$5 Software
February 24th, 2006[ Software Development ]
Bug tracking software for only $5, even Scoble linked to it. I admit I didn’t read the fine print, but it got me thinking, initial licensing costs for a bug tracking product would be the least of my concerns. Support, maintenance and upgrades are what I’d look at. The reality is it’s ugly and costly to migrate your data out of a bug tracker into a new product. So once the average customer is in, they’re in for the long haul.
Example, the Fogcreek boys charge a flat $2995 US rate to migrate your data out of your old bug tracker into Fogbugz. I’ve done that work for a client and that’s a reasonable rate and by no means outrageous.
A not-so-nice company could base their business on this type of lock-in model. Discount, or give away, the software, get clients in, get their data and then make it painful to leave. Create borders to exiting your product. (Note, I am by no means claiming this is the case with the above product.)
Most software companies don’t necessarily do this on purpose but don’t fool yourself into thinking some don’t. When I was with MKS, we spent a lot of time and resources moving new customers off old source control and issue tracking products onto ours. I was directly involved in building tools to make this process easier for our services team as it lowered barriers to entry for our products.
I went so far as to suggest several times to product management that we build tools to do the opposite, ie get our clients off our products. We had the tools to go one-way, it would actually be fairly simple to have them go the other way as well. We could then offer this up during the sales process. We will help you painlessly get off our products if you want to. We do not base our business on lock-in and only want you using our product if it’s serving you effectively.
Ah, needless to say product management never quite latched onto that idea.