PBX vendors are changing their terms and raising license costs. A note on why this project matters more than it did.
When we started Pidgin Talk it was a side project. This year it stopped feeling like one.
What changed around us
The popular PBX vendors have been changing their terms and raising what a license costs. We have seen each of these, some more than once:
- Licenses that were bought outright became subscriptions to be renewed every year.
- Features an office was already using moved to a higher edition, so keeping them meant paying more.
- Prices went up, and then went up again.
- Hosted services put the customer under the vendor's own account, at the vendor's price, with the IT company paid a small commission for the introduction.
What that does to a small office
For an office of ten phones the numbers stop working. Either the customer pays far more for the same thing, or the IT company absorbs the difference and loses money looking after them. Neither lasts.
And every time, we were the ones explaining it to the customer, about a decision we had no part in.
What we can do about it
We cannot fix the industry. We can keep building the thing we wish we had been sold:
- No license to renew, so nothing to switch off if a renewal is missed.
- No count of users or of calls. Capacity is a hardware question.
- The customer's system on a server they or their IT company controls.
- The provider account held by whoever looks after the office, with the margin that goes with it.
So
Pidgin Talk gets more of our time from here on. The offices already using it are the reason, and the reminder.