I love a good upgrade, and by the looks of it OmniPlan 3 delivers. So know that I appreciate all of the hard work that goes into the development of such a major release and I absolutely believe you as a company should be compensated and rewarded.
That said, Omniplan 2 included MS Project interoperability and in Omniplan 3 this feature has moved to “Pro”. From a dollar perspective, Omniplan2 cost $199. The upgrade to Omniplan 3 Pro cost $149. Yes, there are new features in the Pro, but to get an apples-to-apples upgrade to ensure feature parity one has to spend $149, essentially 75% of the prior amount paid. There’s something off there. That’s not an upgrade, that’s new product pricing with a 25% discount for being a loyal customer. Except that it’s not a new product, and the new features don’t warrant new product pricing.
I would love to see how large of a company Omni could grow into if it changed its pricing strategy. I get premium pricing, and I firmly believe your products are premium for the most part, but this type of pricing strategy without any meaningful pricing breaks makes it difficult for even a loyal customer to be completely all-in. Your pricing has led to customers, no matter how deep their products, to selectively choose which products to buy and the quantity of those, essentially keeping your footprint relatively small.
Please reconsider this upgrade pricing, and perhaps look at your pricing strategy overall. There’s a sweet spot to pricing, but I don’t think you’ve found it yet and it’s a weakness for your company. As a long time customer and supporter of your brand, I’d like to see Omni as strong as possible.
Pricing was another factor in my choice to go with Merlin Project. I felt I was getting more for my money. I agree the “sweet spot” is yet to be discovered.
Agreed, I don’t mind paying for an upgrade but the current pricing does not seem fair.
Adding a Pro version for v3 is fine, but then I expect new functionality on top of what I can already do in v2.
Now the upgrade is in some ways a downgrade.
I have to pay $74.99 to upgrade from v2 to v3 and another $75 (total $149.99) to keep the v2 functionality:
MS Project import/export
Publish & subscribe
AppleScript support
Beautiful reports
The real new v3 Pro functionality (which indeed looks useful, but in my case I don’t really need):
Monte Carlo simulation
Earned Value Analysis
Multi-Project Dashboard
So, I need to get Pro to keep what I could already do, and I gain Pro features that I don’t really need.
And for Mac App Store customers (like me) it feels even worse. It is all ($149.99 for Pro) or nothing (no upgrade).
V3 has a well deserved fresh look and improved usability, so I am definitely interested in upgrading. But not with this pricing.
Related, the what’s new section is misleading I think, it lists new features that are mostly Pro features: multi-project dashboard, Monte Carlo simulation, Earned Value Analysis. The only regular feature listed under what’s new: network diagrams.
Also related: of all the OmniGroup applications this one seems to get the least attention and crashes quite a bit for me both in v2 and v3. This does not increase my enthusiasm to upgrade.
[quote=“flymac, post:1, topic:19599”]
That said, Omniplan 2 included MS Project interoperability and in Omniplan 3 this feature has moved to “Pro”. From a dollar perspective, Omniplan2 cost $199. The upgrade to Omniplan 3 Pro cost $149. Yes, there are new features in the Pro, but to get an apples-to-apples upgrade to ensure feature parity one has to spend $149, essentially 75% of the prior amount paid. There’s something off there.[/quote]
Most OmniPlan customers are Pro customers; we expect most to be interested in upgrading to the Pro edition. (In fact, if you’re upgrading on the App Store, that’s your only upgrade option.)
The list price for Pro is $299.99, but customers who already own OmniPlan 2 can buy it for $149.99—which is a $149.99 discount. In other words, OmniPlan 2 customers preserve $149.99 of their original $199.99 investment.
When you look at it from this perspective, I hope you’ll agree this is a really great deal. (How many apps let you preserve 75% of your investment when upgrading to a new paid version?)
It’s worth noting that the list price for Microsoft Project 2016 is $589.99 for Standard, $1,159.99 for Pro:
OmniPlan 3’s sales have been very strong so far (it’s currently one of the top grossing apps on the Mac App Store, but we’re selling several times as much directly through our own online store), so it appears that many customers agree that we’re delivering very good features for the price.
Hi Ken, thanks for your reply.
For the math you used, understood, but when you look at it from my point of view: I need to pay another €149 to get a fresh look, better usability and 3 new features (that I don’t need). Combine that with v3.1 completely crashing within an hour and corrupting my project file, and you can see why I won’t be upgrading with this pricing.
I still feel the software has not improved enough -feature wise and stability wise- to justify forcing me to pay the Pro upgrade.
This is the first time that I have ever splashed out to ‘upgrade’ a product only to find that features that I used in the previous version have been removed. Omnigroup should really be attracting users to upgrade with the new features not by removing features that they have already paid for. Shame on them.
