Thank you for your new perspective from users managing multiple servers. The basic Pro plans we’re familiar with include everything in the “free” plan, along with additional features. However, in Virtualmin, opting for the paid version introduces restrictions—such as being limited to a single server, even with the unlimited license. This makes the free GPL version more advantageous for users in most cases. Ironically, while users benefit greatly from the free version, they may feel bad for not contributing financially to such an excellent tool, creating a paradoxical situation.
I only need the GPL for all my needs. However, I decided to go Pro to support the devs.
Why are you trying so hard to find whatever reasons? It’s all there to pay/donate your share. Just don’t come up with more reasons and flick out your credit card to help.
maybe. that is the real problem (I have been trying to persuade a customer to use their credit card to ‘upgrade’ their GPL VS but with no success) and continue to use multiple servers each with GPL 
The forum provides adequate and really good support (probably too much from the team) - I could only speculate on the time dedicated to responding to Pro tickets vs issues on the forum 
Versus the income from each and all of those servers?
The servers I make money from I pay for. The servers I use to test and do other stuff I use GPL as they are not earning servers.
I unfortunately do not wish to share with you the revenues generated by these servers so you will have to take my word for it, but it would not balance the $3000 I would pay for Virtualmin … these servers are managed as a service to my customers to avoid hacked websites, lost sites, poor performance sites, unsaved sites, etc … it’s not my main business so … I know everybody tells me to charge more but if I try to do so they leave for OVH or equivalents which are way cheaper. Performance is bad but it’s cheaper.(my customers are mostly ONG’s, not for profit organizations, businesses just starting, individuals, artists, …).
And to go back to my idea, I do not wish for zero payment, I wish for a license structure that would not generate a lot of work (managing 30 server licences vs 1 global license is entering 30 invoices in the invoicing system, having to handle the corresponding VAT, having to purchase an additional license for each server, having to cancel license for expired servers, etc …). I think it would make sense but I’m not the one to decide, so for this year I will most probably go the “donation” way.
Why is it always to the nice HONEST Indie Team we ask to make price reduction (While they are already the cheapest on the market) and not to the insanely greedy (near “scamful”, if it’s a thing in this World) unrightful Corporation.
Is this a collective conscience/consciousness ?
Stop give money to the wrong ones and put it in the pocket of Honest and passionate teams and everything will go in the right way.
1 Like
I would like to add it is a good thing to discuss how virtualmin can be made more profitable, not all ideas work but that is no reason for not suggesting.
2 Likes
Good plan, use GPL and donate $2,000 per year, you get no admin hassles and a 33% discount.
I will also mention that for people who have more than five licenses, you qualify for a discount. It’s not automatic (yet), but if you have a bunch of servers and want to run Pro on them, you can get 15% or more off the price (maybe quite a lot more if you have quite a lot of licenses). The theory there is that each additional license incurs lower support burden than the previous one, in the general case (and they tend to have more experience, since if you have a bunch of servers, you’re probably doing it professionally for a profit).
So, anyone reading this who has more than five licenses and isn’t already receiving a discount, let me know, and I’ll set it up for you. I’ve been meaning to make reporting tools for that.
I’m amazed how you guys do it all. NOBODY should ever complain about your prices or support. I’m also a poor freelancer with small margins and half-baked technical knowledge. I have a different idea.
In addition to the support for pro licenses (and I think even those support tickets should have a finite number), how about selling support per incident? You could make it like:
Virtualmin GPL - no support tickets are included, support can be suggested in forums
Virtualmin PRO - includes N number of support incidents
For either license: purchase a single support instance ticket, or buy 5-10 instances in advance at a discount. I would totally buy these, and it means that your support efforts are fairly renumerated. You could also offer performance tuning tickets, or hacking clean-up.
WP FIx it offers a similar service just to fix, enhance or clean WordPress sites.
2 Likes
Yeah, that’s something we’ve considered and discussed in the past, and we did used to offer per-incident support for GPL, but it proved challenging to manage expectations. People often expected $50 to buy hours of our time for large and complicated tasks, basically there was an assumption that because the software was free, our time must also be close to free and that we’d drop everything to log in and act as their system administrator for major projects instead of answering questions and providing links to relevant documentation and helping them understand the documentation. (That’s also a problem for Pro licenses, sometimes.)
But, I guess we could do a better job communicating what an “incident” entails and the scope of what we can provide for a small fixed cost. We never want anyone to be frustrated with our products, so we’ve often been pretty easy to push around and provide more support than is reasonable to ask for. As I mentioned, I’m uncomfortable not supporting our software.
We also used to offer hourly support, when I didn’t have a full-time job, but that was also difficult to limit scope and prevent feature creep.
All that said, support is how most of the successful open source businesses have made it work. It’s just that the prices those successful companies charge would infuriate a lot of our customers, even though that’s the only way to make it work. Human time costs a lot of money. But, maybe we need to bite the bullet and charge realistic prices for everything, including support.
2 Likes
Support really IS a full time job 24/7 for 365 it cannot be measured by number of incidents - only by their frequency (and that is dependent on release updates) it is a moving target.
I am always amazed at just how much (effectively free) time and support is provided by the forum. all the way down to basic Linux knowledge and simple “where to find” information that should be obvious to anyone on a search engine or with rudimentary IT 1-0-1.
On top of that we get extra free input from the W/V min team 
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 8 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.