WEB DIRECT Licensing Requirements

[Jarvis]

How does Web Direct work with respect to licensing requirements?

I would like to create a database for my cabinet shop that I can use to train customers.  A lot of this will be predicated on Conditional Value lists.  If you pick "Natural Wood", for example, you would be presented with a subset of further questions related to what species of lumber, whether the lumber should be slip-matched or book- matched etc.  If  you  pick "Paint Grade" you would be presented with a list of options like Spray Painted vs Brush Finished.  What I am trying to is present information and ask questions in a way that my customers don't need to drink from a fire hose.

My question is how is this handled with the current subscription based licensing paradigm in Filemaker?

As I understand it the current licensing model allows for 5 seats on a basic license.

What happens if I have twenty projects currently in process?  How do I provide licenses (seats) for all of these people who come and go?

[Wim Decorte]

FM's licensing is meant for what they call "named users", known members of a team / department / workgroup / company / ...

If you have a revolving set of unknown users (your clients) then those do not belong to your team.  In that case you would normally choose the 'concurrency' licensing model instead of the 'team' model.  With concurrency licensing you buy enough licenses to cover your max projected peak load of users, without caring who those users are.

Concurrency licensing is three times as expensive as team licensing.  You can of course have a mix of the two licenses.  You can buy a team license to cover your actual back-office team, plus enough concurrent licenses to cover your projected client user load.

In your case, you might be better off splitting the solution in two and do the web front-end as 'custom web publishing' that pushes and pulls data from the FM system through the XML or the Data API.  That way you don't need to worry about the client-side licensing.

So to some extent the choice is between a little more for the web development or paying more for the licensing.

[Jarvis]

Thank for the info Wim.    I am going to guess this is one of those things that if you have to ask what it costs  you probably can't afford it.

Something I have noticed about subscription based software is that Price Elasticily of Demand seems to hover around $70 +/-.

That's about as far as they figure they can reach into your pocket without you saying no or finding another source.  $70 a month to be on the filemaker team,  $70 a month to host a shared file on somebody else's server.  $70 a month to have access to Adobe Create Suite.

My cabinet shop is located about two miles from Amazon Headquarters.  Almost every one of my customers works for Amazon, Google, Apple or Facebook.  Funny thing is whenever I tell them I want to license a kitchen to them for $70 a month they say "Absolutely NOT!"  They somehow don't like subscription services when it's their pocket.