That reminds me of the post by Eric - can't remember his last name - called 'The 7 million dollar developer' or something like this.
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On both sides.
I watched and enjoyed
DIGFM: The 2.6 Million Dollar Dev (12/14/2017; Santa Clara, CA)
Oh they can see the value - they have a fairly good ERP system but they produce works orders(WO) for their internal timber mill and at the point it raises the WO the business loses visibility of the job until the milled timber eventually appears back in the warehouse, hopefully before the date the customer wanted it. 
. This is the board the mill manager schedules his jobs on - he sometimes forgets to write them on or wipe them off so it’s not entirely accurate. Our solution is to create a link between a new FileMaker solution and the ERP system using an ODBC link (£1000 setup fee from the ERP company!) and create a scheduling system that allows the manager to allocate slots to the incoming jobs from the ERP system. Then the key sales team can see the status of any jobs. I’m hoping to turn the sale around next week by showing a mock up I am creating in Balsamiq.
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@tonywhitelive, that story is so true! It is a real oddity that organisations are happy to spend millions on ‘standard software’ projects with bad outcomes (the list of failed or under-delivering, cost-overrunning projects stretches from earth beyond mars) while not even considering to evaluate a custom solution.
According to Gardner, the percentage of failed projects will grow further with the ‘cloud’.
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As I was reading, my brain anticipated what you were about to say. “our intention is to create a link between FileMaker and the”… “white board” 
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The comments here are so true. I have a client, a small charity, I’ve developed a solution that sits on the founder’s Mac, we would really like someone to do data entry. So the current price is £259 for his solution. To allow one other person to remote access that data is £1300 per year.
They’re having a laugh. For £1300 I’d move his solution to PHP/mySQL (if I’m allowed to swear here)
£31 per month x 2 is not an insubstantial sum of money for a service that has very very low maintenance costs so why not per user, minimum 1, I could maybe have justified that.
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I totally agree. I could get many new clients into FileMaker if there was a 1 user cloud option. Maybe for Claris wouldn’t be profitable to sell one cloud user licenses, but they should look into this as an investment. FM is a great product and when clients start using it they want more, they want to grow and expand the apps, that means most one user solutions quickly grow up to a higher number of users. At least this is my experience.
Many projects start with one user and a small solution, so we need a gradual approach in order to get into a company, and once inside, expand to more processes, and therefore more users. I wish Claris saw the benefit for an option to a gradual approach.
42 € / month per user is a reasonable price. But it is difficult to explain to possible clients that they need to pay 42 x 5 = 210 € / month for licensing without even starting talking about the cost of custom development.
I used to get new clients that needed to transition from Excel to something more secure and efficient. If there was an option for one cloud user licenses, FM would still be good competence for Excel, and the market there is huge.
To be honest, I’m not clear about what is the target market for FileMaker, having the 5 cloud user licenses minimum.
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we have tried to discuss that a couple of times, no success
- single server available
- single user with server
- in general licenses for 1…4 users
- a single user install of today might result in a 20 user install in the future
I suggested also to sell fms bundled with one client by default, adding one by one
We got single user customers who need a fms located on a hosting service or FMC
While ‘FMcloud’ is not always an option here due to several reason, ‘on premise’ would be the way to go - if the server is not at the same location, we are talking ‘cloud’ anyway…
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The min 5 users packaging is a penalty imposed on businesses with less than 5 users. It is exactly the group of businesses that allowed Claris-Filemaker-Claris-again to grow over many years. A solid and reliable customer base that now can choose between boot and stick.
There is not only customer loyalty but also loyalty to customers. Some people went over the fact that loyalty is not a one-way street.
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In the olden days this was called ‘remote access’. That’s what is technically is. ‘Cloud’ just sounds nerdier.
Twenty years ago the number of people who could talk php/sql were thin on the ground. Today I could find five web devs in as many minutes by standing on the footpath in the city. That changes the landscape enormously. Especially when you are designing an “I only do one thing” (as opposed to “I only do one thing well”) app. This is the space that Claris is trying to jump into with Connect.
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The pricing for five seats with server is less than the cost of two stand-alone seats. In that comparison it is excellent value. The company is saying, “If you need more than one seat, do it properly with server and we’ll throw in three extra seats as incentive.” That’s a great deal.
The issue is that all of the goodies are in server. WebDirect, Data API, xDBC, and the older PHP/XML APIs. FMGo is possible without server but FMS makes it straight forward and easy. At that point, you have to talk about the goodies, not about seating.
After wallet-shock I find that small / medium business prefer to buy pret-a-porter. No matter that it doesn’t fit well. They want a solution yesterday not soon. It is much easier to rationalise. Getting past this mentality is the biggest hurdle that I face.
