Reseller and Soholaunch Pricing & Rules Change
In case you hadn’t noticed, the prices for DrakNet’s Reseller accounts have dramatically risen to $59.95 per month. We made that change in response to the fact that most of our Resellers are Soholaunch Developers, and most use our accounts to resell Soholaunch designed sites to their clients. 
Since we began offering Soholaunch, Soholaunch’s pricing scheme has changed. Unlimited Server Licenses are no longer sold, Soholaunch has maxed out server license bundles to 50 per server at $100 per month. They now lease the software licenses at $15 a month, and the purchase/ownership of the product is now $149 per site. As the software value went up, the price was adjusted to reflect that while our prices stayed fairly stagnant.
There are points in business where you realize you got a good deal and you pat yourself on the back, and there are points in business where you realize that you are getting so far over on someone that you’re committing legalized highway robbery, and that’s kind of where DrakNet is today. The value that our resellers get for what they pay and the number of licenses they hand out is so far out of sync with the market cost of this software (and what we pay having to support it) that we realized the pricing scheme as it was simply couldn’t continue.
First of all, its not in our interest as a business to see Soholaunch lose that much revenue. Granted, they set the prices and they made the deal and they afforded us the ability to pay what amounts to spit in the bucket for what is, retail, worth thousands of dollars every month so hey, that’s business. However, they’ve also chosen to honor the deal they made with us even though they can see clear as day that we’re hitting their bottom line. While we would survive if Soholaunch vanished tomorrow (as Soholaunch makes up a small fraction of our hosting, and much of that fraction is made up of resellers with large numbers of licenses), the fact is those people who do use the software are extremely loyal to it, and we do like it a great deal.
Both Resellers and individual accounts will still get one heck of a deal from us with this new pricing scheme and the new rules, but not quite such a deal that it may drive Soholaunch to drink.
From now on, Soholaunch Licenses are 1 license per account. No add ons, no subdomains. Part of this is simple housekeeping – we have to manually audit our licenses to delete ones that are not in use and we can compare what is installed as an account with the list to delete licenses for sites no longer installed. That, and with 40 add on domains, you could feasibly have a $10 Jaz account with $600 a month in free licenses installed. Scarily “not fair” comes to mind here when the account is $10 a month and you already get a license worth $15 a month thrown in.
Resellers are limited to 50 Soholaunch licenses per Reseller account. That Reseller account costs $59.95 per month. That is still a screaming steal – a Soholaunch Server License comes in increments of 50 Licenses, is $100 a month per 50, and that’s before you pay for the actual server to put said server license on. After you fill up 50 licenses, you can purchase another Reseller account if you wish, which is still less than 50 licenses would cost you + a nice VPS. If you fill that up, you really should likely talk to us about transitioning to a VPS and a direct relationship with Soholaunch because at that point, you’re growing fast enough that will likely start to save you money.
Current resellers are grandfathered in at the price that they are paying, however, the 50 license limitation does apply to them as well.
As for regular Reseller accounts, well, for the most part we just don’t find that we have those (and never really marketed to that, so that’s not a big surprise). If you are a long term client that we know and you won’t be using the licenses (we will check) but wanna save a buck on multi-domain hosting, you’re free to talk to us and we’ll try and make you a unique deal tailored to what you need.
I realize there are still a few hosts left that will let you put as many Soholaunch licenses on your site as you can cram in there, but considering the situation we’re just not really comfortable doing that anymore.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to email in to support if you’re concerned about how this affects you – the vast majority of you won’t actually be affected at all.
