Unannounced Lansweeper price quadrupling

[ThKl]

So apparently since today you have to license a minimum of 2000 Assets, quadrupling the price for everyone below 500 Assets.

We happily payed 500€ for 180 Assets. But paying for 2000? There is no way.
Will there be an option to stay on the 500 Assets tier for ongoing customers?

[beacampos]

Hello everyone,

Our new subscription plans are shifting away from a one-size-fits-all approach and are aligning certain features, services, and capabilities to the needs of our different customers.

Which means we are updating our package into a value-based offering that includes 2000 assets. This gives our customers a lot of room to grow and simplifies subscription management.

To learn more about the value of each offering and the reasoning behind them, please take a look at our Blog article.

Kind regards, Beatriz.

[jrothgeb]

Speaking of "value", I was curious about Lansweeper's ROI. Lansweeper makes a time consuming, inaccurate  and potentially unreliable process (doing manual audits with spreadsheets) faster, easier and more reliable and accurate. That is what software automation does best. I did a little exercise on the new plans for a business with say 1000 assets. I hope it helps. 

Imagine if you have 1000 assets (a typical number for an SMB 200 to 350 person company - often 2 to 5 assets per employee) and let’s say it takes only 10 minutes (very optimistic) to audit each and every asset.

That is 10,000 minutes or 167 hours!!! Over 4 weeks! Just to catalog all your PCs, servers, monitors, switches!” Now think about a company with 10,000, 100,000 or more assets!

Here’s the value and ROI - An entry level tech doing an audit makes around 50,000$€£. So at $25£€/hr., 167 hours or roughly 4 weeks is a bit over $4000…at the VERY fastest and cheapest. Hiring a consultant or contractor to do it would be around 300% more or $16,000, conservatively. That doesn't even consider waiting 4 weeks for the data vs. Lansweeper delivering results in less than a day. That stacks up pretty well against the initial price point it seems. In addition, manual audits return less accurate, more error prone data, and no reports until they are manually created (what attacks or problems could occur in that month?) Plus, the data is essentially out of date before it's all collected. Basically Lansweeper can often pay for itself, ROI, on day one.

Certainly less expensive products and solutions can be found, especially for those with fewer than 1000 assets, but the question is are they as good and do they bring as much overall value to the table? Even with only 250 or 500 assets does Lansweeper ROI justify the cost?

Finally, this is just the first of several points or cases of value and ROI that Lansweeper brings to the table. More to come soon.

[skipITjob]

An entry level tech doing an audit makes around 50,000$€£. So at $25£€/hr.

Not in the UK... More like £10/h. And if it's an Apprentice, even less, around £5

[Kendal]

Lets say an average user has 5 assets When a user in that environment costs $100 a year for office or google workspace, it is very hard to sell to management that an additional $20 per user when the original price was $5 per user.  

Sadly management of small companies rarely would bring in an consultant or contractor to do this work.  They would simply add it to the massive pile that the IT department is already handling.  More often then not deflecting the tedious tasks to side work for the help desk.  

[jrothgeb]

Good points, and I've had my own company, begun startups, worked in startups all the way up to Global organizations with 450,000 employees, so I've seen the issue from many sides. Still, if management only looks at the cost not the value and ROI then they may be missing something.

I am anticipating some announcements though that will help meet the gap for highly price sensitive customers in the coming months.

OTOH, here at Lansweeper, if we sell only on the low, low price of $1 an asset, we may be underpricing our value. I know we need to do more to show the value and ROI to ALL our customers, but I know everyone here is working hard to do that. IT and the world are changing and we must change with them, we can't stay static and survive, sadly.

[Kendal]

You really need to stop advertising that you sell on a per asset basis.  It simply isn't true.   If I can't purchase anything smaller than 2000 assets but only have 500 assets in my environment, the price is not $1 per asset. 

If I can customize my package for say 550 assets at $1 per asset, then your statement would be true, but that is clearly not the case. 

[StevenLC]

"This gives our customers a lot of room to grow"

So did the ability to add more assets to my subscription. 500 gave people room to grow to 1000, and so on. You've now quadrupled the starting price for anyone wanting to use LS. Is this a deliberate attempt to discourage smaller orgs from buying your product?

99.9% of companies in the UK have less than 250 employees, my org has more than that, and 2000 assets works out quite well for me. What about a business with 25 employees? Where's the value?

If you actually want to offer value, add more fine-grained asset counts under 2000. Let people buy 200 assets instead of 500, or 800 instead of 1000, and give people an option to add assets pro-rata based on how many days are left on their current subscription. Three months left and you need another 100 assets? Charge them for 1/4 of the normal fee, and add them on so they're covered until their current subscription ends, with no wasted licensing.

Trying to sell the 4x increase in minimum asset count as "room to go" is incredibly out of touch. A business with 500 assets now is highly unlikely to hit 1000 in the space of a year, let alone 2000, and the entire point of your licensing model was the ability to scale up when needed instead of being forced to spend money on wasted asset count from the start.

[GoodLuck123456]

"Is this a deliberate attempt to discourage smaller orgs from buying your product?"

Nailed it!

[GoodLuck123456]

Reading the blog article it sounds like that not only is our price going up x4 (we have around 450 assets), we will also have to upgrade further to the pro licensing just to keep some of the functionality we are currently using?   For example we use SSO for our users to log helpdesk tickets, however it says SSO will only be available with a pro licence?  Perhaps I'm misunderstanding?

By the way, our growth wasn't limited by the number of LANSweeper assets we have, so scope for another 1500 assets is not a benefit and does not simplify our subscription management.