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Red Gate Gets the Price Wrong with SQL Prompt

A couple of months ago I blogged about a tool that I like called SQL Prompt. I praised Red Gate Software (the new owners) for releasing a free version of the tool while they worked on the next version. This is all good. Then I saw this entry Open Letter to the SQL Server Community about SQL Prompt from the joint CEO of Red Gate Software. In it he talks about how the tool was fundamentally flawed so they are writing it from scratch the Red Gate way. Again, this is fine (applaudable even). Near the end the pricing for the upcoming version (3.0) of SQL Prompt is revealed to be $99 pre-order and $195 list price. This is where Red Gate is stumbling. One of the reasons that PromptSQL (the name before it was purchased by Red Gate) was so popular was the $25 price tag. This made it a no brainer purchase for most developers. At $25 a lot of developers won’t even bother trying to get the company to pay for the tool but buy it themselves (I did). At $200 (ok,ok $195)  this doesn’t happen. Not even close. For most developers a $200 expense can require anything from a simple explanation to an understanding manager to a 3 page justification for the expense. The tool is providing auto-completion and basic snippet functionality for SQL. That’s it. Price it at $50 and it is still a no brainer to me. Price it at $100 and I probably won’t buy it. Price it at $200 and it’s not even close.

 

 

Posted: Aug 04 2006, 07:13 AM by mfrank | with 1 comment(s)
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Comments

Simon Galbraith said:

Mike,
We really appreciate your comments on price, which have been echoed by others privately - including Doug Reilly (http://weblogs.asp.net/dreilly/).

When we set about pricing our software we look at two things:
1. How technically demanding was it to create - i.e. the creation cost.
2. What price will people consider to be fair in terms of the value they get in terms of time saved etc - i.e. the fair price.

The creation cost and the fair price are related to each other because most people are happy to pay more for something which is fundamentally more costly.

SQL Prompt is an enormously difficult technical problem - one of the reasons why Microsoft haven't put intellisense in themselves. The creation cost for SQL Prompt is as high as for any of our tools. The fair price is hard to determine but it will certainly save many hours of time for people who write SQL without having to change editor (writing an editor would be easier than writing SQL Prompt).

In the case of SQL Prompt it is actually even more complicated because we're going to be competing with a free copy of the software - so we've got to make very significant improvements.

We chose $195, which is as cheap as any of our tools, because the initial price had been so low.

Our hope is that people will recognise that the value to them and that the quality of the engineering are worth $195 (discounted to around $100 for multiple copies). If, like you, they find that too costly we'll have already provided them with a free copy of SQL Prompt 2.0 so they won't lose out too much.

Simon

Simon Galbraith
Co-founder and Joint-Chief Executive
Red Gate Software
# August 22, 2006 8:20 AM