[asterisk-biz] Ribbit.com ?

[Dean Collins]

My suggestion was a $25 one off license per simultaneous call.

Eg you run a small asterisk server in your office where people may use
it from time to time then it's a one off $25 fee.

If you run a website with a community of users who get together to chat
with each other and want to restrict it to 10 people at once then your
fee would be $250

And lets face it if you cant/wont pay $25 then you aren't really serious
at any price.

The question in the founders mind always was....how many people actually
want to buy this product (at any fee) and how many would use it if it
was free but really don't want it bad enough to fire up a paypal account
or similar.

At the end of the day Tim spent a long time developing the application
(and at only 125k in size it's a work of art), office space, rent, food
and telephony, sales people/tech support salaries all cost money. Mexuar
needs a return on their investment to cover their costs and a profit
return.

At the end of the day they chose to go with the high end unlimited use
for a single reasonable fee of $US2,000 which means any service provider
or large company could implement it quite easily and they offered an ASP
service for one off licenses with a monthly fee.

What confuses me about this whole space is JIAX.

If there is an existing free application available, albeit free and not
perfect, why haven't more people chosen to spend time fixing this or
offered bounties for it's improvement.

At the end of the day maybe there just aren't as many people looking to
use this functionality as 'perceived' and my proposal is wrong. As it's
not my investment I think the founders of Mexuar made the right choice.

Will be interesting to see if a lot of people chime in on this
discussion and I'm shown to be right and there is a market for $25 per
simultaneous call licenses. 

 

Regards,

Dean Collins
Cognation Pty Ltd
dean at cognation.net 
+1-212-203-4357
+61-2-9016-5642 (Sydney in-dial).


> -----Original Message-----
> From: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-biz-
> bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Matthew Rubenstein
> Sent: Tuesday, 18 December 2007 7:33 AM
> To: Mike Clark
> Cc: Asterisk -Biz
> Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] Ribbit.com ?
> 
> 	$5 per end user is way too much for little Web apps like
chatrooms or
> sales/cust-svc chats, or anything where a given random user from the
> public on the Web isn't going to return at least $10 a year in profit
> from which that license can be paid. Even $5 per running instance is
too
> high. The problem isn't so much the price, but just a per-instance fee
> as a limit to scale.
> 
> 	The solution is a license fee on a middleware server with
traffic
> capacities, and a free client. But if the middleware does't offer
value
> of its own (beyond being the "key" for the clients to work), then it's
> going to be a nuisance. In any case, the client should be free. Which
is
> one impediment to widespread development, which is a reason it isn't
> here yet. But since there is some development, with those bizmodel
> constraints, I'd think there'd be several options already for "webpage
> voice" integrated with the PSTN. These same business constraints don't
> seem to have eliminated any number of free clients floating around and
> seeing lots of use. Which are then harnessed to support business
models
> relating to the business, not to the software used by the business.
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2007-12-18 at 07:20 -0500, Mike Clark wrote:
> > They key is not creating a barrier to entry. It would be ideal if I
> > could license a "Mexuar-like" client in small lots of 5 or 10 at a
price
> > of around $10 per license. You might even give away a "free"
developer
> > pack of 2 licenses so folks can easily get started. This all enables
the
> > little gut to get in the game, and then maybe hit a homerun
resulting in
> > thousands of licenses.
> >
> > Dean Collins wrote:
> > > But Mike the question remains how much is it worth to you to be
able to
> > > do this?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > >
> > > Dean Collins
> > > Cognation Pty Ltd
> > > dean at cognation.net
> > > +1-212-203-4357
> > > +61-2-9016-5642 (Sydney in-dial).
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >> -----Original Message-----
> > >> From: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-biz-
> > >> bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Mike Clark
> > >> Sent: Monday, 17 December 2007 5:22 PM
> > >> To: email at mattruby.com; Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk
> > >>
> > > Discussion
> > >
> > >> Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] Ribbit.com ?
> > >>
> > >> Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> 	Dean, how would you describe Mexuar, with its embeddable
but
> > >>> proprietary IAX applet, in that context?
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >> ...snipped a bunch..
> > >>
> > >> I'm not Dean, but I'll comment here.I evaluated Mexuar and really
> > >>
> > > liked
> > >
> > >> it, but they had no good mechanism for a small developer to get
> > >>
> > > started.
> > >
> > >> They wanted a substantial up front licensing fee to get going.
OTOH,
> > >>
> > > if
> > >
> > >> you turned out to be successful, it was a good deal because it
was a
> > >>
> > > one
> > >
> > >> time fee.
> > >>
> > >> Ribbit has a totally different model as they are a full blown
ITSP and
> > >> have provided a Flex/Actionscript API to their Flash phone
component
> > >>
> > > at
> > >
> > >> no charge to developers. I have an app ready to roll as soon as
they
> > >>
> > > are
> > >
> > >> completely live.
> > >>
> > >> I would love to see a similar type API to a Flash SIP or IAX2
> > >>
> > > component
> > >
> > >> where I could access my own Asterisk or Freeswitch server.
> > >>
> > >> Mike Clark
> --
> 
> (C) Matthew Rubenstein
> 
> 
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