Lime-Technology Shutdown?


oxi

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From what I recall, the past month looked to be quite busy for Tom -- nearly 2 weeks to complete hardware orders, one week was a US Holiday, and the week after he's out of town. A week or two before that, we've had unRAID 4.5.3 release with massive support for Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 controller and an updated Linux udev system and Kernel.

 

No. I would not say Lime-Technology is shutdown. This "lull" of time is less than the previous durations during the 4.5 series development.

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Very good sentiments indeed.

 

But R&D doesnt not equal a company. Your always available customer facing presence is a vital component.

 

Yes this is about manpower but its much more to do with time management. Closing the blinds and doing R&D till you have done what you intended should never be at the expense of your customer facing presence.

 

I say what ive always said... a Limetech person should be posting here daily. Even if its over morning coffee replying to a few quick posts.

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I agree with that.  The one-man-show feeling can be extremely off-putting to people, especially potentially new customers.  

It's also difficult to argue against when you're a proponent.  What do you say, "The software rocks, the support is great when it's available"?

 

You know, I've owned a "one-man-show" business for many years, so I can relate. 

I don't have bosses or shareholders to answer to, and I am very happy with where I am!

I don't much care about who thinks what, or who finds my business practicess off-putting.

 

Tom has been AWOL before... and has always been back with nice free upgrades. 

It won't bother me at all if he goes on a six-month cruise around the world.  It's his business. 

My NAS will still be working.

 

He has sold me a great product that does everyting I want form a NAS. 

I am happy with my purchase, and I'll still be happy with it if I don't get another upgrade ever. 

So the free upgrades we keep getting here are the icing on the cake.

 

There are two things that I would do differently if I were in his shoes:

First, rethink the current licensing prices.  Cut those prices in half and the bottom line may even quadriple, without lifting a finger.

Second, be sure to make a few posts on these boards every day, even if on vacation abroad.

But hey, it's his buiseness after all!

 

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For theoretically a one man band (I believe Tom runs the entire Lime-Technology business solo), he is doing a fantastic job of it. He builds servers to go on sale to buyers, compiles the unRAID OS for updates and addressing fixes and features, even provides support, that is a lot to ask for one person.

I believe the licencing price is fair and reasonable too. If you look at other NAS solutions, they are a lot higher in cost (I understand when you buy a dedicated NAS kit, you get the software and hardware, albeit with limited to no disks out of the box too), but why buy proprietary hardware and a limited OS when you can use x86-based hardware, use a open source Linux OS and customize it to the max with addons that unraid has widely available (Thankfully to the support of forum members).

The disk expandability, hardware flexibility, feature set, free future upgrades, a great community-based forum, I can't seem to find a much better NAS solution, whether your as poor as a student or rich as Sir Richard Branson or Donald Trump.

I can only sum up by saying 'Good On Tom' for his hard work and dedication and also to the Hero forum members and others members too who continue to provide support and give their personal time to unraid. I'm honestly surprised Tom hasn't been bought out or has had larger PC company's offering him a buy out as his RAID architecture is a smart solution (Fingers crossed this never happens, Alienware anyone?). Though unraid wasn't built for speed, it is built for redundancy, which is the important factor and suits a home or even small business use, unraid fits the bill for a backup or storage solution.  

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I believe the licencing price is fair and reasonable too. If you look at other NAS solutions, they are a lot higher in cost ...

That does not factor in the equasion at all. Only the bottom line does. He is not selling cars, he is selling bits and bytes, so the math is much simpler. He can sell 10 licenses today just as easily as selling 10000 licenses. If a x% price cut results in a 1% profit increase, then you do it. The rest is irrelevant.

 

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I believe the licencing price is fair and reasonable too. If you look at other NAS solutions, they are a lot higher in cost

The way I see it the price is a little steep. The OS is free, the md driver is free as its source is included to be gpl compliant (think of it as his payment back to the open source community for being able to use a whole OS in his product for free), samba is free, having it packaged to run on a bootable usb is easy to do with all free software. The only thing I see he is actually selling is the control interface for a whopping $70 for plus. I know this way of looking at it is flawed but I can't help but think of it that way with the price of the product as it is.

