Yeah, I think we have a more delicate balance to walk than our biggest competitors do. We always have to consider whether changing prices, support policies, etc. will drive more users to use the free version of the product, which is also very good and already does just about everything most of our competitors do. Something is better than nothing in this case. cPanel gets away with huge price hikes because for people familiar with cPanel and who have users familiar with cPanel, the cost to migrate is pretty high, often higher than the license and support cost of sticking with cPanel.
We also want Virtualmin Pro to be affordable. I know things are tough all over and every major corporation has raised prices over the past couple of years, and I feel like because our marginal cost (not taking into account support burden) is very low, we can resist the temptation to raise prices just because everyone else has. But, my cost of living has gone up, too, so we can’t be too averse to charging more.
So, maybe the secret to really tapping into that marginal cost advantage of software is separating the software from the very limited scalability of support. Support gets more expensive and takes more time with every new customer (though not every customer needs the same amount of help). And, in an ideal world, we’d be able to spend a lot of time on documentation and making the product easier to use, and maybe making more money with less support burden could would allow that to happen (we have a huge amount of documentation, and we obviously try to make the product easier with every release, but time is always a limiting factor for a tiny team of people working part-time). Maybe that’s better for more people more of the time than what we currently do, I don’t know.