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That’s true.
but the price for the 2 clients is ‘buy’ and the price for server+5 is ‘rent’ (per year)?
(completely agree with the other points)
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Not really. The price for FM Server (5 sits) is five times the price for one sit.
To be more specific, the price for one sit (in Europe) is 576 €. The price for FM Server with 5 sits is 2,880 € (machine or VPS cost not included).
I think you are comparing the anual rent of FM Server, that includes licenses, versus buying perpetual FM Pro licenses, but you can't really compare anual rental vs. buying perpetual.
In any case, this topic is about FM Cloud 2, so the correct comparison would be anual rent of 5 sits, vs anual rent of 1 sit. I would be very, very happy if that comparison could be made! (that was my point in my former post)
Let's say that you go to a car dealer and you have a budget of 20.000 € to buy a new car. You see a car that you like, the price is according to your budget.
You tell the sales guy: "I want to buy this car". They sales person tells you: "OK, but you need to buy a minimum of five cars, so the price is 100.000 €. But the good thing is I'll give you 4 extra cars"
Then you say, "OK, I really like this car, so I'll buy it and sell the four extra cars I don't need" ("shared hosting")
Then the sales person tells you: "Sorry but you can't do that. If you buy 5 cars, they can only be driven by people within your house".
Then you say: "We are five people living in my house. My wife just bought a new a car. My three children are too young to drive. I only need one car, and my budget limit is 20.000 €".
The sales person says: "Sorry, I can only sell you a minimum of 5 cars, for 100.000 €"
That's a good point, but it depends on the needs of the client and the specific solution they need. Clients that need only 1 sit are unlikely to need CWP, WD, etc. , so I wouldn't be able to convince them to pay for 5 sits every month if they are not going to use those goodies.
The price for one license is reasonable. There is no wallet-shock if the client has to pay 42 € / month for 1 sit in the cloud. I could easily sell that, even to a possible client that uses a basic Excel spreadsheet on Dropbox, to upgrade to a basic custom FM app hosted in FM Cloud 2. Then I will make it grow from there, like I did in the past when shared hosting was allowed, and probably go for 5 sits in a few months. We all know 90 % of the solutions grow in size and users, at least this is my experience. The wallet-shock is having to rent 5 sits and pay 210 € / month for clients that only need 1 sit. That's what people don't understand.
I think your point is that FileMaker is for companies that can afford buying a minimum of 5 sits, which is a very valid point.
My point is, by disregarding the entry level option to FileMaker, that is, 1 sit in the cloud, we are having a big cost of opportunity, and disregarding a huge potential market that could be good business for everybody, including Claris, thinking on the mid and long term (small fish become big fish ...).
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The depressing thing about this whole new pricing structure is that it makes selling simple solutions to new clients much more difficult. In the old days I could show a client a CRM solution and get them using it for 4 weeks for free. Then when they discover that they like it, they are not shocked by the price of buying a collection of licences so that a few people in the business can use it. A year down the line, everyone in the company wants access to it and they can’t live without it.
This is the whole process of getting a new client hooked who doesn’t really know what they want and what it can do for them. They are interested in anything that makes their business simpler and helping the communications process between different people in the company as a job progresses. FileMaker is just the programming environment that makes this possible, but we have to put the development time into the solutions that make this possible.
Front-loading the software pricing for new clients is insane. The online market is too competitive now for FileMaker to adopt this pricing policy and survive. New client uptake is down and as someone who has been selling FileMaker solutions since 1991, I now find it increasingly hard to promote it.
Claris needs a proper business strategy to promote the uptake of FileMaker, not just a more and more exorbitant pricing structure.
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The runtime was convenient, but it sounds more like you need to run a demo FileMaker Server for your product, where you give potential new clients a login to test for a month and then move them to their own server if they like it.
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Hi - sorry, I may not have been clear. I was referring to the reduction of the ‘trial’ period from 4 to 2 weeks, which has been helpful to nobody. I simply don’t understand these silly changes in Filemaker policy that just make our lives harder. It is not as though the extra two weeks really made any difference to FM revenues. As you mentioned, the good thing about the trial period is that you can have a sample database running on your test server and then set up the client to be able to login to it on a trial copy of the FileMaker software. However, the trial period is now so short, that they don’t have much time to evaluate anything before the trial is up and they have to pay for a licence.
This two week trial must be for Cloud (v2)? As far as I know the Cloud 2 trial is only available to FBA members…? I don’t see it anywhere on the filemaker.com site… For ‘on-prem’ FMS and FMPA18 the trial is still 45 days (just over 6 weeks) which is pretty good.