Simplified pricing for Load Tester 5
Short version:
The pricing for Load Tester 5 has been simplified down to a single price for Load Tester 5, along with a handful of options. Easy to understand, easy to afford, easy to buy!
Long version (or, how I learned to stop worrying and love simple pricing):
We have always tried to make Load Tester easy to understand and easy to buy. Part of that effort was to offer flexible pricing based on what customers needed. Over the years, we increased the number of price tiers, added a variety of permanent, floating and temporary licenses. Somewhere along the way, our price list went insane. As recently as 2 years ago, there were 28 separate prices for Load Tester. That did not include support (21 prices) or server monitoring (14 prices + a calculation based on the number of servers). More than 60 prices for what is essentially a single product! That is just nuts.
At the end of 2010, we started to simplify the pricing: we rolled monitoring support into Load Tester support and changed the server monitoring to work with any number of servers. Our customers loved the change. But that still left 49 prices. Plus one for cloud engines. Still crazy.
This has actually bugged me for many years, but every time I campaigned for a change, we kept coming back to the same question: How many VU-based price tiers should we have? Eventually, I realized my mistake. The industry practice of pricing by VUs had become so ingrained, that I had been asking the wrong question. The right question was: Why is the price of load testing software based on the number of VUs at all?
Over time, a few answers had surfaced. For example: “because it’s expensive to engineer the software to run really big tests”. While I expect that may be true for many of our competitors, that answer does not apply to us – scaling big is easy for Load Tester because it was engineered from the start to do exactly that. Another suggestion was “VU pricing makes sense to buyers”. For some, that might be true – or perhaps those buyers are simply accustomed to this industry practice. But our experience indicates that this pricing does not make sense for most organizations. Many organizations don’t know how many users they want to test – they simply want to measure the maximum capacity of their system. Others are very small organizations with small budgets who need to know what happens if they get slash-dotted. And some want to run a really big test just because it’s fun!
Once we agreed that there was no compelling reason to price our software based on VU-tiers, we were free to make our pricing as simple as possible: there is now only a single price for Load Tester. Our entire price list, including server monitoring, cloud engines, training and 2 support tiers has a grand total of 6 prices…and it all fits nicely on one page!
In addition to being easier to understand this change also removes test-size limitations from Load Tester™ – so you can now run million-user load tests with an affordable tool!
Chris Merrill, Chief Engineer