Response to a comment by Jonathan Nolen, of Atlassian

Yes, I was aware of the Confluence Hosted service, and frankly, I was very upset by it when I realized Atlassian is offering a hosted service to use the wiki for less than the cost of a license for a similar number of users, or in the case of 500 users, an annual cost only $500 greater than a license, which in my opinion certainly wouldn't cover the annual cost for hosting of providing a wiki of that size.

Cost of Atlassian Hosted Confluence Wiki Spaces Compared to Cost of License User Count License Name Hosted Monthly Cost Hosted Annual Cost Wiki License Commercial Wiki License Academic 2 users Personal N/A N/A Free Free 15 users   USD $49 $490 N/A N/A 25 users Team USD $89 $890 $1,200 $600 50 users Workgroup USD $149 $1490 $2,200 $1,100 100 users   USD $249 $2490 N/A N/A 250 users   USD $349 $3490 N/A N/A 500 users Enterprise USD $449 $4490 $4,000 $2,000 500 users 30 day trial N/A N/A Free Free Unlimited Unlimited N/A N/A $8,000 $4,000 Comment: Hosted confluence is available for free trial for 30 days. They don't say how many users this allows. 15 users seems to be a new price point. They initially offered 25 uers for this price, so it appears they've changed it to only 15 users, and added a new price point for 25 users. Sources: April 27, 2007 - Confluence licensing and pricing - www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/pricing.jsp April 27, 2007 - Confluence hosted pricing - www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/hosted.jsp

I understood your license would clearly require if I find a customer who wants to run their own copy of Confluence, then I would need to have them buy their own license for Confluence. That would be an upfront cost for them, in addition to whatever monthly or annual hosting I would charge (for which I estimate $100-$250 per month cost of providing). I was looking forward to helping sell more Confluence licenses. However, with a very small amount of investigation, they will find that they can go direct to Atlassian for a hosted service at a price less than the license and service I would be selling. I realize your service has some limitations, but it still puts me in the position of cutting down your service and sell benefits against hosted's limitations, while still trying to sell them a license to the very software running the service I'd be selling against. It's a very bad position to be in with smaller clients, and will probably generate a lot of confusion rather than sales.

• Survey of Confluence Features Missing From Confluence Hosted

I've shared my frustration with Donna, and she had one of the guys call me from Australia, and we discussed it. He told me there is a partner pricing plan being worked on for resellers, but the discounts probably will only be 10-20%, not nearly enough to offset the discount that hosted represents. A more tenable discount should be around 50%, which would bring the cost to a distributor reasonably below your hosted service. It seems to me that the different between that price and your hosted price ends up being a reasonable estimate of the cost of the hosted part of your service.

So I think you can understand why the hosted service really seems to me to be unfair competition, and even undercutting, the effort of selling Confluence licenses to existing and new customers..... I'd be surprised if there were any other hosting providers anxious to get into offering Confluence under these terms...

As for your license terms, I also realize it's clear that I shouldn't try to sell Garnet's Everything Web 2.0 and include your product as part of that bundle, although of course, like I said above, I could buy them a license of their own to Confluence with some of the money from my package product.

Less clear is whether the license allows this situation: If I were to sell a customer a 25 user wiki installation, where they pay only $200 a month, and no setup fees, I would have to, at the beginning, buy a $1200 license on behalf of that installation. But I would obviously want the license in my name since the customer haven't actually paid for it yet. (In fact it takes 6 month of revenue from that customer just to cover their license.) Obviously, if the customer quits after 3 months, I retain the $1200 license, and can use it towards another customer installation. This scenario causes no lost revenue to Atlassian, and shouldn't cause a concern.

Without being able to do deals like this, the barrier to entry will be too high for the small firms I work with. It's still extremely expensive for me to invest up front in licenses like this, and I would need some protection from the risk. In a case like this where I'd take the wiki offline after the first customer leaves, I'd probably really want Atlassian to allow me the courtesy of freezing the time clock on such a license while I find a new customer to use that license.

Without mechanisms like this, Atlassian is competing very unfairly with ISPs and potential Confluence resellers like myself who would really like to offer wikis to their smaller customers, especially customers who have been kicking the tires of the wiki idea, and would like to get their feet wet slowly without a huge upfront investment in a technology they aren't sure of.