Confused on MSP pricing
So let me get this straight... If I have 3 firewalls its 10 bucks in total a month but if I add a 4th then all of a sudden its now Business and its shoots to 30 buck a firewall and is now $120 a month? Am I reading this right? I cant be right? How does it go from 10 to 120 a month by adding 1 more box?
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I would imagine small business's would. @ 30bucks a month each firewall its a major cost, its almost like buying the firewall over again each year. I just cant equate or figure out how that costing even makes sense, a $200 - $500 firewall with free license but $360 yearly to manage it if you want to use the web based app.
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@michael I think the fair comparison is other similar managed platforms and their licensing models. Since firewalla is license free (as in no fees) adding a bit of cost for management of sites, mesh VPN, etc. makes it still quite competitive.
Obviously not everyone needs these capabilities. But professionals can certainly justify the cost as a fraction of 1 hour per month of their time and the fact is there is no other monthly or annual license fee to pay.
Much of MSP has to be done in the cloud, so there is a cost to providing the service as well as development costs.
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@Michael,
FIrewalla started with no license fees for the box and it is still the case. I suspect it will always be the case. Every quarter or so the firewallas I bought are better than the day I purchased them and that doesn't cost me a penny. Remarkable.
MSP is a standalone product that ads new areas of value that can't be delivered on the box alone.
Just because MSP is delivered over the web that does not make it free. There are significant costs to web hosting data intensive applications like MSP. AWS is far from free. And then there's design and development.
Do you feel Firewalla should give away the new rack with every Gold too?If MSP doesn't appeal to you, that's fair. But expecting Firewalla to lose money by developing a new product and giving it away is completely unrealistic. My guess is either they would abandon it or go out of business if they followed that path.
Firewalla MSP isn't for everyone, but I suspect it may enable service providers to adopt the Firewalla platform where otherwise they could not for practical reasons. It is too hard to manage dozens or hundreds of Firewalla boxes on a mobile device which lacks tools to see trends across the networks and deploy policies across locations for example. All of that has value to those people, if not to you. -
A bit of cost? I understand this, but don't have an arbitrary # cap where adding 1 device changes the entire license fee model and ups the costs by %120. If its small business's you are after then don't cap the "less data" option. 3 device cap for pro is way too low, I guarantee I am not the only one that thinks this. You want to pay $300+ a year to manage a $300 device go ahead but it doesn't make sense to the small business or even starting MSP who are trying to get off the ground/expand.
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Who said anything about a home? The name of the product is MSP so its trying to cater to the MSP, but at $30 a month each firewall good luck on getting anyone to move their offerings over. I started to deploy these for the small offices that have 5-10 users and don't have a big budget, ill keep them on my cell app I guess but not something I want to continue doing. My honest opinion is this per pox cost needs a dramatic decrease. Its a shame, great original concept with the idea of no licensing costs to get the end user to buy the product, but a complete 180 on the MSP portion. Add a cost is fine but think it through first the management of a device cant cost as much as the device itself each year.
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FYI, we are likely to create a simplified version of the MSP seating. A configuration without syncing the flows. This should allow MSPs to manage and see devices at users' homes without intruding on what they are doing. (but still allow things like Mesh VPN, minus the flow reports) We may start adding some simple network configurations as well.
The cost of managing such instances is likely to be around $3 (per firewalla box). The savings really do not sync the flows and store them with AWS, hence the lower cost.
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I would be very interested in a cheaper personal/home version of MSP, but to me it would be disappointing to not have any advanced flow functionality. IMO this it is the most important feature of MSP, even for home users (that and api support). Please consider offering a low performance Home tier for one box with 3 days of flow logs!
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@JeeHaa
What advanced flow functionality are you looking for?
The lower / cheaper MSP is likely just no flows. We can't do 3 days of flows, the cost of sending the flows and having Amazon index all of them, even if it is only 3 days, they charge us money for bandwidth, CPU, and API calls. (the static storage of 3 day vs 30 days is not much of a difference, while bandwidth / API calls are likely cost the same)
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I meant flows in general: I like the filtering and reports.
Would it be possible to store 3 days of flows on the Purple itself and make that accessible using reports and filtering in a Web UI + allow api's for home users for a small fee? I run into the 24h limit a lot when I want to look back a bit more.
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I would be happy to pay for MSP professional for managing more than three devices it’s quite restrictive in the current packaging as it’s not unreasonable for a family to need more than the current device limit. The pricing jump after 3 devices is just not economical, I’d be ok with a flat + $x per device e.g an additional 10 per year for 3 more devices.
In regards to the flow, making it an as needed would be super useful in the sense of a per Gb stored allowing those that need/want it. Again bundling them in chunks might make sense, allowing customers grow.
Overall great product and execution, just the pricing seems excessively high and unsustainable for families with more than three households.
It would be nice to allow more than one admin too, only one active at any given time would be fine in that sense.
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Hi Damien
Do you mean you are managing more than 3 firewalla/s? (I want to make sure you are not referring the devices, like phones,ipads, firewalla MSP do not have limit on those)
If you do mean by firewalla units, we will be creating a lesser tier (storing 7 days or 30 days) tier for a lower rate. Please watch out for those in the next couple of months. (by storing less, we can significantly reduce the pricing)
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Since the cost of the plan is a function of the amount of data stored, we are likely to add cheaper seats base on this.
It will be something like a storage of 7 days, 30 days and 180 days.
We will also likely to introduce a personal plan by default with 7 day of storage for a much cheaper rate than professional plan.
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Yeah, I’d like to be able to grow to up to 10 firewalla devices without a significant increase.
I get that it would be a function of the stored/processed data in the flows it would be nice to allow customers bring their own storage too as I would suspect they would already have invested in one or both local NAS and cloud services, and I get that this would increase complexity but allow power users to utilise all these features possibly at a degraded performance or availability.
Thinking out loud integration/partnering with popular NAS solutions would be a great way opportunity to gain exposure to new customer pools and help enable existing customers maximise the value. I do understand the complexity this may add.
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If you don't care about having 7 days of storage, I think the per seat cost is cheaper than a cup of Starbucks double expresso / month.
The "storage" here is really the amazon database storage. So, it is more of a "store" and also "cpu" cost; (and all plans also have transfer data through their load balancer cost ... a small DNS cost ... load balancer usage cost ... login cost ...)
Anyway, it is definitely less costly for us to use the cloud (in terms of software, maintenance, features...) than spin everything on our own.
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