Come In, It's Open!
Posted at September 19, 2005 01:49 AM - Category: ASObill
So, I said I'd make an announcement regarding ASObill on the ASO forums. I suppose I should pre-announce things here and maybe see how the intial response is.
While I've been working on ASObill, I've been trying to work out where I want to go with the application for the first version and for future versions. My first plan of attack is against webhost-centric scripts, such as ModernBill and ClientExec. I've yet to see a decent billing script, paid or free, and see it as a BIG area for improvment in the industry. With these systems the general application architecture is a frontend order form with a backend customer relation managent (CRM) system. And that's where I intend to go with version 1.0. With future versions, my intent is to start going after the general storefront market and expand the frontend portion of the application to include more robust functionality. My main competitor is OSCommerce, which is a horrible mess of code from my experiences with it. So, it also represents a BIG area for improvment.
To get market leadership, having the best product doesn't necessarily guarantee the #1 spot. Apple has shown how this works. The real way to convince people (especially in the webhosting world) is on price. High quality at a low price is the fast track to gaining a large adoption rate. So, I could lowball the competitors and offer the product for a price point lower than theirs, but I don't think that's the way to go. That's not going to provide for a good support team and won't necessarily convince people. Instead, I have a better idea:
Open Source
Yep, ASObill will be 100% free as in beer and free as in speech. I'm not sure which license I'm going to use just yet (probably not GPL, maybe the MPL, maybe my own!), but it will be one that allows free redistrobution and use of the script.
Of course, where's the money in open source? Well, obviously it's not in the core product. You can maybe get donations going, but I don't see Novell or RedHat getting many donations nowadays. Instead, the money is in two things: Support and extensions. Obviously support is going to be something we can sell, but the extensions are the neat part. ASObill has been designed from the start to be extensible, so I intend to use that extensibility to make money. That doesn't mean that ability to sell products will cost, but some extraneous things definitely will. At its core, ASObill will offer billing services, including ordering, invoicing, billing, and customer management. What I intend to sell on top of that are automation plugins. Control panel integration, domain registration, credit card processor integration, etc. Given that it's an open source app, there's not much I can do the stop people from supplementing with free versions, but that certainly makes the coding more exciting and the competition just benefits the end-users, as well. In addition, ASO gets more airtime for free and there's a supplemental halo effect, much like the iPod halo effect on Apple's Mac computers.
So, I could either try to weasel our way into the market with a good product and try to make a ton of money, or I could give it away for free to the benefit of everyone. I think the choice is obvious. Besides, I've already got enough money with ASO :P
