I was literally just in the process of going to purchase EPM for several systems, until I realized it basically doubled in price. Am I seeing that right? You can no longer get just EPM for $75? You now have to pay twice as much?
Not quite yet. It will be July 1st but it will also include UCP for EPM which currently has to be bought separately.
Newsletter going out tomorrow on things.
Will the notice explain the math of how two individual modules that combined cost $100 now cost 50% more as a result of the bundling? I could see putting them together and making it a flat $100 instead of licensing them individually but how does this support a 50% price increase?
So to be clear, the EPM module is probably more purchased than the UCP for EPM so really what this is doing if for resellers/vendors/users who are only using the EPM (again probably the highest use case) this is a 100% price increase. For those that use both this is a 50% price increase.
I’m not sure what the benefit is as the FreePBX website has already been updated to show the price changes and the bundling changes, I don’t see where there are any extra features or additions to justify this price increase.
For the most part this hurts the resellers/vendors, like myself, who now have to adjust our pricing structures to support this price change or just take the hit on our margins.
We rarely sell the UCP addition, as we get little buy in with UCP to begin with, so for us this is just a flat out increase. Tried it a few times, and ended up being a support headache, or local admins didn’t like users messing with their own devices, or both. Won’t impact individuals in the least, just makes FreePBX that much less competitive.
Well the store already reflects that change just FYI. This really throws a monkey wrench in my plans. This makes it beyond my financial reach. So basically instead of purchasing several licenses I will not be purchasing any. And if this is how it is going to go overall I might have to move away from FreePBX. Which would make me a sad panda.
I find it very coincidental that at about the point the EPM module effectively doubles in price the OSS EPM stops working properly.
I figured there would be a move to more aggressively monetize FreePBX post Sangoma but I did not expect double price increases for single modules. I am not sure what the strategy is there but I find it a bad one personally and as for as I go you just lost my money I was ready to spend directly due to the increase just due to financial constraints.
Speaking for myself, the hook with FreePBX initially is it’s affordability. If it loses that then as you mention it really loses a competitive edge. Again that makes me a sad panda as I have used FreePBX for years now and I really adore it.
I know how you feel, was getting ready to buy 5 Phone Apps licenses for a new platform next week and now I see that it’s no longer supporting non-Sangoma phones so now I have to change my plans and figure out how to deal with what I was going to use Phone Apps for.
It stopped working correctly because the third party developer who was working on it dropped off the face of the planet. He was from latin America and I haven’t been able to talk to him in a while. There is no conspiracy here. The module is still in the repos. If you want it to work then go work on it (GitHub - FreePBX-ContributedModules/endpointman). Did you know that there are literally no outside contributors besides two people who actively submit patches to FreePBX (@miken32) and no this is not because of Schmooze or Sangoma. Back when I started working in freepbx in like 2009 there were still only two outside contributors it’s always ebbed and flowed around 1-3?
I’m seriously exhausted answering these OSS EPM conspiracy theories and I’m the one who wrote it!
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We have not changed EPM pricing in 4 plus years. The amount of money we spend supporting and building this app is crazy expensive. We try to keep cost down over and over but in the end things just get expensive. Our cost keep going up as we have to put more resources into FreePBX and our main source of revenue is the commercial modules we sell. Every year salaries go up, health insurance goes up, benefits go up, cost of doing business keeps increasing. FreePBX Open Source project has a team of 8 plus developers who work just on FreePBX writing code. Plus a full QA team, marketing and everything else associated with running a project that gets over 500 installs a day around the world. We give away over 100 modules for free and open source.
If you feel its to expensive then please voice your concerns here. We do truly listen and partly why we raised the price was lots of users in this very forums and other mediums saying 75.00 is so cheap for what it does and we agree with them.
I can tell you that a vast majority of users do buy both EPM and UCP for EPM and how we based the increase was combining the two.
The biggest thing I wanted to make sure was the yearly maint cost did not go up very much as a 1 time cost is much easier to absorb then a yearly increase. With the current setup you would be paying 33% of 75.00 a year for maint renewals plus 33% of 25.00 for UCP for EPM for a total of 33.00 a year. With the new setup you will be paying 18% of 150 which is 27.00 a year so the cost per year for maint goes down. If you look at the comparison with just EPM it changes by 3.00 a year.
Our other option is to not do a large price increase on the sale price but only offer it in a yearly license fee as this module and Phone Apps are constant development. I am not kidding when I say we have people full time just on EPM and that is all they do 52 weeks a year.
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Again Phone Apps are still being sold for 3 more months and supported for 15 more months and after that the version you have that works can keep working for you. If you truly were buying 5 of them I can assure you that would be the largest number of Phone Apps bought in a single day ever and in a single week. If we were selling alot of them we would never stop selling it as we are a Public company that is for profit for our shareholders but that is just not the case with Phone Apps
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Stop supporting garbage phones. Just don’t do it. Polycom, Mitel, Digium, Yealink, Grandstream, Linksys. If it were me, Yealink/Grandstream wouldn’t be included. I doubt Linksys will be selling phones much longer. Support a single firmware version a year. I don’t understand wanting to support 10000000 devices - you’re catering to the very most edge case and it’s supporting market fragmentation and bad practices. This seems more reasonable to me than making the guys who buy the module repeatedly for use with the same manufacture pay more so that some guy can get the latest and greatest htek garbage working once.
Boy would that make life easier but FreePBX is about Freedom of Choice. We try and support all of this because of feedback and demands we get from around the World and each market is different.
