Environmental Impact
September 19, 2014Find Me Printing
September 19, 2014
Fair Licensing
PaperCut's licensing policy is well established and has changed little in over 10 years. It was set initially by the development team (not the marketing department!) with the aim of ensuring that the licensing model "does not get in your way or dictate your technology choices as an administrator". Licensing is based on the number of users in the database/organization and hence is proportional to the organization's IT budget. Traditionally server based applications have been licensed on a per-server basis, however this model encourages organizations to
- overload servers
- centralize towards single points of failure, and
- discourages best practice such as setting up duplicate testing and production servers/VMs.
PaperCut is supplied as a true enterprise-wide flexible license:
Our license is flexible, will accommodate your technology and architecture choices, and will grow with your IT infrastructure.
Our pricing is also 100% transparent. A concerning attribute of much enterprise class software today is "hidden pricing". In other words, the reseller/agent will look at the stature of your organization and charge what they think they can get away with! We take the opposite approach and transparently publish our price list. All organizations pay the same no matter what country they are in, or what operating system they run. (One notable exception to this is the developing world license. We offer special and often free licenses to government schools in developing countries).
Fair Pricing
A common questions we get is, "How can you price PaperCut so low (often costing less that US$1.00 per user), while other network/site-wide applications cost far more?". We manage to keep costs low in a number of ways. The main contributor is that we prefer not to distribute our application via retail, marketing, or reseller networks. When you purchase PaperCut, you are buying the software directly from the original developers. There is no retail mark-up.
We're also an engineering-driven company and our resources are allocated to software development rather than marketing. This allows us to keep costs low as we don't pay a team of salesmen or "marketing experts". We instead rely on
word of mouth and the quality of the application to sell the software. This has worked very well for us and most of the users that implemented PaperCut ten years ago still run and recommend the software today!
Fair Use
PaperCut is packed full of
customization options such as the ability to customize the web interface or develop 3rd party extensions. We have fully documented and transparent APIs. We do charge for services such as tailoring of the end-user web interface, but also equally make the same features available to you so you can opt to undertake this work yourself at no additional cost.
Fair Development
PaperCut is a mature and stable print control application, but remains under active development to ensure it remains
modern and featureful. The
release history is testament to the speed at which new features are added and the transparancy of our development process (open bug reporting).
Our development is prioritized based on customers' requests. The more requests we get for a feature the higher it's pushed up the list. We're also transparent in the way we approach our development. Our source code is available to our customers - nothing proves the quality of an application more than the code underneath!
