With growth comes changes and today we're introducing changes to our legal terms and pricing. The basic susbcription remains the same at $78 USD per year and the Professional subscription was bumped from $249 to $360 USD per year. The Enterprise subscription now starts at $3000 with a $1000 USD set-up fee which is needed for the one-time job of collecting brand logos and brand names and setting up our scripts to produce the white-labeled/re-branded products automatically. The Enterprise subscription will now be charged per month rather than per year.

New terms of service: https://www.sooperthemes.com/legal/terms
Services catalog:  https://www.sooperthemes.com/legal/services-catalog

Drupal is becoming more valuable but more expensive

3 years after Drupal 8's release the results are in: Drupal is still relevant but Drupal 8 is more expensive to implement and Drupal's adoption curve has tapered off. I don't think this is necessarily bad. Drupal's leadership made a decision to make Drupal the best Enterprise-grade CMS, not the best everyman's CMS. The result is that Drupal's steep learning curve became steeper yet, and costs of training and hiring Drupal developers increased accordingly. Our price bump is not merely a reaction to a decrease in the volume of Drupal websites in need of our solutions, it is also part of our learning process. 

Sooperthemes is growing but it is not growing enough

Since our Drupal 8 launch last year business at Sooperthemes is better than ever. But with our growing popularity comes a big increase in workload from the customer support forum, customer success tasks, and managing simple tasks like account administration, taxes, sales questions. It adds up to a lot of work. Currently our prices are too low for the increase in customers to pay for new staff to take on the additional workload. We have been investing a lot of effort in training interns but the time has come to move to a more sustainable solution.

Without changes Sooperthemes is not ready for the future. This price increase in the Professional subscription is one part of our strategy for sustainable growth.

Another change is getting better at charging big clients more than small clients. We want to keep our products accessible to the entire Drupal community. While we love our enterprise clients. we don't want to develop an amazing product just for the Drupal elite who can afford hundreds or thousands of dollars per month per site. Therefore we're introducing new licensing terms to charge users based on the scale of their usage of our flagship product Glazed Builder.

We updated our terms for us to be able to charge websites fairly not just by the number of domain (site) licenses, but also by the number of users who are using our Glazed Builder product. Some examples to illustrate why I think this is fair.

1. Freelance Music teacher's website with 1 domain license: $78 USD per year including updates and support.
2. An Drupal agency with currently 10 clients on our products: $360 USD per year.
3. A fast-moving consumer goods enterprise with 40 enterprise domain licenses: ~3000 USD per month.
4. If Tesla.com would use our products for their marketing content, job portal, community forum, online stores, online tools, in 37 languages: $78 USD per year, or 6 dollars and 50 cents per month.

I think the last example illustrates why it makes sense to introduce this new lever to help Sooperthemes grow sustainably.  To learn how exactly our new licensing term works make sure to read our services catalog.  

Provide More Value To Enterprise Clients

In order for Sooperthemes to be successful in the future we will need to work on signing on more Enterprise clients. We're going to work on adding more features that are important to enterprise clients. Starting today we offer better support options and dedicated support developers to cases in the Enterprise tier. If you want to share ideas on what you think should differentiate the Enterprise subscription tier from the other tiers don't hesitate to send me an email here: https://www.sooperthemes.com/contact

I would be especially interested in hearing what it would take for your business to purchase an enterprise subscription.

Photo by Benjamin Voros on Unsplash