To Pro or not to Pro?

So, after ten days from the first release of Jade, one of the most frequently asked question is: “what’s the difference between the Pro and Home licenses of Jade”. In other words, why do I have to pay more than 100$ to have something I can get for less than 40$ (and at the moment for less than 30$)?

When we have started discussing the possibility to make an end-user product out of the image processing enhancement we were working on in our research, one of the first issue was exactly this one: how much money we will going to ask for Jade? We decided from the start to have two different kind of users (and so of licenses): a casual user that just want to enhance her family pictures and does not want (or can’t) use some professional and complex tools, and the professional user, on the other side, that needs a fast and simple tool to handle enhancement of pictures in an automatic way and that can be easily inserted in her job workflow.

So the main issue was to clearly separate a COMMERCIAL use of Jade, i.e. a usage that bring some economical advantage to the user, and a NON COMMERCIAL one. How to distinguish between the two? After long debates we’ve decided for the simplest solution: we just don’t distinguish on the feature side. The Pro version for commercial use of Jade and the standard edition have exactly the same set of features; as long as Jade is a simple tool (enhancement and batch processing) it seems to us a nonsense to remove some of the basic features. We’ve decided to trust our potential clients and we are simply asking them (i.e. YOU) to just be honest and buy the proper license.

Let us call this an “ethical” marketing choice: we are not the first one using this strategy and we will not be the last one either. After ten days what we can say is that it seems to work; we’ve sold both kind of licenses and received feedbacks from both kind of users.

So, the bottom line is the following: if you are using (or want to use) Jade for your personal interests and you’ll not have a commercial advantage in doing this, go and buy a standard license. Otherwise, if you’re using Jade as a step in your professional work and this let you earn money easier and/or faster, please get a Pro version license.

See you, Riccardo :)

3 Responses to “To Pro or not to Pro?”

  1. I think the distinction is clear enough, but just to make sure–what about non-profit [501(c)(3)] organizations that choose to use Jade? We aren’t “home users” in the strictest sense, but on the other hand we wouldn’t be using Jade for commercial, profit-making purposes.

    Thanks for your help.

    Mark

    Mark said this on April 3rd, 2008 at 3:07 pm

  2. Non-profit organizations should buy Jade home.

    Seb

    Sebastian said this on April 4th, 2008 at 1:02 pm

  3. While I bought the home version as I only rarely get money for photos is it possible to go “pro” when/if sales increase? With occasional/rare image sales, paying double was not in my present budget.

    slunetta said this on November 1st, 2008 at 8:16 pm

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