General Consultant Discussion

I'm working on a proposal for a Sage 100 prospect who'd need light MFG. For a 6 user system, I found that their breakeven point where the perpetual user bundle is cheaper than subscription is about 5 years. This also makes some assumptions which I'm not sure are valid: a. Sage won't increase pricing on perpetual (either SLP or maintenance) b. Sage will continue to offer perpetual for 5+ years and not force migrate existing users I'm not really sold that a and/or b won't happen which if it did would make the analysis rather worthless. Just an FYI on the breakeven

@WayneSchulz can we even offer perpetual user bundles anymore? I thought it was only subscription now?

Perpetual is still available. Sage is pushing Sage 100c as their preferred solution. You can no longer offer the old Sage 100 subscription pricing. Subscriptions must be Sage 100c price list. The pricing for perpetual and Sage 100c is in MySageSell and attached here.

Ok thanks ! So hard to keep up the price of the month!

You can't guarantee they won't increase pricing on subscription either.

This math also presumes that maintenance and pricing options will remain the same for 5+ years. I remember when Sage introduced EES and a couple years later dropped the licensing option. I had sold three customers an ""upgrade"" because EES was cheaper. Sage , IMO, made a mistake on EES pricing and subsequently eliminated the option. It's very possible that within the next few years Sage will eliminate perpetual licensing (anyone who claims to say for sure whether this will happen is just guessing). And if perpetual gets dropped then the breakeven doesn't really mean anything -- and it could wind up costing a customer more money to spend for perpetual rather than subscription.

Sage will keep jerking around their pricing until they have pushed every current customer out the door and created a barrier to new customers (who is really going to want to buy outdated technology for the price of new technology?).

With perpetual the customer still has the option to drop maintenance and run the software for the next 5 years or more. Extortion is only a viable business model if you have a monopoly.

This analysis presumes everything remains static. What if Sage no longer allowed you to install product updates unless the customer was on a plan? Then you'd roll the dice that something major didn't happen which required an update. Also, bigger companies tend to be less likely to completely drop maintenance unless they're in the process of migrating away from Sage or they are in a non-core industry and use the ""forgotten"" modules. Looking into my crystal ball I'm predicting Sage will accelerate their move to subscription. They need the revenue and they have too many executives going out the revolving door to keep delaying and twiddling their thumbs.

Currently you are repurchasing the software every 4-5 years anyway, and getting virtually nothing new added to it for your repurchase. Outsource payroll, because that will always have compliance issues subject to the whim of Congress and 50 state legislatures. Sage's ""ACA compliance"" is a joke - all they did was add a table or two, and don't even populate them. It's ridiculous that Sage made the IRD require the latest service packs just to run 1099s. Anything you can do with ""integrated"" Aatrix can be done by uploading spreadsheets to Aatrix.

@WayneSchulz - I have found the same thing. I like @PhilMcIntosh 's comment about selling perpetual and not renewing business care. With my existing customers, I have stopped defending Sage, and with some of them, I have flat out attacked Sage. I'm not sure that would sit well with a prospect, so I try my best to play nice and show both options like you have.

What if your favorite car company was Ford, and Ford had a new policy of lease only? You could no longer buy a car, your only option was to lease. Imagine the current trend among car manufacturers was to only offer leases. Eventually, due to customer demand, some car manufactures would begin to sell cars again. I find it hard to believe that the subscription only model will be the only option. It may be for a while but customer demand will force software publishers to change or begin losing customers.

Well if GM, Chevrolet, Toyota, et. al. only sold leases then Ford would be crazy to not do the same if it provides better financial sense to them.

Why not differentiate yourself and get all of the customers that don't want to lease?