Friday, February 13, 2004

Vault 2.0: Major Price Reduction

I am very pleased to announce that SourceGear has just released version 2.0 of Vault, our source control tool for Windows developers.  This new release is a major step forward in features and performance (and it is a free upgrade for all Vault users).  If you have been hearing great things about Vault from the early adopters, but have been waiting for it to grow out of its 1.x immaturity, we invite you to give our product a fresh look.

And for those of you who have found Vault's price to be an obstacle, we have good news for you too. 

One of the most difficult decisions in a small ISV is product pricing.  When we shipped Vault 1.0 (almost exactly one year ago), we spent a lot of time trying to decide how much to charge for it.  In the end, we settled on a base price of $399 per user, with no standard volume discounts available.  We were very tempted to price it lower, but we didn't want our product to be priced dramatically cheaper than the offerings from other source control vendors.  All the other serious source control tools are several hundreds dollars and up.  We think our product is just as good as theirs.  Why should we not price it accordingly?  Many small ISVs make the mistake of setting their initial pricing too low, and I know better.

However, the popularity of Vault has overwhelmed us.  Sales have exceeded our projections.  The basic message of our product has resonated with lots of people who are grateful to have found a compelling replacement for Visual SourceSafe.

As the months have passed, we have been constantly getting feedback from people who say Vault is too expensive.  Granted, a certain amount of this kind of feedback is very healthy for a small ISV.  There will always been someone who thinks any price is too high.  If absolutely nobody is complaining, then it is very likely your price is too low.

Still, the feedback from these people was unsettling.  We had started to feel almost like an evil drug company with an important new medicine which is priced so high that only the rich can afford it. 

Seriously, we want to attract a much larger user base for Vault, so we have decided to reduce our prices quite significantly.  The new prices vary by quantity.  The gory details are available in our online store, but in a nutshell, the good news is this:

With volume discounts, Vault user licenses
are now priced as low as $100 per user.

We are hoping this new pricing makes Vault compelling for a lot more people than before.