates.tech/blog/introducing-vates-virtualization-management-stack/ To summarize, we combined XOA and XCP-ng into a single offer to ensure smaller businesses benefit from a more cost-effective solution. This change was made to support smaller setups, even in the face of inflation and rising operational costs.
Second, it's important to clarify the rationale behind the bundle. XOA on its own was originally designed as a solution to complement XenServer, but the landscape has evolved. Today, the majority of support tickets are related to XCP-ng rather than XOA. This is because the critical infrastructureāyour hypervisor and virtualization platformāis where complexity and stability matter most. Bugs or issues in XOA are often tolerable, but a problem in XCP-ng could directly impact production environments. Maintaining and advancing XCP-ng involves significant resources, requiring specialized teams and substantial investmentāour efforts are focused on delivering stability and innovation for production environments, and that comes with costs.
Lastly, while we understand that budgets vary, our open-source philosophy remains at the core of what we do. If a paid subscription isnāt feasible, all our software remains fully open-source and freely available, ensuring accessibility to those who cannot afford to pay for a subscription. This project costs over ā¬5M annually to maintain, yet we continue to prioritize the community by keeping everything open and transparent.
Comparing us to VMware feels unfair given our dedication to an open-source approach, a stark contrast to closed, proprietary systems. Weāve always strived to support smaller organizations while advancing open-source innovation in virtualization.
I hope this clears up some of the confusion, and I encourage you to revisit the new pricing model and consider the long-term value we aim to deliver.
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@olivierlambert said in Price Increases:
Comparing us to VMware feels unfair given our dedication to an open-source approach, a stark contrast to closed, proprietary systems. Weāve always strived to support smaller organizations while advancing open-source innovation in virtualization.
Actually it's more than just unfair
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I always strive to carefully choose my words to focus on the content and avoid triggering emotions when discussing facts. This approach makes it easier to address incorrect statements while keeping the dialogue open and constructiveāsomething we prioritize here.
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@manilx said in Price Increases:
@olivierlambert said in Price Increases:
Comparing us to VMware feels unfair given our dedication to an open-source approach, a stark contrast to closed, proprietary systems. Weāve always strived to support smaller organizations while advancing open-source innovation in virtualization.
Actually it's more than just unfair
Only because VMWare's lowest tier so much worse than any edition of XO with XCP-ng, and it (VMware) doesn't (or didn't include any support) and that all pricing models going forwards are way more expensive for the bare basic hypervisors. If you require some additional feature of ESXi at different tiers, you wouldn't even be considering any other hypervisor platforms, because ESXi does this specific thing and nothing else does.
Even using XCP-ng and XO(CE) with community support gets you more for literally free.
So yeah, I guess it's really unfair, free and open source with the option for paid support, or Forced subscription at the lowest tier and no official support.....
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@olivierlambert
Thank you for clarifying everything. By the way, I meant no disrespect to your product. I setup XCP-NG 8.2 and Orchestra in a lab environment about a year and a half ago (I think) and I loved it.
In fact, we have spoken through chat before about getting over that 2TB vm disk image. I think itās been addressed in 8.3 but I really have not had time to tinker with 8.3. I believe it was SMAPI version 3 that fixes it. I may have botched the name - sorry - my memory isnāt the greatest.
Anyway, I have 12 servers running in a cabinet at a datacenter that I am getting a killer deal on. My MSP is very small and we are not making that much above our cost and I also have a full time programmer who works for me so thereās just not a lot of extra money coming in.
I have seventy two VMs running on VMware based hypervisors. The were licensed using three sets of VMWare essentials license allowing for 3 nodes each so I had to maintain 3 different VCenters instances. The other three servers were Linux based fileservers where I ran Nakivo to back everything up.
It all has to go somewhere because has screwed everybody since the Broadcom merger.
Anyway, I was thinking XCP was the way to go and as soon as it could break through the 2TB vm image barrier then I would start converting VMs.
