From today 6th July 2017, we are disabling free plan from ERPNext cloud.
The reasons are:
It had a negligible impact on conversions to paid plans. It is the paid plans that ultimately pay the bill for free users.
User engagement went down in the Free plan. The hardest part in an ERP is implementation, and with Free, it seemed there was even lesser motivation to implement.
The 30-day trial introduced a hard time-limit that motivated users to spend time on the free plan.
What about current free signups?
Users who have signed up for the free plan will able to continue with same as long as they keep using it within the limits.
ERPNext is free anyways!
Those who want to use it can download the Virtual Machine, or setup using the bench easy install system in minutes.
even i make on user in free plan , for last week when i want to login always show bellow error .
link is : https://shk.erpnext.com
Sorry!
We will be back soon.
Donāt panic. Itās not you, itās us.
Most likely, our engineers are updating the code, and it should take a minute for the new code to load into memory.
I think that is okay. The āFree Single Userā was not very helpful for most customers. It was really only useful for the independent business owner of a kiosk or other very small business. It was probably a blessing for them if they could figure out all of the complexities of the system. At the beginning that was probably a good thing.
Now the system has grown in usefulness and complexity to rival the paid proprietary systems on the market. With that in mind, it became less useful to start a free account for evaluating the system. If you have 2 or more people that have to evaluate their own part of an ERP system that impacts the overall business, the free version would not work. Usually several people in an organization need to collaborate to evaluate a system they may want to adopt to run their business. The free version just would not work in that scenario.
Since they were able to notice the number of free accounts dwindling down over time, it is actually a good indicator that they have begun to reach the multi-person, multi-tasking businesses they originally set out to help. Those are the cases where the free version made little sense at all. You could also probably see the increase in the forums of people trying to get their own multi-user versions up and running for testing and evaluation.
No matter how you look at this, the outcome is always a positive. Be happy about this. It means the system is growing into the kind of business tool that you really wanted anyway.
The only thing that might be helpful in the future would be some sort of a free trial period on the 5 or 25 user version to get organizations to experience how it can impact many of their daily business tasks across all parts of their business. Then you might get a new up-tick in the paid conversions. I know I have spent a long time working within my organization to get 15 to 18 key people to understand how this will help them, and I am finally getting ahead with convincing them to adopt this in place of the very old methods they used before. The free version would never work for doing that kind of experimenting and testing. But I figured out much of it on a local server box.
So look at this as a milestone. ERPNext is growing up to be a bigger better tool.
In my opinion, the best way would be to do a install in development mode based on docker.
Right now docker works seamlessly on all three major operating systems (windows 7 with virtualbox and windows 10 based on hyper-v, osx and linux). With docker-compose making separate containers is trivial and in this way there are no dependency problems, or with versions of nodejs or āon my machine does not workā ā¦ With the environment variables the installation of the subversions is equally transparent.
It could even be started at the moment making a single container like a classical virtual machine, but the separation of the services (mariadb, frappe + celery, nodejs, nginx) would be ideal.
I mean if it doesnāt cost much to run the free plan, Frappe should consider continuing that offering.
Itās not so much the Free bit thatās appealing to a person checking out ERPNext, as much as it is the fact that s/he can begin using ERPNext in minutes, instead of hours or days.
I donāt think we can measure the impact of the free plan by conversions unless we are tracking conversions well and at the whole ecosystem level (a person that tries it out, figures out that itās too complicated and then tries to work with the Frappe team for implementation. Frappe team says boy, you really need some help and please contact the service providers and they come to a service provider. The service provider evaluates their request and figures out that they need intense customization and therefore Frappe Cloud is not the way to go and implements on a Self Hosted solution.
Iām working with an eCommerce company with a very interesting model that came to me in the same way.
I think the ecosystem needs to cater to the impulsive person that wants to check out ERPNext and your free model served that need well. I am not saying that Frappe should continue to support this model (though I hope you guys will change your mind), just that somebody needs to cater to that impulsive and compulsive peopleās urge to check out ERPNext.
Please let us know if the Foundation can support you guys in someway to keep this service going.
I think a good model is to give a 30-45 days notice before you make such impactful decisions.
With docker you are agnostic of plataform to deploy, operating system, providers, trials periods, etc and can automate practically all depoyment process of th ādemoā with a simple command. I think that are opposite methods.
If Frappe cannot support it, that is their decision
If the foundation feels that it is important for promotion of ERPNext, then the foundation would need to step up
Could the foundation host a demo site that say gets reset every midnight or so?
Could the foundation ask for sponsorship for a demo site?
I would be happy to sponsor a small server, if the foundation can maintain the site. Or even offer to maintain it for you. We will need to work out user agreement / alerts etcā¦so people donāt think this is a production site.
@rmehta Deepak is happy to sponsor a server where people can login and it gets reset every day at midnight, (May I suggest every Sunday at Midnight. Letās give people a maximum of 7 days to play around with it. A max of 24 hours is way too little).
What will it take to do it? Do you think it is required?
