Why must all Team Storage Accounts charge monthly ? – Meet the SME Lifetime Option

Most cloud storage plans that offer team pricing do so on a monthly basis using the typical SaaS pricing model where the simple calculation is:

No of Users * Monthly Price

Storage Made Easy also offers this plan but we realised when talking with customer that many companies would prefer to have the option of an alternative of what they term “perpetual” licensing.

This is the “old” software model in which licenses were procured on a one-time pricing “capex” basis and the only recurring costs was a monthly recurring “open” support and maintenance cost.

After numerous requests for such pricing for our online hosted team service we thought why not ? We can surely construct a model that works for companies who want a pricing model where the majority of the costs is up front in capex and the longer you use the service the more money you save.

Support enables access to SME support and Maintenance enables access to future product versions and this payment is mandatory for continued use of the service.

Support and maintenance is 22% of the initial purchase in year 2 and then year 3 and the thereon.

So how do we calculate this ? The algorithm used to calculate this yearly pricing for business team users is simply:

No users * $5 (monthly Price) * 12 (industry average customer churn)

This results in companies who use the service for longer than 12 months effectively using it for free thereafter other than the one time recurring annual 20% payment for support & maintenance.

Now lets look at some practical examples

Company with 15 users:

SaaS Cumulative Spend

12 Months 24 Months 36 months
      $900         $1800          $2700

Initial Payment (15*$5) = $75
Monthly Payment thereafter $75

Lifetime Cumulative Spend

12 Months 24 Months 36 months
      $900         $1098          $1296

Initial Payment (15*$5*12) = $900
Monthly Payment thereafter $0
Yearly Payment thereafter $198

Savings over 3 Year period

1 Year savings = 0
2 Year savings = $702
3 Year Savings = $1404

Savings go up the longer the time period and the more users deployed !

Are there any differences between the accounts ?

There is only one difference.

In the SaaS service each users gets access to 10GB storage per user (hosted on Amazon S3)

In the Lifetime service each user gets access to 5Gb storage per user (hosted on Amazon S3)

In each case the cumulative storage for all users can be used as a ‘pool’ and spread between users as per the Administrator quota policy.

Also each Company can add additional storage or services from any of the 40+ clouds that SME supports.

Features also included for The team service also includes in both lifetime and SaaS pricing options:

– Encrypt sensitive data stored on remote cloud services with a private key
– Integration with Active Directory (optional)
– Full Audit and event history of all files
– Access via FTP, WebDav or the S3 protocol to any cloud or service added
– File versioning and locking
– Folder permissions and ACL
– Joined up collaboration
– Secure file sharing

More details on features can be found on the SME features page.

All pricing information is on the SME Pricing page.

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