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Free Vs Paid apps? If you want the platform to move forward someone has to pay the developers or they will go somewhere else. It like you working for free at your job....you are OK with that? UNA need revenue to pay developers so just like you need a paycheck at you work. My earlier suggestions were:
- 1. Make apps available on free trial basis for a set duration like 30 days. This gives UNA clients time to determine if it fits their needs. Should increase sales.
- 2. Make apps more affordable after the trial period as an incentive to purchase. Perhaps a tiered pricing system based on total purchases.
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I must have misled people with the title of this post. I didn’t mean that Pro Apps would be completely free in this scenario - rather free to download and install, but paid when updates are required.
In the long term however we would like to step away from charging for apps and monetise through integrated services, such as media server, notifications server, mail server, analytics, monitoring, etc. A lot of these services are necessary for a site to function but can be expensive when it’s just starting. For example, running your own streaming server when you only have a few streams sometimes is really inefficient - it has to be quite powerful even for a few hundred of viewers, but it would idle most of the time on a smallish network. We can offer and “shared” system integrated with UNA. Other things like, say, frontend apps or analytics can be integrated efficiently if we handle the service and still be economical for the network operators. The end game is to get revenue from clients in proportion to their success - minimal at first and more when the networks start scaling.
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I think providing services like streaming for low volume sites if the price is right would be a great benefit for startup sites. Example: I have a linux server that could handle 2Mbps per user for 400 concurrent streams using a 1Gbps fiber optics connection, but the main reason I am not using it is because I do not want to be tied to a local server and never take a Holiday, for fear that it will go down while out of town. If I were to pay to host a streaming server it would be an overkill and not very practical until the concurrent users reach a set threshold. I had a client (a free lance reporter) that was interested if they could live steam their news reporting to several social media sites about the time you introduced streaming for the UNA platform and was still in development. They lost interest because of the delay. So how far off is this service and what is the projected costs?
Thanks for the interaction