 

I'm on the fence with this product for several reasons: Higher than I can justify price, lack of visual support on the forums, and lack of simple built in features such as audible error notification and ssh (things I have added manually) and a few other minor features. Good thing about it being Linux is I can easily add all that. But since unraid consists of a few small programs I would love to have a version that will simply install on top of an already running Linux installation.

 

Correct me if I am wrong, but I see a lot of two types of people on these forums. Those who spend A LOT of money on their unraid (15+ drives) and those who use the free version for testing and eventually disappear. I can see a lower plus price helping with the latter.

I will still buy this software if and when I need to add my fourth drive to my unraid. But at the current pricing, not until I really need to.

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Yeah good point purko, less is more really and I understand that point entirely. I was more stating the value-for-money side of things, saying that it is worth the current costs that he's charging for the licences, but yeah, a valid point indeed that you've made. If licencing were cheaper, people would buy them easily and wouldn't have to dig as deep dollar wise.

Although to meet with the demand of orders of hardware/software that this price drop might incur if Tom decided to do done this path, he'd have to take on board one or two extra staff members (One Hardware tech person, perhaps working part time building servers and responding to technical support emails that people send to Tom directly and another person handling the administration side of things like purchases/finances of any hardware and licences that Lime tech sells) to keep the flow and the production line at Lime Technology running smoothly. This would allow Tom to concentrate on the unRAID OS updates, bug fixes and feature integrations/improvements and the alike.

 

I believe the licencing price is fair and reasonable too. If you look at other NAS solutions, they are a lot higher in cost ...

That does not factor in the equasion at all. Only the bottom line does. He is not selling cars, he is selling bits and bytes, so the math is much simpler. He can sell 10 licenses today just as easily as selling 10000 licenses. If a x% price cut results in a 1% profit increase, then you do it. The rest is irrelevant.

 

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Although to meet with the demand of orders of hardware/software that this price drop might incur if Tom decided to do done this path, he'd have to take on board one or two extra staff members...

Again, he is not selling cars, he is selling bits and bytes.  Such a sale does not require any human attendance!

 

Think of it this way:  You currently have 2,000 licensed customers at 70 bucks a pop. (licenses, not cars!)

If at 35 bucks a license you could have 50,000 licensed customers, then which way would you choose to go?

 

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I was more stating the value-for-money side of things, saying that it is worth the current costs that he's charging for the licences

That does not make much sense.  You can't define "worth".

See, at any given price level there will be some number of people who feel that the goods are worth the asking price.

And, there will also be some number of people who feel that the goods are NOT worth the asking price.

The numbers in these two groups change whith the changing of the price level.  So you see, you can't really define "worth"

As a seller, the only reasonable thing you can do is to examine the curve and find such price level that maximizes your profits.

 

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To me:

 

unRAID becomes more valuable when upgrades come out periodically.  For me, Tom's spending his time on the software is better than other things.  However, when I first landed on the unRAID doorstep, one of the solid draws was that he built hardware for professional buyers.  It conveys a confidence in the product when buyers like that are spending money. 

 

Currently I'm at the free level but I'm busting at the seams and need to buy the Plus.  Which I will do at some point.  I don't see myself EVER needing a system with more than 10 drives but... Every other raid system I have tried out CRAPPED out one way or another.  Either the hardware dumped on me or the problems of rebuilding the raid IF the hardware takes a dump is very daunting to the small raid user.  unRAID has already proven to me to be managable.  I've swapped out the motherboard, twice! 

 

Ok, I'm at the bottom of the food chain but I'll spend some money also.  The amount Tom is asking is not to much for the Pro license.  As far as Plus, I'm on the fence.  On the one hand, I can't see anything else that compares with unRAID.  So, yes it is important to do comparisons like that.  That means I'll stick around until I eventually spend money.

 

Purko, I read what you said and price levels is important.  But the most important factor is by far switching costs.  It's always about switching costs.  How hard to switch into a product.  How hard to switch away.  For me at least, it very hard to switch away because there isnt' anything else available that can fail over onto a whole new machine with different MB and the works like unRAID can.  Where am I gonna go? 

