As the head of sales here at xTuple, I spend a significant amount of time on the pricing page. When I first came to xTuple six years ago, the pricing page was my favorite page on the website. I had come from the big-iron ERP world where pricing was NEVER revealed. In that world, pricing would go to the prospective customer only AFTER exhaustive demos and sales meetings and qualification phone calls. Only then would the proposal be made. A proposal which closely matched the prospect's budget.
At xTuple, we wear our pricing on our sleeves. Transparency is one of the most important parts of our company philosophy. It comes from our open source heritage: If you are going run in the open source world, promote your product on Sourceforge, and make your source code available to the whole world, you certainly won't be able to play the kind of games that the big ERP players continue to play even today. xTuple pricing has been out there since the very beginning.
If you are one of those who have been watching, you will have seen that the pricing hasn't changed for years. Until recently, that is.
Recently, we did the unthinkable and LOWERED our pricing. Since its initial release back in 2007, the xTuple Standard Edition has sold for 80% of the price of the Manufacturing Edition. This included the xTuple Batch Manager, which managed the batch processing of repetitive tasks, and the ability to email certain documents from the system.
In polling our Standard Edition customers, we discovered that only a fraction were using the Batch Manager. Since not everyone needed it, we decided to lower the price of the of the Standard Edition, and make the Batch Manager an optional add-on. So the price of xTuple Standard is now just 60% of the Manufacturing Edition.
(We've also introduced a commercially-licensed xTuple PostBooks product. It's the same software you know and love, but available under a commercial license, with UNLIMITED helpdesk support via our customer web portal. Again — see the pricing page if you're interested).
Finally, we've also added a significant amount of new functionality to the former Batch Manager product, which is now called xTuple Connect. As the name might suggest, it's evolved into a true platform for integration with other systems — building on the initial email support, and adding major new import/export and automation features for uses ranging from EDI, to real-time shopping cart integration, to CAD/CAM/PLM systems, and much more. If you want to get that amazing NEW functionality in xTuple Connect, it is available as an add-on in our App Store (the xTuple xChange).
We hope that our pricing is not only transparent, but clear. But if you have any questions on the pricing on any of our products, please ask.
Wally Tonra
Wally has been with xTuple since 2004 and in ERP sales since the mid-1990s. After all that time selling vendor-centric, proprietary enterprise software, moving to an open source, Mac-friendly ERP package was a natural evolution. Prior to xTuple, Wally spent 10 years at JD Edwards, which was eventually acquired by Peoplesoft, in various sales and sales management positions. He made the move to xTuple before Oracle took over both Peoplesoft and the former JDE. Prior to JD Edwards, Wally held sales positions at ERP software company Daly.commerce (formerly Daly and Wolcott), hardware supplier XL/Datacomp and storage vendor EMC. Wally holds a B.S. from Boston College, where the Mac fanaticism all began.