Announcing new products and pricing

We're happy to announce two new additions (editions?) to the xTuple product line, and some simplifications to the pricing that will be effective April 1. (No, it's not an April Fools joke... )

Based on strong customer demand, we've added Project Accounting functionality to xTuple, and will be rolling that out in a new Project Edition of xTuple. This consists of the Project Acccounting package on top of the PostBooks core and fully integrated with the Time and Expense functionality (which remains freely available). Check out the online Product Guide for more; xTuple Project will sell for the same price point as the Standard Edition of xTuple.

We're also rolling out what we're calling the Enterprise Edition of xTuple. This package includes "all of the above" — the PostBooks core, Project, Standard, and Manufacturing — as well as xTuple Connect, the xTuple Web Portal core, and the Fixed Assets Depreciation add-on package. It also includes a 50% discount on any tier of our xTuple Network (XTN) service offering, allowing for xTuple-managed upgrades, offsite backup, database and hosting services.  xTuple Enterprise will be our premium offering, with a minimum license of ten concurrent users. If you've been considering some of these other xTuple product and service offerings, it's an outstanding value.

Here are the details on the new pricing. We will continue to offer both the traditional perpetual license and the annual subscription license. The annual license will also continue to be available on a monthly basis, as well as in the Amazon EC2 cloud environment. But, starting April 1, these new prices will also include built-in discounts for each additional user license you add — so the more users you have, the more you save per-seat. (And yes, we still only count concurrent users). Here is the base pricing, per user:

  Perpetual License Annual License
  through 3/31 Effective 4/1 through 3/31 Effective 4/1
         
PostBooks (free download) n/a n/a n/a n/a
xTuple PostBooks (commercial license, support) $900 $1200 $300 $400
xTuple Standard $1800 $2100 $600 $700
xTuple Project n/a $2100 n/a $700
xTuple Manufacturing $3000 $3600 $1000 $1200
xTuple Enterprise n/a $4500 n/a $1500

 

The discounts start at the 10-user level, for both the perpetual and the annual licenses. 1% off the cost of every user for a 10-user purchase, 2% for 11 users, etc... all the way up to a 45% discount for 54 users and up!

The monthly option for the annual license will continue to follow the same "easy math" rule as today — there is a 20% premium for the convenience and cash savings. Just take a zero off the price, and that's your monthly per-user price. So a 5-user Manufacturing annual license would be $6,000/year, or $600/month. Please note, this option is only available via direct ACH debit of a US bank account.

Software maintenance, of course, is included in the annual license. For the perpeptual license, it will be 10% of the base (undiscounted) price. That's down from 18% currently — so most perpetual license customers should see a net drop in their annual maintenance costs.

Direct, live helpdesk support from xTuple, which had previously been the most confusing part of the picture, will hopefully be a little easier to understand now. Annual or perpetual, no matter the user count, it will be 10% of the base (undiscounted) price, subject to a minimum annual support fee of $1,500 for any customer. Basic web-only support is included with the commercially licensed PostBooks product; this offering adds unlimited telephone help.

We'll of course be updating our pricing page, world-renowed for its transparency, on April 1 — and will include a handy onscreen calculator to help you compare your options. If you have any questions, please feel free to contac us

Thank you very much — and remember, the new prices take effect on April 1, 2011.

Ned Lilly

President and CEO

In October 2001, Ned co-founded xTuple, originally called OpenMFG, with the aim of bringing the worlds of open platform software and enterprise resource planning (ERP) together to solve the unmet needs of small- to mid-sized manufacturers. In 1999, he was a co-founder of Great Bridge, an early business built around the PostgreSQL database which is also the core technology for xTuple today. Great Bridge was incubated inside Landmark Communications, a mid-sized media company where Ned directed corporate venture investments, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and startup activity. Prior to Landmark, Ned worked for a regional technology group in Washington D.C. and had a brief first career in political media — television, radio and a non-partisan news wire. He holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia and an M.A. from George Washington University.