When we first started EPM manufactures were happy to pay to add their phones and pay yearly for us to keep supporting them and that died 4 years ago way before Sangoma involvement. It only lasted 1-2 years and most dropped out. Most refuse to pay anymore as they know we have to keep supporting their phones because our users demand it and they know they have us by our ba***
We have thought about reformatting the code to charge per manufacture but that felt wrong and alot more work to do and would have lots of push back also.
We thought about making it cheap if its a certified manufacture phone and another price if you want to include non certified manufacture phones and start getting the manufactures to subsidize but than that falls apart because what happens when today manufacture X is certified but next year they are not anymore and now you cant manage your phones without paying a fee to upgrade to the non certified manufacture version of EPM.
believe me we spent 6 months discussing all of this and deciding the best course of action. We thought about just killing off EPM completely but that seems like a even worse idea.
I truly was, I have a new hosted voice platform going out and they were going to be used with the Aastra/Yealink phones I decided to go with based on using Phone Apps. I had no idea that this would be the biggest single purchase of Phone Apps ever. I figured the module was selling just fine.
This platform is being built with the idea of leveraging quite a few commercial modules from EPM, SysAdmin Pro to Paging/Parking/Queues/Conferences Pro modules and Class of Service. Along with Phone Apps.
Just because I can still buy Phone Apps for the next three months and it is supported for 15 more months doesn’t make it a good reason to buy it and to roll out a platform with a multi-year plan with a chunk of features being unsupported within the first year of the roll out.
As well the EPM increase now doubles my monthly costs even after I amortize the cost over 12 months. And while, yes, the bundle does save me overall on yearly maintenance vs buy them separately. I don’t buy UCP for EPM so really this is actually increasing my yearly maintenance fee, albeit not a lot, but at the end of the day on my sheets this is all an increase in regards to EPM.
I’m not trying to question Sangoma’s reasons for any of this or think that this was a rash decision. Sangoma made a business decision based on data that showed it was a better move for Sangoma. Get it, no issue with that. I’m just expressing the view from the side of people that resell or push Sangoma commercial products to their end users and how it impacts them.
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This is not just about Sangoma and best for Sangoma. We used data we had and feedback we get from users and partners and trying to make sure FreePBX is hear for years to come. Just look at the other projects who have all gone under or no longer offering their open source platform like Trixbox, Elastix and others I choose not to name yet FreePBX 13 years later is still standing.
Tom if you are concerned about things and a partner of ours talk with your account manager and ask to talk with Preston. I am sure we can work out a special bundle for your hosted offering like we do for others.
I just went and checked commits on OSS EPM, The the latin fellow both did some work on it to make it work with PJSIP and it works. No errors. I will go and update our release of what they did (they did not notify me they did these commits so I had to go track down the forks, they have signed CLAs so I can accept their code)
The biggest challenge you will have is the latin america guy wrote every new line in the visual gui in spanish. So if someone wants to change that to english the code is here: GitHub - FreePBX-ContributedModules/endpointman
As far as I can tell OSS EPM has gotten significant upgrades from the community (over 100+ commits) and everyone still keeps saying how bad it is…
Inserting endpointman v13.0.7.13 STABLE for 13.0 and up...Done
Honestly guys its not really that expensive. The Phone software is already free. If you are concerned with cost honestly look at the PBXact prices. They are solid units that are fully licensed for everything. Put together the cost of what a 1U rack unit costs plus the PC components inside (including an SSD) then fully license it. It will cost more than the cost of the PBXact 40-60. Which is what i see across the board.
Off Topic: Speaking of which I noticed the PBXact 60 is now 120 Endpoints!!!
Overall an increase in costs is what we are all doing arent we? Asking for more per hour for service because everything else goes up? And when your talking about competitiveness… who exactly comes close to FreePBX cababilities for the cost… ESI? Toshiba? Samsung? Those systems are a joke in comparison. 
Cisco and Avaya are the players in comparison and they are a TON more, i have seen the quotes when I go up against them.
I think we should be happy they didnt take it to $200, just saying. 
As a reseller of telephony solutions I have to say that yes for how much time EPM saves, not only during the initial install but also every time the client has a change, the price increase is easily justified.
I would hope in the future a little more lead time could be given and for Sangoma to consider a gradual price increase over time.
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I am sure my opinion will not be very popular, but I think its a good idea Sangoma is charging more for the module. I have often thought they are not charging enough…HOWEVER…I think in exchange, some things need to be improved. First, I think it is surprising that the only phone supported for sip-tls and srtp are Sangoma phones…this needs to change. and also support https provisioning as well.
Also, you have to be a little quicker with the firmware updates. i see that the grandstream firmware was just updated in epm but not to the current that is GA on their site.
If you improved those 2 things, I will be happy to pay 150…and don’t drop support for Grandstream, they are a pretty good phone and worth supporting.
thanks
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Uhh… I am new to the game in the last year. We moved from Vertical Solutions for the last 15 years. Those systems were almost the same cost for the bare minimum. Add any features to make it near the FreePBX and its double the cost. @cullenl dont just post to attack someone and what you said literally has nothing to do with my comments. I have my own problems with it on occasion but cost has never been one of them. Arent the rules here to post only to add to the conversation? You added NOTHING with that comment. Grow up a bit.
I agree and have asked internally how we do better. Part of our issue is the whole public company stuff and working through all those requirements. Maybe I can get a discount code for some money off for the next 30 days to allow little more transition time.
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