I don’t disagree Andy but the marketplace is extremely competitive - a 5 user licence minimum is cutting a large chunk of the market out where you are not competing. These aren’t small businesses I deal with - they are £5m-£35M T/O organisations but my solution is only for a particular part of the business that requires only a couple of licenses. Just get frustrated really. My customers prefer to pay monthly for their software Office365 is everywhere now - they will not buy more user licences then they need just to meet FileMakers minimum requirements. Maybe I need to forget FileMaker and invest my time elsewhere.
Does the SBA fit your needs? Or is it all custom?
Hi Mark. I am actually with you on this. We’re having to abandon our SaaS model, other than our SBA products, for this very reason. We’re actively looking for alternatives to FileMaker for the products where we need to customise for a very small number of users. We’re losing market share to companies with vertical products, with very low hosting costs and offering very reasonable customisation rate, which used to be Filemaker’s market. We are making slow progress on this.
We’ll be changing our future marketing strategy for our FileMaker systems to aim at larger organisations, which some of our database systems are more suited to, but it is the licensing that is forcing us down this route, not technical. Thankfully our marketing is rubbish anyway, as we’re too busy working for existing and new clients. No, we don’t want anymore work or business and our websites help with this - LOL!
We’re relatively relaxed about it now, having exhausted our conversations with FMI/Claris and understand that they are not going to budge. So time to move on and look to the future. Our main concern is that dealing with larger organisations can often be less rewarding than the smaller ones, with so much more bureaucracy and internal politics involved.
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Such a shame. This product wipes the floor with web applications in terms of development time and deployment. Once this space, which historically didn’t deliver value due to peer to peer, run-times, disappears it will be extremely difficult to get it back.
Makes me mad.
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Just looking at the requirements for SBA - bundles of 5 licences, no mention of cloud, must commit to 50 licences per annum with initial of 10. Just not geared towards small time developers.
Andy - must be frustrating for an established business like yours to be caught up in the middle of this pivot by FileMaker. I am increasingly coming up against spreadsheet usage or product like AirTable (spreadsheet type database) - companies are employing a ‘good enough’ strategy when I could make such dramatic improvements with custom apps. So many opportunities and I was hoping that Cloud 2 would solve the infrastructure, resilience and sharing needs to help meet those opportunities but when I saw the 5 user minimum my heart sank.
Oh well.
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Thanks Mark. What’s frustrating is that our business decisions are being restricted by a partner/supplier, so yes it is very frustrating, but no doubt it will all come out in the wash one way or another and it is easier to swim downstream than upstream (enough mixed metaphors).
We’re huge fans of FileMaker and have been since the mid-80s. There does appear to be a cultural shift there and we’ll see where that goes. In the meantime, we’ve a brilliant tool for the job, but will keep an eye on potential alternatives for some specific work.
What we’re not keen on is for the provider of our tools to also be the curator of our and our clients’ systems and data (our and our clients’ IP). Personally, I think the 2 things should remain separate and we’ll certainly continue this strategy for the foreseeable future.
Ultimately, we’re looking for a bit more freedom than we have.
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What I don’t understand, and what I’ve tried to explain to various UK based Filemaker people, is that for £1,400 per year, I can get fmphost.com to configure, support, and maintain a full blown Filemaker Server, hosted on AWS, with built in support for things like Dropbox backup delivery, MirrorSync installation server-side, and basically incredible customer support. Why on earth I’d want to pay £2,200 per year for LESS is just beyond me.
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… to clarify, that’s based on $60USD/mth for the hosting, and buying my own Filemaker 18 5xUser pack, on an annual basis…
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I like that they have the option to pay monthly for sure - one concern would be access to the Claris Connect functionality coming down the pipe soon. This looks like a game changer to me and I’m unsure what platforms this will be applicable to - if it’s initially just FileMaker Cloud then that is a competitive advantage they have over third party hosting.
Anyone any idea what platforms will be able to access Claris Connect functionality ? Do we even have any timescales at this point?
Oh and welcome James 
Thanks Mark!
The compatibility with Claris Connect is certainly factor, but once again, I think we can all appreciate that Claris Connect won’t be a free service, as they’ve taken so much effort to be able to market it as a seperate ‘Product’ from Filemaker - so the real question for me is whether Claris Connect will be comparable in terms of price and functionality as Zapier - which already works very nicely with Filemaker.
why even AWS? there are amazing smaller hosts with great service and price…
I’d never even considered this would be a cost option for FileMaker users ! You are probably correct however. Do you the FmGateway product to ease the interface to Zapier?
Zapier is very expensive too - if you are looking to move large amounts of data between linked system the price would quickly ramp up. Maybe I’ll just stick to rolling my own api integration.
Yup, I use the FmGateway product - it’s super easy to use, and has reduced the time I’ve spent implementing a few 3rd party services - particularly with things like Web Forms, where the client always ends up wanting to add/change forms and their content - updating things with Zapier / FMGateway really simplifies that - but for some use cases of course, you always have to roll your own!
Depends on your use case - 100 ‘tasks’ are free (per month) - $20USD for 750 and upwards. The thing is though, you can use these tasks across all of your ‘Zaps’ - so if a specific client is using loads of tasks, I normally just charge them a piecemeal amount each month, and across all clients the service pays for itself, and that’s before I take into account the amount of time saved in development.
I believe the monthly amount is displayed for comparison purposes, payment is upfront for the duration of the contract (1, 2 or 3 years). At least that's my understanding, please correct me if I am wrong.
Fresh out of the APAC Devcon where questions were being asked about this. They are still not completely certain about how it will play out - increasing confusion for everyone - but suggested that one scenario is for SBAs to buy a block of licenses and then sell those individually to their clients. This seemed completely reasonable. The only thing being that in their example they said, “one option would be for SBAs to buy a bundle of one thousand licenses and then they would be able to sell them…” No one picked them up on the number “one thousand” so we’re left hoping that SBAs could buy a smaller bundle than that.
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here is something for cloud-lovers )-:
I got 5 Mini’s here, all serve as filemaker servers, different versions of fms and os - to serve different customers who are not on the latest version (there are no live customer solutions on those machines, it’s developing only)
Those fms do main backups during night on their local volumes, chronosync will copy backups to a NAS, sending emails to confirm backups, not just if something went wrong, they protocol every chronosync-backup
Last night at 3 o’clock am, the last message arrived (the first of the series)… network seems to be down
- the fritzbox control lights were red
- today is a holy day here, everything closed, almost nobody is working
- we got quite a couple of jobs to be done today (yes, it’s a holy day…) and meetings in my office are planned with colleagues, all jobs via remote access to customer sites
- no internet connection, wether wired nor wifi
- checking via phone-net, all services were available (celluar, got a flat rate)
- I’ve reseted all modems/routers, no change (but the fritzbox was no longer ‘red’)
- every support site I called from celluar was fine…
Shortly after 7, I called the 24hrs help-line, but they could not help…
There are several players in the game, swisscom (base net), internet provider, local cable company (individual net to the buildings) and the local provider (yes, this town is complicated, the last two players are not really necessary…)
Means no chance to get help!
Lucky-me… shortly before our meeting starts, network is up again! I was on the way to set up a hot-spot via celluar as I realized that a web-page on one of the displays reappeared…
This time, it was a problem with a dns/dhcp service somewhere
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no you can pay monthly (you do have to commit to a 12 month contract however). 
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