A Freemium Software Model
As we are currently going through a process of migrating all our old PHP scripts to Ruby on Rails I was thinking about giving away those old scripts for free as we upgrade the system.
The first one that I was planning on releasing was for our private site network. However after thinking about it I just wanted to get a feel for how people viewed "free" scripts offers vs paid.
As the script would be unsupported with no tutorials and only the quickest of readme files I had wasn't sure how well it would go down.
So my question is this - would you rather have a free script with little documentation or actually pay a around $20 (which would be donated to charity) to have a few video tutorials and a PDF guide?
The reason that the supported version would be paid is because it has extra value over the free version and as I want to provide this for free anyway - I feel like donating to charity would be an awesome way to do this.
I would be really grateful to hear some opinion on this. As I mentioned this isn't a buy my product thread - I am just looking to see which would be more valuable, a free unsupported script or a supported version with a small charity donation.
About the script
The network script has never been de-indexed or discovered in the 3 years that it has been running. We are currently running 41 different website from our central system.
Incase anyone wants to incorporate any of our ideas into their own script here is a further break down.
At the moment it offers a number of high level customization options such as changing the file extensions that appears on the site and customizing the url structure.
The admin panel is used to manage the networks and has a easy to use CMS. The whole network system only requires 1 database on a master domain to run the entire network from.
In the present state cpanel is needed on the master site to add new domains to the mysql remote access list - however this wouldn't be too difficult to integrate into a script using the cpanel api.
The first one that I was planning on releasing was for our private site network. However after thinking about it I just wanted to get a feel for how people viewed "free" scripts offers vs paid.
As the script would be unsupported with no tutorials and only the quickest of readme files I had wasn't sure how well it would go down.
So my question is this - would you rather have a free script with little documentation or actually pay a around $20 (which would be donated to charity) to have a few video tutorials and a PDF guide?
The reason that the supported version would be paid is because it has extra value over the free version and as I want to provide this for free anyway - I feel like donating to charity would be an awesome way to do this.
I would be really grateful to hear some opinion on this. As I mentioned this isn't a buy my product thread - I am just looking to see which would be more valuable, a free unsupported script or a supported version with a small charity donation.
About the script
The network script has never been de-indexed or discovered in the 3 years that it has been running. We are currently running 41 different website from our central system.
Incase anyone wants to incorporate any of our ideas into their own script here is a further break down.
At the moment it offers a number of high level customization options such as changing the file extensions that appears on the site and customizing the url structure.
The admin panel is used to manage the networks and has a easy to use CMS. The whole network system only requires 1 database on a master domain to run the entire network from.
In the present state cpanel is needed on the master site to add new domains to the mysql remote access list - however this wouldn't be too difficult to integrate into a script using the cpanel api.
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