Switching onto unRAID was not too steep because I was able to use existing spare equipment to get started with.  Where else can you do that?

 

Ok, so that's me and I'm definitely a small installation that might grow to a medium sized one.  What about medium to large?  Compared to the cost of a medium or large system the cost of the Pro license is inconsequential. 

 

Ahh, but what about the truly professional buyers like small or medium businesses?  Well, the license cost is nothing to them because maintenance costs of the personal managing the box FAR outweigh the puny cost of even a dozen Pro licenses.  What they want is turn-key.  And the product + management interface is not there yet by quite a wide margin.  I think it could get there in another 18-24 months if it was a business objective, If...

 

So, even though I'm not going to buy one of Tom's excellent hardware, I have to say I'd encourage him to start a franchise business of sorts allowing others that he hand picks to build unRAID machines paying him some royalty for the right to put an unRAID sticker on it.  While he himself, the visionary, pushes forward on the software.  And when the time is right, outsource the development of an administration interface that can be sold at additional cost to the business customers who need it and are willing to pay for it.

 

 

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:) i agree with you, but I believe if his business increased by 10, 20 or 100 fold because he is selling his licences at half or even a quarter less than that, he'd be spending too much time generating licences and processing orders then actually doing other things like developing the OS and unraid related stuff which I'm sure he needs as much time as he can get to do this instead.

A know basically the building blocks and components of unraid are free but the way it is put together, the architecture of the way it works, etc... Is what you're paying for in the end, which is all true too and it deserves a lot of credit too. If the was licences were created by an automated process of when someone purchases a licence and a licence as generated and sent to the customer by some kind of service, not by Tom, he could do this solo and sell as many licences (albeit thousands a day no problems). That was the point I was trying to make a i too concur with your opinion too (believe me I do). I don't know whether he does all of this by himself or not (producing licences and sending them out but i believe he does all of this while doing 10 other things at once as well). For a business to grow, so would the staffing power to get it off the ground. Even just one person could really help him out to start with. Just my two cent's worth, and for the record, I'm not a business man :). Interesting topic.

 

Although to meet with the demand of orders of hardware/software that this price drop might incur if Tom decided to do done this path, he'd have to take on board one or two extra staff members...

Again, he is not selling cars, he is selling bits and bytes.  Such a sale does not require any human attendance!

 

Think of it this way:  You currently have 2,000 licensed customers at 70 bucks a pop. (licenses, not cars!)

If at 35 bucks a license you could have 50,000 licensed customers, then which way would you choose to go?

 

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I'm still of the opinion the 'buy once, forever upgrade' model is bad for everyone.

 

If the license cost was dropped (or even left the same) and minor version bumps provided free but major revisions charged for we might see more development and more features as the financial incentive would be there.

 

At the moment releasing a new version, although perhaps appealing to new customers does nothing for the bottom line in terms of the existing userbase - we get it for free. It's nice, but I'd happily pay a bit more to have more development and a quicker turnaround between releases.

 

I've 'managed my expectations' somewhat since first using unraid and no longer treat it as a company but look at it as someones hobby that they happen to ask some money for. This may be insulting to limetech but I'm afraid it's the impression that gets given off long term post purchase.

 

The lack of communication and timelines on any development (there was a post from limetech stating they'd hoped to have a 5 beta out the door in time for christmas 09...) is exceptionally frustrating and I basically ignore them now. There is a constant assurance from forum regulars that 5 'is coming' which I can only assume means they have a little more insight than the rest of us they're sharing.

 

It's unfortunate as it makes unraid hard to recommend to people and it means I'm never 'settled' in my choice of NAS, I'm always looking out for something better. At the moment there isn't anything that *quite* matches unraid in feature set (which is probably the key point to be taking away I suppose..) but there are a number of products in a position to easily do so in the future through additions or the emergence of promised features. Or even to become more appealing as disk sizes increase / reduce in cost. At which point there wouldn't be much incentive for me to remain using unraid nor for limetech to keep me as a customer given I've already paid them their money.

 

It's a curious situation and one that could, as has been suggested, be easily alleviated to a large extent with an opensource style changelog / timeline / issue list that's kept up to date and the odd forum post to just check in.