I wouldn’t assume that just because customers have bought the product that they would agree that you are ‘delivering very good features for the price’. You are currently in a situation in which, apart from Merlin Project, you don’t have a lot of competition on the Mac platform and both products have their faults - I may have purchased OmniPlan 3 but my opinion of the company, and this product, has dropped in line with my bank balance as a result. I certainly don’t feel happy as a result of my purchase.
OmniPlan 2 was a Pro product. OmniPlan 3 adds a less expensive Standard option, but our assumption was that any customers who wanted the full feature set previously available would upgrade to the Pro edition since that’s the edition which includes all those features.
Would it have been better if we had only offered upgrade pricing to the Pro edition, so that no features would ever be lost while upgrading?
According to your website (back in July 2015), OmniPlan 2 for Mac was a Standard product. I would have expected that an upgrade to OmniPlan 3 Standard would have preserved the features that I had enjoyed in OmniPlan 2.
Sorry, you’re right, previously OmniPlan for Mac was a single product priced at $199.99 and targetting professional customers. We didn’t really have an OmniPlan offering available for non-Pro customers, but since there was a single edition we simply called it “OmniPlan” and labeled its price “Standard”.
For OmniPlan 3, we added a number of new features that our professional customers have been requesting for years. We raised the price to $299.99, matching Merlin 3 (and still far lower than Microsoft Project).
In order to offer upgrade pricing in the Mac App Store, we then split up the feature set into Standard and Pro features, charging half of the price for the Standard features and half of the price for the Pro features. This let us offer “upgrade pricing” in the Mac App Store by asking people to pay half price and giving them the Pro features for free if they had previously purchased OmniPlan from the Mac App Store.
Choosing which features should be in Standard and which should be in Pro is always a tricky business, particularly when the price split is effectively dictated in advance by the limitations of the App Store. (Charge too much for Standard, and our upgrade price from v2 to v3 is too high. Charge too much for the Pro upgrade, and people won’t think it’s worth upgrading.) We’ve found it best to split the price 50/50, which means we have to split the feature set roughly in half—hopefully in a way that leaves the Standard edition compelling on its own for some customers. (However, across all our product lines most of our customer base purchased our Pro editions even before the App Store existed. And in the App Store, of course, everyone who upgrades to a new major version will automatically receive the Pro upgrade.)
Since v3 Standard costs less than v2 used to cost, this did mean that some features that were in v2 would need to move to the Pro edition, where they would join a number of new Pro features being built for v3.
We decided that the way to make that split worthwhile was to focus Standard on features that you would use as an individual working alone (including the new network diagram view which makes the app more accessible to beginners)—while focusing the Pro upgrade on features that make the app more useful when working with a team.
Exactly. Yes, always a tricky business getting the balance right. In this thread you are getting feedback from people that feel the balance is quite off. It would have been fairer to keep the same features in the new Basic and only add new features to Pro. Anyway, it sounds like your mind is made up. In that case so is mine. I’m quite an OmniGroup fan, but this has been disappointing.
I understand your logic for v3 standard v pro pricing, but in doing so you essentially rewrote the game for v2 customers and not in a good “take care of your loyal customer base” way. Regardless of how you want to spin it, the bottom line is this: your pricing needs help. The vast majority of negative comments in the app stores back this up. And you have some smart, industry-savvy people in this thread taking the time to try to help.
I would strongly urge your senior management to bring in an external pricing strategist to analyze and provide recommendations.
There’s a lot of good upside potential for Omni, but I don’t think you’re going to reach it if you continue to go down this direction.
Thank you to everyone for your feedback on OmniPlan 3’s pricing. Please understand that every pricing decision we make is done with a lot of care—but no matter what price we pick, there will always be some people who will wish we had charged less, and some people who would have been willing to pay more.
In this case, we appear to have hit the mark with our pricing: OmniPlan has earned more revenue in this past month than in any other month during its nine year history. Some customers in this thread would obviously prefer different pricing, but thousands of customers have already purchased OmniPlan 3 at its new price and we’re not going to suddenly change the price on them.
If you don’t feel the upgrade from OmniPlan 2 to OmniPlan 3 Pro is worth $150 to you today (or that the upgrade to 3 Standard is worth $75), then you’re obviously under no obligation to buy it. If the app doesn’t provide enough value today to be worth that price to you, then you’re welcome to continue to use OmniPlan 2 indefinitely. Meanwhile, we hope you’ll keep an eye on OmniPlan 3: while we have no plans to change its price, we certainly do plan to continue to make improvements which increase its value over time (as we do with all our apps).
