I think I can address your points here.....


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I agree. 10 grand is way too much it. I reviewed the docs but I would find it hard to recommend to a client to purchase at it's current price.
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With regard to the $10,000 price and thinking it is too much. The price is actually a 5 developer licsense. At $2,000 per developer, it is in line with other C/S tools on the market today. The class of this tool is on par with large scale C/S projects. If the budget is only $20-30K, it might be a little hard to take. After all, there would not be enough left over for the core development time. The idea behind the marketing is that this tool, along with some consulting, are combined to form a complete solution.

>I don't know how many would "bite the bait" but how many would readily admit they bought it.
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There are quite a few folks out there that have purchased the tool. They are folks that don't hang out here. I am talking about VP/CIO level managers with multi-billion dollar companies. I can tell you these folks are used to paying way more for developer tools and getting far less productivity than that which was received from DataClas.

This gets back to my "think outside the box" rant... The world is not defined by what goes on or who frequents the UT.

>Figuring pricing is a fine line science and I think that they haven't done enough research to keep it within what the market will handle.
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It depends on what you define the market as. If you define the market as the VFP-Tools market, which is the sub-$1,000 range, I can tell that is not the market. The market is for those folks that are wanting to undertake a C/S project that is either new or consists of upgrading their existing systems. In most cases, their tool of choice is VFP. There will be a COM version of Dataclass in the near future. But for now, it is a VFP-based product. In most cases, these large scale projects have budgets in excess of $50,000. Now, if you new you could spend 20% of your budget on a tool that was guaranteed to save 4-5 weeks of dev time, you would be hard pressed not to give serious consideration to such a tool.

The ideal client for such a tool is a developer who is heading up such a project. He/She is going to use VFP, but they need to get out of the C/S shortcomings the base product has. This tool does that. Fact is, most folks up here are not in the ideal demographic for the product. Sure, the price could be cut down to be in-line with other VFP prodcucts. However, because of the nature of the product, it would cost a lot of dollars to support.

If you recall, there was a product called Red. It was last marketed a year or two ago? It did some of the same things that dataclass does. However, it did not do a lot of things dataclas does as well. I think that product sold for something like $300. The product still exists, but in this country anyway, it has not sold all that well. Europe and Asia may be another story.

The biggest marketing flaw perpetuated today is a plan based on price. If there was a real strong market for VFP C/S dev tools, the Red stuff would have sold. The fact is, it did not. The dataclas product on the other hand is not something that has to be marketed all that heavily. When a match is made, it is instantly apparent, and good things happen. And most of all, the price is based on value provided. All VFP products are under-priced by a factor of at least 2x IMHO. Doug Hennigs product is worth at least $2,000. VFE is worth at least 3-5K. The players behind Dataclas have chosen not to play in a market that has products that have been under-valued. The only way to play is to lower the price. Then again, that would not buy anything since there really isn't a VFP C/S market anyway...The bottom line is that you should NEVER lower your price to gain access to a market. You have priced your product with some logic in mind. Best to find the right market to compete in, rather than lowering your price to compete in a market that has no prior track record for your class of wares...

The Red Product, which was marketed fairly heavily bears this fact out....

My 2 cents....