The thing that changed was when the pricing changed, that scared me. In my mind Iām thinking, I know I could go at this alone and do everything my self but If I did, I would have no support with your backup system. I currently pay Nakivo 2.75 per VM per month for backup and support services. I have had to call them in the past for several very important issues and had I not had their support I might have really been in hot water.
In all the years I ran VMWare essentials, I never had to call them for support because their stuff just worked and I knew how to set it up.
I feel that XCP would be the same in that regard but since I canāt just get support on the backup portion of Orchestra, your new pricing model leaves me with an all or none option when it comes to support and I just canāt afford 9 thousand dollars per year. I could afford a third of that and only get support on the Hypervisors running Orcgestra and maybe one or two others with the most important VMs. I just canāt swing them them all.
If I do KVM then I will do everything myself using Cockpit and Virt Manager which Iām okay with. Thatās nothing new. However, I would backuping everything up using using BDRSuite for $3.00 per VM per month. The bill would be $250 per month.
Itās a smidge more than Iām paying Nakivo but I would continue being supported as I am now.
Maybe if you had a per VM with a low monthly rate option then Iād be able to afford running everything in XCP-NG and pay as I go and only pay for what I actually use. If you had such an option then I could swing paying $4 per month per VM if that gave me backup support and the ability to add as many hypervisor hosts as I feel that I needed and also kept everything patched via updates. -
I really don't understand what the problem is here. The price is what it is. Everything is free with the use of your brain. We don't know your need for system availability, but for $2000 you can set it up not 3-2-1-1-0 but 9-4-5-3-1. At least the disks are cheap.
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@dariosplit
The problem is that I need (and required to have) enterprise level support for the backup system and since thatās handled through Orchestra then the current support model puts me in an all or none situation. I could run the Hypervisors for free and manage them plus orchestra all myself - no problem there. However, Vates isnāt going to help me with a backup and restore issue unless Iām paying them nine grand per year (9 hypervisors at $1,000 each yearly) and we just canāt afford that with all my other operating costs. A $4 per VM per month MSP option would solve this for me. Pay for what you use month to month. I really wish they would consider an MSP monthly option like many of backup solutions offer such as Veeam, Nakivo, and BDRSuite.
As a small MSP owner, I am willing to pay what I can afford. If we are willing to do most of the work ourselves, isnāt some money better than no money?
There are probably a lot of other folks in the same boat Iām in. It sure seems like thereās a whole other market Vates could tap into if they just add more flexibility in their pricing models. A $4 or $5 dollar VM per month MSP option would solve all my problems. -
@olivierlambert
Would you consider an MSP style licensing model where customers would pay $4 or $5 per VM monthly with a 20 VM minimum? I could swing that and have enterprise backup support via XO on all my hypervisors.
By paying it monthly on what I actually use is a much more attractive model. -
No. I didn't say never (can't tell in like 2 or 3 years from now), but at this price we're clearly just losing money.
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@olivierlambert
I understand and I thank you for at least hearing me out.
If I go with KVM, I know that Iām not going to have all the fancy bells and whistles that XCP-NG offers. Believe me I know, I used your product and loved it. However, I will be able to operate and have an enterprise level backup fully supported via BDR Suite for $3 per VM.
I can have as many hypervisors and file servers as my heart desires and never pay a penny more. Itās all based around the VM count and itās all paid monthly. I can scale up or down as needed and only pay for the Qty thatās used during that month.
Again, I would prefer to use XCP-NG but many of my customers require that I use a fully supported enterprise backup system. The only way I could afford to do it under your current model would be if your $1000 plan (pro) was $500 per hypervisor and thatās still almost double of what Iād be paying if I went with KVM and BDR Suite and never pay more when adding additional servers. I completely get your point about making enough but I wonder If you wouldnāt get a lot more people in my boat if you did come down or offer an MSP per month model that we could afford. Again, I thank you for at least hearing me out. Thank you.
