Hey Arjan,

Thank you for the congratulations, and thank for your support of Vendr, it really means a lot.

I can totally appreciate your viewpoint on the pricing change as it is a big difference from what we had before. If you haven't already, I would strongly recommend giving last Friday's umbracoffee a watch where we discuss the acquisition and answer a few common questions including around pricing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm8fokichyo

I guess some key points from that session would be:

1. With Outfield Digital and Umbraco merging there is now a much bigger team working together on the product and so there is much more to the offering than we had on our own
2. Throughout our 3 years of development we never increased our prices when a lot of the market around us was so I think this probably comes into play a bit here too
3. The current pricing is introductory to see how the market reacts and see what people thinks is actually fair.
4. Umbraco don't want to cut off the small / non-profit sector so if the pricing is a problem here then please reach out to the SUITs team to discuss options.

I think the biggest thing I could recommend is to just communicate. If you think the pricing is way off, then reach out to Umbraco and let them know. If you have a project you want to use it on but the price is prohibitive, then again reach out and let them know.

Again, a big thanks for your support of Vendr, and I really hope that support can continue with our next steps.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for chiming in. I already watched last Friday's Umbracoffee episode. I may be wrong, but judging by Callum's reaction he wasn't very excited about the 235% price bump either. :-) For clients I've worked with e-commerce is often not their core business, but they do want to have a small online offering next to their regular business. For those clients the new price point will definitely not be an option.

I completely understand Umbraco's reasoning that having a larger team behind the package ensuring continuity will probably have a possitive impact on large clients/prospects, and they don't mind paying for that. And it will probably also mean that you'll be able to add tons of new features in the future. However, from what I've seen the package's current feature set will be more than sufficient for most smaller projects. It doesn't feel fair to pay for features and/or support you don't need, so I really hope Umbraco will consider introducing a tiered offering.

Having said that, I appreciate the fact that Umbraco are testing the waters with this new price point and that they will (hopefully) be receptive to feedback. And I'm happy to hear Umbraco don't want to cut off the small / non-profit sector.

I'm looking forward to hear/read other people's thoughts and ideas about the matter.

I was hoping to offer the £40/mo Vendr offering to my SME clients, but now I can't offer a Shopping Cart option as it's now too expensive

Completely agree here with Arjan, the price is too high for small business owners. Hope to see some other pricing options as there was before or on monthly basis like Nick suggested (40€/month). Definitely Umbraco needs to consider this ASAP. We are finishing our first Vendr project, now whole project is in question as price has increased significantly.

Hi all

As Umbraco and Matt have mentioned, the price is introductory and they are only testing the water so the cost may change with more feedback. Vendr is a great package and has always been well supported and maintained. A massive congrats on the acquisition!

If you are interested in a Lite (or more affordable) eCommerce option then perhaps you should consider uSkinned Site Builder. We have offered a simple integration with Ecwid since we first released the product in March 2021, and it has served many of our customers very well — including both small and large product catalogues.

However, we have recently added a fully-integrated eCommerce option with Snipcart. You can manage your products, categories, filtering, search, SKUs, product variants and more in Umbraco CMS but let Snipcart handle the headless checkout process. This is an awesome option for customers who would like to avoid such a high monthly fee, with uSkinned and Snipcart, there is no ongoing fixed monthly fee. Instead, you only pay per transaction. The transaction fee is a combination of 2% for Snipcart + your payment gateway fee — for example, Stripe is 1.9%, and the total per transaction is 2% + 1.9%. With this model, you and your customers can affordably launch eCommerce ready websites without worrying about paying a high monthly fee.

You can find out more about this integration here: https://uskinned.net/blog/posts/product-update-site-builder-4-1-0-is-out-now/

You can sign up for a free trial and start testing it here: https://trial.uskinned.net/

One of the major advantages of this approach is that uSkinned Site Builder is fully extendable. This means that, if in the future you decide that you would like to use Vendr, you can. You can retain the content structure we offer with our shop and extend it to use Vendr instead.

I should point out that I am Paul Daly, one of the co-founders of uSkinned.

If you have any questions, please reach out here: https://portal.uskinned.net/contact/

If you would like to know more about uSkinned Site Builder and our new eCommerce integration, we will be appearing on Umbracoffee this Friday 28th April 2023.

Thanks

Paul from uSkinned

This price increase has also put a stop on my current.. and first umbraco project. I started managing a few websites for a small company in November 2022. With my previous .NET developer experience I was hoping to build something a bit bespoke for our smaller e-commerce sites.

I only noticed today that the price has now substantially increased after checking for latest news/releases. Now it feels like I've wasted weeks of time going down this path only to be back at square one. Given time constraints I will now have to rapidly research alternatives and move away from umbraco entirely.

I get that there's a bigger team working on it now, but ultimately the product itself hasn't yet received their input so I don't see how the increase can be justified.

Congratulations on the aquisition though, I don't expect anything to change, just providing feedback.

Congratulations on the acquisition. I hope Umbraco reconsider this price change. In last 6 months I have built two Vendr sites and quoted the client using old pricing. Now I need to explain the client that after the year they will need to pay 2.4k instead of 600 which is enormous change. Plus now I need to find an alternative for future projects. The sad part is that I really loved using Vendr but this price changes really changes a lot.

Has anyone tried to use SnipCart? Just wondering how easy it was to implement

Nick

I totally agree with the pricing being very expensive.

I have a number of charity clients and smaller projects that would be great for vendr but will now have to find something else to use. I was really excited to get started with it but its not really viable at that price for pretty much all of my clients.

@Jonny I really hope Umbraco HQ will think about it and offer some other pricing tiers as well.

Hi Matt (and Umbraco Commerce Team),

We purchased a Standard License in March this year (2023). Are there any changes to upgrade pricing after our first year expires in March 2024? I couldn't find anything (anymore) on Vendr.net, or on Umbraco.com, but this is what your website stated back in March (from https://web.archive.org/web/20230325013314/https://vendr.net/pricing/):

"Should you wish to update Vendr after the 12 month period from purchase, an upgrade licence can be bought. Upgrade licences provide you with a further 12 months of updates from the date of purchase and will cost €600.00 +VAT each."

I wouldn't expect much, to be honest.

We have an ongoing project which includes 5 Vendr licences. All prices discussed and accepted by customer.

So comes Umbraco and buys Vendr. We got new price from "Suits" which we need to renegotiate with customers.

But wait! Vendr does not exists any more! "Umbraco Commerce" is a "whole new product" and old deals does not count any more!

It's too late to change to something else, so we need to pay the price to not-so-friendy Umbraco to deliver the project on time.

But we are looking for other solutions.

I hope that they at UmbracoHQ can still sleep well...

I'm very disappointed.

Tomasz

Hi Matt

It doesn't relate to this topic but I have no idea where should I ask this question.. so I didn't see the "Ask a question" button anymore, I guess you locked down this function, could you tell where I can post questions and get the answers about Vendr now?

Thanks, Nick

Thanks Matt, I've already posted my question in the commerce channel in discord, please check when you have time.

Cheers, Nick

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