Our new Small Business Program

Here at Particular, we’ve been closely following recent developments in the .NET ecosystem, as our good friends Jimmy Bogard and Chris Patterson have started exploring commercialization options to find a sustainable path forward for their popular open-source projects. We went through this process back in 2010 and can say many good things about how it worked out for both us and the organizations relying on our platform.

One of the things Jimmy and Chris are including as a part of their licensing is a free offering for smaller businesses. Jimmy set his threshold for that at $5 million, while Chris has yet to publish his details. Other vendors have offered this for quite some time, with some minor differences. For example, Duende and SyncFusion have thresholds of $1-3 million, subject to certain conditions.

We believe it is only right that the mature technology that larger enterprises can afford should also be accessible to smaller organizations that don’t have those kinds of budgets.

But before jumping in and offering something similar, we reached out to a bunch of people to better understand their thinking and learned something interesting.

Folks were worried about crossing those thresholds in the coming years and then being hit with a big bill all at once.

That made sense.

So we gave it some thought and came up with a model that replaced that “cliff” with a more approachable “staircase”, where that initial 100% discount gradually steps down, bit by bit, as organizations grow past different financial levels, like so:

This discount structure also layers nicely on top of a variety of pricing models:

• Let’s say you’re a $1.6M org, if full price was $3k/year, after the 90% discount, you’d pay just $300/year or $25/month.
• After growing to $2.4M, if usage also grew to $6k/year, the now 80% discount would bring you to $1200/year or $100/month.

We’re hearing that these are much more reasonable prices for many of the smaller businesses we’ve talked to. Of course, for those organizations under $1M, it would be entirely free.

Want to learn more? Check out the program details and tell us what you think in the comments below!