Jeff Croft links to Ellington, a new content management system that he helped to create for newspapers and entertainment sites. The price tag is $15,000 for news sites, and $10,000 for entertainment sites. Compare to Big Medium at $129.
Software pricing is a strange and mysterious universe. Jeff is a great designer, Django is a capable platform, and Ellington certainly has more features than Big Medium. But wow... do you think over 100 times as many?
According to Jeff, though, sales are doing well, and they're hiring more developers at World.com, the company behind Ellington. It's big in Kansas: Ellington powers lawrence.com, LJWorld.com and KUSports.com.
Fifteen. Thousand. Dollars. *cough*. It's a different class of product, sure, but it certainly occurs to me that I probably charge too little for Big Medium.
Then again, maybe not. A big motivation behind what I do is to make my stuff available and accessible to the little guy, and that means keeping the price low, even below its value.
Cogitation required. More thoughts on Big Medium's pricing to come.
Comments
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I realize this post is quite old, but I just saw it. You're comparing the most advanced newst publishing system ever created specifically for journalism to a "a website editor that lets you manage entire websites from your browser without knowing HTML."
We're in different worlds here, my friend. Ellington is not for creating web sites without knowing HTML. Ellington is a platform for talented designers and developers to build upon. You can't build an Ellington site without knowing HTML, and you never will be able to. That's not our target market. Apples and oranges usually don't compare well.
And, ifyou think $15,000 is a lot, you clearly have never priced enterprise-level content management systems (mind you, we don't calling Ellington a CMS, we call it a news publishing platform). Many of them are well over $100,000. Ours is cheap, by comparrison.
FWIW, here's a list of content management systems (again, we don't really consider Ellington a content management system, but you seem to). You'll note that Ellington is in the "Medium" price range:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems
Fair enough, Jeff, thanks for the note. The intent of my post was not to suggest that Ellington is over-priced but that Big Medium might be under-priced. In re-reading what I wrote in light of your comments, I can see that this might not be terribly clear. Apologies.
I saw the Ellington announcement and wrote the post at a time when I was wrestling with a price change in my own product. I was thinking a lot about pricing in the CMS market and sorting out where Big Medium fits into the market's very wide price spectrum. And of course you're quite right that CMS pricing goes much higher. (Sorry if CMS is not the correct term for Ellington. Your post, linked above, referred to it as a CMS and the ellingtoncms.com domain indicated same; I followed suit.)
At any rate, yes, the products are very different animals, and I agree that they're aimed at different audiences, different feature sets and different skill levels, and thus deserve a different price tag.
I've been very impressed with what I've read and seen about what you folks have done at LJWorld.com, as well as Adrian Holovaty's vision for tech in journalism in general. My intent was not to run down your project or suggest that you're price-gouging -- that's not at all my nature -- only that, wow, this broad category of software has a big pricing swath and that it was worth reassessing my own product's place in it.
While I'm at it, a minor clarification: Big Medium is not for creating sites without knowing HTML. Like your own product, it also works best when set up by a talented designer who knows her way around markup. Rather, it's intended to be managed and updated by non-technical folks after it's been configured by a designer. The majority of my customers are web designers who deliver sites to their customers with Big Medium plugged in, giving them an easy, affordable means to update their new sites.
Big Medium is a reasonably sophisticated general-purpose tool but, I agree, quite different from Ellington's specialized framework. I strongly believe that it's important for people to choose the right tool for the job. I try to point customers in other directions so that they can make an educated choice. If Ellington is the right tool for a given newsroom, then I'm sure it's worth the price.
Keep up the good work.
Josh, and everyone considering Ellington, I would take Jeff's opinion with a grain of salt. In my research I get the impression that the hype behind Ellington is a ploy to dupe the fearful small-town newspapers into overpaying for a system which is no more powerful or feature-rich than the free alternatives. Drupal has a strong journalism community, and some amazing news sites to show for it. Your product is similar in price to ijoomla's journalism mod. Arguably, Django is a fair cms, I read that the Washington Post uses it for a small subsection of it's political site.
The big picture is that Ellington is not nearly the only online journalism solution available. However, I agree that with prices starting at $15,000, it stands in a league of it's own. In my opinion, they are using fake conferences, a lot of hype, shameless blog evangelism (notice i am NOT selling anything), and the honest efforts of django open source developers to push newspapers into making a choice which will likely bankrupt their web budget, swam their meager dev/design teams, and possibly kill their foray into online journalism. The end result will likely be that they will have a monolithic body of code without the large IT staff necessary to use it. This is not only irresponsible, it is nearly fraudulent. It gives the django team, and all software developers a bad name.
Josh, the best thing you can do for your industry is hold a journalism conference, hand out awards (including a bigmedia developed site), then sell bigmedia for $10,000. You'll be doing all the small news shops around the country a huge favor by giving them technology which they can manage, and evolve with.
That being said... if Ellington would provide true cost of ownership (10x the price tagat LEAST) information to their customers, and lock in subscription based site management and upgrades... then they might be on to something. Until then, I'll continue to advocate Ellington's responsible competitors.
(fyi - I've had a lot of software pricing experience from the vendor side of the fence like from where you are looking at it). The thing that would allow GlobalMoxie to bring BM to a price point of say, $495/server, would be if you could ship a diverse set of templates with it, (50 to 100 templates). So, as I go to each of my very small prospects, if I could offer to get them up-and-running with a functional website out-of-the box, I'd buy the $495 license, (which I had installed on the hosting company server that I use for multiple of my customers) and work with the customer to pick out a temple. Then I'd spend an hour tweaking their logo into it, and charge them a day's work for getting their website working. It would make sense for me like that around the $495 price point. All dependent on the availability of templates to cover 95% of the types of websites out there. My 2 cents worth.
Many thanks for the feedback and suggestions, Liam. For a CMS that's aimed at designers, my gut so far has been to include a limited number of templates simply as examples to help designers get started with their own designs, while making Big Medium flexible enough to accommodate just about any custom design they throw at it. My thought being: Designers need a system that can handle their own designs rather than a set of boxed templates.
But your point is well taken that not every client will need a full-blown custom design, and a big, big toolbox of existing themes could be both useful and valuable for both designers and clients. I'll certainly have a look at it.
Thanks!
Josh
Hello, I am an interactive media producer who has used Expression Engine, IPS and Duke content management systems. I have a small weekly newspaper (7000 paid subscribers) who needs to update their html web site. What cms would you recommend that would be affordable and easy to use? Thanks. Melanie
If you ask me, Ellington is extremely cheap. I manage several Ellington powered sites, and am constantly amazed with this product. I was skeptical at first, because I thought it was just an overpriced Django package. $15,000 is a lot cheaper than paying developers to package something that is not anywhere as robust as Ellington. You get what you pay for.
I read about Ellington this morning, and I must say this all sounds pretty P.T. Barnum-esque. Folk's are certainly being ripped off here. And the argument that "this is what people charge" is just silly. People do lots of craven things, but that doesn't make it right (or smart).
That this template/module system for Django requires a company hire designers and programmers -- who could produce the same thing on Drupal for free -- is the icing.
By the way, Django is BSD licensed. Which means the basic functionality is not just free, but released under specific conditions. Such as:
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Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. * Neither the name of the Django nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
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This company is clearly playing on the ignorance of open source software, and making money doing it. Just hire the staff you'd still need to run this Ellington thing, use the Open Source products it is built on, and you'll get better results by far.
My only question is, if Ellington isn't considered a CMS by its creators, why does the website itself call it one? Just confusing...
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