Q? How much does your software cost?
A. As far as LeadPerfection is concerned, our pricing is rather unique. About 5 years ago, we moved away from charging individual user or “seat” licenses for our hosted version of LeadPerfection. There were two points that led us to this decision. First, we found that many companies would purchase less licenses than they really needed. This would result in users be frustrated because they could not readily access the information they needed, thus making the overall experience with LeadPerfection less desireable. And second, we found that there was not much cost justification for charging larger companies more money, as long as they fit in our standard hosting platform. So we decided to eliminate the individual licenses and charge a monthly fee “per company”. This would allow us to encourage getting more users on the system without having to ask our customers for more money. We currently charge $399 per month per company for LeadPerfection.
Prices for LPLite and CanvassMaster are priced differently. For LPLite, much depends on what services each manufacture would like us to provide. And with CanvassMaster, we allow an unlimited number of managerial accounts, but have a tiered pricing plan based on the number of devices in the field.
Q? Have you ever raised your prices?
A. We’ve been selling LeadPerfection for about 10 years, and we have NEVER raised our prices on existing customers. Here is what that means: if your company signed up with us 10 years ago, you would still be paying the same price that you originally signed up to pay. We have had some slight increases in prices over the years, but WE ONLY RAISED THE PRICE FOR NEW CUSTOMERS COMING ON BOARD. Our customer base has been growing so quickly each year that we found it unnecessary to raise prices for them. Plus, we all have felt the pain that a slow economy has placed on the home remodeling industry, and we stand by our committment to try our hardest to make things better for our customers, not worse. Try asking this same question to our competitors and see if they try to avoid answering the question.
Q? Do you backup your clients’ data?
A. We do more in the way of backups than just about any company we’ve ever come across. First off, we don’t host anything from our corporate headquarters in New York. We only use the top rated data centers across the country, and we have spread our servers across multiple states to avoid any type of outage that would affect a significant portion of our clients. We maintain excess capacity at each site so that, should one data center go down for an extended period, we could shift clients from there to one of the other sites where we host.
We back up each clients’ database each night, and then download a copy of the backup to our corporate office in New York. This is an automated process that happens between 2am and 4am eastern time. We retain each daily for a minimum of one full month. We retain a weekly backup permanently on one of several special archive servers in our office. The backup process is totally automated, and we’ve found that having daily backups have also come in handy in performing analysis for some of our clients in the past.
So we have the live database and a nightly backup at each data center, and daily/weekly backups in New York that go back to the start of each clients’ implementation with us. I don’t think we’ve ever come across a client who had backups anywhere near as thorough when they ran their previous systems on their own hardware on-premesis.
