I have to say that I'm partially with Matt on this one. It's really not about access to your own data, although that can certainly be a component depending on how things are designed. It sounds like perhaps Sonar has no problem giving you reasonable access to exports of your data for you to backup yourself, and for the moment, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt on this.
I don't think I have to convince anyone how critical billing software is to an organization. If it screws up or stops working, you are losing money, and fast. The SaaS model has some clear benefits to both parties (developer and user), but it has an equal number of new downsides as well. One big-E-on-the-eyechart one is what happens if the product is discontinued, either because the parent company/developers go out of business or for some other reason. In the traditional software licensing and hosting model, where you use your own computing resources to execute the code, if the development company goes out of business one day, the software that you still possess a copy of does not suddenly become less useful to you. Sure, you won't get future upgrades and fixes to the product from the vendor, but at least you have some time to figure out what your options are and how you want to proceed, and you can migrate to a new platform on YOUR OWN timetable, not someone else's. And in the meantime, your business operations are not negatively impacted. In the SaaS model, it doesn't matter if you have a complete, unabridged, and up-to-date export of the data: when the product is discontinued without warning, and the company shuts down the software servers, YOU ARE SO SCREWED. That data export does you zero good if you don't have product to process and interpret and act on it. In the case of billing software, this means you are not collecting payments for service from your customers, which is a big problem. Even if you could find a suitable replacement for the software the next day, you still have to figure out how to massage the data export you do have so that the new software can import it, work through the inevitable imperfections of that import (certain fields from the export that don't map cleanly to fields in the new product), learn a new piece of software from scratch, and figure out how to get by or work around issues resulting from "feature X" that you depended heavily on in the old software but which no longer exists in any form in the new one. Things WILL be complete chaos for a while; there's no way around this. We are actively looking for a new billing platform, and in the meantime we have been running a piece of software that we bought and implemented back when it was in active development but which has now been discontinued for years. The reason that this is even possible is because it is self-hosted. Back when this product was being developed, it was very popular and sold very well. Nothing is "too big to fail"...nothing. Heck, Google has shitcanned their fair share of services over the years after deeming them inviable, leaving devoted users of them high-and-dry. That we have personally experienced having a billing software vendor go belly-up gives us great pause when it comes to evaluating our options in the hosted/cloud space. This is not to say that we would never consider billing-in-the-cloud, but it would have to be awfully compelling, and I think it would greatly help if there were certain guarantees in place. One example would be if the developer held the source code of the software in escrow, to be automatically released if a "dead man's switch" were tripped. I suspect this is what Matt has in mind when he talks about "contracts" -- they are not just about protecting the seller, but about protecting both parties. -- Nathan From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Matt Hoppes Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 11:37 AM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar Local install. On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:32, Josh Reynolds <j...@kyneticwifi.com<mailto:j...@kyneticwifi.com>> wrote: Good luck with that. Any company could close up shop today, and if they are bankrupt, they are bankrupt. On Oct 17, 2017 12:27 PM, "Matt Hoppes" <mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net<mailto:mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net>> wrote: It also means at any point they can just close up shop leaving my data and my customer information high and dry with no recourse. On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:24, Josh Reynolds <j...@kyneticwifi.com<mailto:j...@kyneticwifi.com>> wrote: They provide enough value to avoid locking you in a contract that would otherwise retain your business when they don't continuously earn it. Others are NOT the same. On Oct 17, 2017 12:22 PM, "Matt Hoppes" <mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net<mailto:mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net>> wrote: No contract? That's frankly beyond scary. On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:06, Adam Moffett <dmmoff...@gmail.com<mailto:dmmoff...@gmail.com>> wrote: Sonar is strictly per user with no contract, so if you haven't migrated any users in yet then you pay the minimum.....which I think is $100/month. ------ Original Message ------ From: "Matt Hoppes" <mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net<mailto:mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net>> To: af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com> Sent: 10/17/2017 9:16:46 AM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar Fail. On Oct 17, 2017, at 08:54, Lewis Bergman <lewis.berg...@gmail.com<mailto:lewis.berg...@gmail.com>> wrote: Many of them start charging you regardless if you are on their system yet. Once you sign the contract, you start paying. On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 6:00 PM Nathan Anderson <nath...@fsr.com<mailto:nath...@fsr.com>> wrote: I can understand this if the product in question is purchased/licensed for a one-time upfront fee. However, if you have a SaaS model with recurring revenues, it seems like it would be in your best interest to help the customer move existing data over to your product cost-free, and thus get them to be a paying customer ASAP. -- Nathan ________________________________ From: Af <af-boun...@afmug.com<mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com>> on behalf of Lewis Bergman <lewis.berg...@gmail.com<mailto:lewis.berg...@gmail.com>> Sent: Monday, October 16, 2017 3:36 PM To: af@afmug.com<mailto:af@afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar Yea, this seems to be a common practice in the software industry. What they all should really say is that they help you convert. I am going through this with ECi at the moment. We paid several thousand for them to convert our database. What it really was was a half hearted gesture at putting the DB into an excel spreadsheet that they spent zero time checking for sanity. They expect us to do all that. It seems that most software companies expect their customers to have a whole team of people doing what seems to be the software companies job. Not saying Sonar fits the description, just that that seems to be the rule not the exception. On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 5:24 PM Sterling Jacobson <sterl...@avative.net<mailto:sterl...@avative.net>> wrote: Taking forever to migrate from Platypus to Sonar. I was told conversion was free, but they didn't tell me I had to do all my own conversion from Plat to Sonar, so in my mind that's not free. I paid Spender Lambert to move some initial data to their format, but I've been on a hold with Sonar since last month. Super excited to get going with a 'modern' billing system, but so far the process has been a total snoozer.
