Virtualmin Pro licenses for individuals - shareable quota instead of per-server?

[chriswoods]

I’d be interested in buying a Pro licence if it were possible to share the entitlements across more than one server.

My first idea was perhaps with some kind of additional utilisation per server, e.g. a 10 domain licence shared across two physical servers = 1 ‘domain’ extra used for each physical server, and the remaining 8 could be applied to any site running on either server.

This would be most useful because of the current breakpoints - 10/50/100/250 domains are large jumps. It means I am over the threshold for the lower number on a server where I host multiple domains, but my test/personal server only has two domains configured (and is otherwise used for secondary backup DNS and things like Icecast and an NGINX reverse proxy), but I would still like to pay to contribute more towards development.

However, that approach has its downsides, and I know a single shared licence across multiple servers may be difficult to implement due to how Pro features are enabled.

If that’s the case, how about a system where a customer can pay for a quota of domains, then generate separate licences for each server from a customer portal to apply to each server?

Each server licence could be custom for the number of domains they wanted to host, with the domain allocation being deducted from their account in real time. Then, if you wanted to add a domain to the licence, you could reissue – any old licence could be immediately invalidated if it took you over your total quota.

While the available domain quantities have such a large interval, might there be a possibility to bespoke a licence to suit my requirements?

[Joe]

We tried that in the distant past and it was a management/support/billing/licensing/revenue nightmare.

So…no. Definitely not. However, we do offer discounts for quantity buyers. It won’t be anything like “Virtualmin on 10 servers for $7.50/month”, but it can knock a few bucks off of the cost of one license per server.

@chriswoods

While the available domain quantities have such a large interval, might there be a possibility to bespoke a licence to suit my requirements?

While the domain counts are large jumps, the prices are small jumps. From 10 to 50 domains is $2.50 more per month. Likewise, from 50 to 100 is also $2.50 more per month. And, again, from 100 to 250 is…$2.50. And from 250 to unlimited is $5. Tiny jumps for big domain increases.

The problem with splittable licenses is that our costs for support, etc. tend to go up more based on how many servers are running Virtualmin, and less by how many domains someone has on the server. We’re really just trying to match what it costs us to support the product with what we charge for it, and a lower end server costs as much as an unlimited server from our perspective (or more! beginners and hobbyists need more hand-holding than pros running bigger servers!).

There probably is some path we could take down that road, but I don’t know if you’d find it all that more affordable. For splittable domain allotments, we’d need to charge more. i.e. splittable domains might cost something like $1.50 each, or more, for up to the first 10, maybe. I really haven’t done the math on it lately, but, it really didn’t work out in the past with splittable licenses being closer to the current per-server costs.

We honestly do want to make Virtualmin Pro affordable to everyone who wants it, but it’s also a reality that supporting a wildly complex technical product costs a lot of money (more than we make, honestly, we all end up doing a lot of volunteer labor, as it is). I don’t know how to make the prices lower than they are without making the demands on our time impossible to sustain, and splittable domain licenses will generally have the effect of making us support more while getting paid less. (Though I recognize that someone with five servers is almost certainly much easier for us to support, per-server, than someone with one. So, there is an incentive for us in you having more servers even if each additional server isn’t bringing in as much revenue for us. Which is why we have quantity discounts.)

[chriswoods]

Very comprehensive answer, appreciate it. I hear you on covering costs! I’ve always undercharged for what I do and had a real struggle recently increasing just one small customer to a realistic amount (still way under market rate).

I agree with the first allotment in a splittable quota costing more - that seems like a fairer way of compromising for the greater flexibility. I would never expect you to compromise on revenue for the smaller domain-count Pro subscribers. Were it easier to do, it might encourage a few more people down the road of subscribing “a la carte” who might not have gone for a full 10 or 50 domain licence beforehand, even if the price is very similar. (This is of course a hypothesis based on my own experience and observations of how some company bosses think )

Personally, I would have loved to have a 50 domain licence shared across the main server used by a third party client with a few domains diverted for my own personal development server to get feature parity for testing. Obviously that would have worked out cheaper than paying for 10+50. I’d prefer to take out a sub myself and have the customer pay for one, but it’s always been an uphill struggle making them see the benefit of any price increase even when it improves their service

For multi-server subscriptions (in my situation, beginning with two but very likely three in the next few months), is there a method to obtain a quote, or is the threshold much higher?

[Joe]

Threshold for quantity discounts has historically been five active licenses, but that was partly because it was always a manual process to set someone up for getting discounts.

Now that we have a decent shopping cart with code we sort of understand, we can automate that. I could see making quantity discounts start kicking in earlier, maybe even starting at just two.

I can’t make promises about when we can find time for that (it’ll take at least installing another module and a bunch of testing, and maybe even custom code since I don’t know how common our particular quantity discount usage would be…we’d want discounts to apply based on total number of active subscriptions, not based on quantity in one order), but it’s something I’d like to see. I don’t like maintaining the discounts roles manually.