Really appreciate your honest and forthright feedback. Unfortunately we dropped the ball (again) on our v13.1 update and have now decided to cut our losses and head straight to v14.0. It will be based on (the very soon to be released) Debian Jessie, which is just around the corner. Getting this updated and out the door within the next few months is my #1 priority (I have shelved the other project that I was working on). Moving forward into the future I anticipate making more regular releases as well as the ability to release 'out of band' (i.e. release individual appliances between full library maintenance releases).
In relation to your suggestion, we are pretty committed to keeping the images free to download although tweaks to increase our revenue should always be considered. Ideally we want our revenue stream to come from value add services on top so it's an 'opt in'. Currently that's how it works and although it still doesn't raise as much as we would ideally like; it is sustainable.
So if you'd love to help out financially then have a think about signing up for a TurnKey Hub account (they start from $10/mth). There are other things that are also helpful to contribute (upgrading appliances if you have the skills or interest; helping out on the forums frees me up for other stuff; etc).
Anyway, I digress... Back to your suggestion; out of interest how much did JumpBox charge originally? TBH I wasn't even aware that they still existed. I just went and looked and sure enough they are still there, but WTF $60/mth!?! That seems like a lot of money when you still need to pay for the hardware or hosting...! All I can say is wow!
What do you think would be a fair price? Do you think that it should be a per download? Or some sort of subscription model like JumpBox use? Maybe we could include an intermediate 'nag' screen asking for people to pay a contribution for the appliances they download? Maybe we could provide a "TKL Membership" subscription which gives people some range of benefits
Hi Mark, thanks for your feedback
In relation to your suggestion, we are pretty committed to keeping the images free to download although tweaks to increase our revenue should always be considered. Ideally we want our revenue stream to come from value add services on top so it's an 'opt in'. Currently that's how it works and although it still doesn't raise as much as we would ideally like; it is sustainable.
So if you'd love to help out financially then have a think about signing up for a TurnKey Hub account (they start from $10/mth). There are other things that are also helpful to contribute (upgrading appliances if you have the skills or interest; helping out on the forums frees me up for other stuff; etc).
Anyway, I digress... Back to your suggestion; out of interest how much did JumpBox charge originally? TBH I wasn't even aware that they still existed. I just went and looked and sure enough they are still there, but WTF $60/mth!?! That seems like a lot of money when you still need to pay for the hardware or hosting...! All I can say is wow!
What do you think would be a fair price? Do you think that it should be a per download? Or some sort of subscription model like JumpBox use? Maybe we could include an intermediate 'nag' screen asking for people to pay a contribution for the appliances they download? Maybe we could provide a "TKL Membership" subscription which gives people some range of benefits