 

As it stands I've paid my money and I have 'a' NAS solution. It works right now, but in time hardware support will degrade unless it's kept up to date due to the nature of the design. I just have to hope limetech keeps enough interest in this to keep doing so but its very difficult to gauge. It's not what I was expecting after the initial impression of the slick frontend company website, payment method and quick license turnaround.

 

It is however a good product and, as has already been mentioned, it's clear limetech is run from the 'tech' persuasion rather than the using the 'suit' approach. Ultimately leading to a good product, but iffy PR.

 

The above is all with the caveat that I, along with most people on this forum, have no idea of the financials or sales throughput of limetech. However the bigger those numbers are the more surprised about the existing situation I'd be...

 

 

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i agree with you, but I believe if his business increased by 10, 20 or 100 fold because he is selling his licences at half or even a quarter less than that,

he'd be spending too much time generating licences and processing orders then actually doing other things like developing the OS

unraided, for the third time in a row you are not paying attention:

These kinds of sales (licenses) do not require any human time/effort. They are normally automated. Therefore they are not a cost consideration.

 

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That what I wasn't sure on, the process of how the licences are generated. Yes selling thousands of licences a day would cause no problem or put pressure on Tom if this is the case. Thanks for pointing that out :D. But boof has made a valid point too.

In the end, regardless of what happens in the future at Lime Technology regarding costs, profit margins, business processes, etc, etc.., I'm not concerned about the behind the scenes or business side of things, so long as Tom keeps on doing what he does best, I'll still support and use unraid.

 

i agree with you, but I believe if his business increased by 10, 20 or 100 fold because he is selling his licences at half or even a quarter less than that,

he'd be spending too much time generating licences and processing orders then actually doing other things like developing the OS

unraided, for the third time in a row you are not paying attention:

These kinds of sales (licenses) do not require any human time/effort. They are normally automated. Therefore they are not a cost consideration.

 

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Is price really an issue? 

 

I dunno, the cost for for lifetime upgrades and support seems pretty fair to me.

I think people forget what it costs to handle the foundation of support.

Running the website and forum alone costs are ongoing.

 

What's really the core issue here?

I got the feeling that it was presence and response.

 

 

 

 

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Is price really an issue?  

 

I dunno, the cost for for lifetime upgrades and support seems pretty fair to me.

I think people forget what it costs to handle the foundation of support.

Running the website and forum alone costs are ongoing.

 

What's really the core issue here?

I got the feeling that it was presence and response.

 

 

My feeling is if there was 'more' money to be made - we'd have more development and response.

 

As such I see the current prices as being too low. I think it's excellent value for what is a one off lifetime payment.

 

I would pay the current license costs per major version *if* it meant there was significant improvements to release times of those versions (1 a year?) and each major version came with significant new features making it a worthwhile investment.

 

I see increased response going hand in hand with that as limetech then has incentive to feedback to us and sell new versions to us to get our repeated business.

 

As intoned above, I would see more money being involved pushing it (hopefully) away from what I view as more of a hobby rather than a business.

 

But I know 0 about the behind the scenes and this is only my opinion!

 

If the presence and response is an issue then we have to ask why is there a lack of presence and lack of response? And I would suggest because there's really no incentive for limetech to do so beyond goodwill.

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...

What's really the core issue here?

I got the feeling that it was presence and response.

 

Well put. Its my opinion that its not cost, version updates or anything else its the perception of stagnation. This is to be expected if there is no news or official forum support. But is is just a perception. For all we know 1000 man hours a day are happening on R&D and company support.

 

Posts over morning coffee, every morning and regular news updates. So easy to do when you get into the habit of it.

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>> Posts over morning coffee.

I would surmise there is more communications for direct support over morning coffee and throughout the day.

 

>> If the presence and response is an issue then we have to ask why is there a lack of presence and lack of response? And I would suggest because there's really no incentive for limetech to do so beyond goodwill.

 

I really don't think there is no incentive. In fact at least 2x a year we see a jump in features.

limetech has posted many times that they are busy building systems.

I'm sure there is plenty of incentive to build and sell.

I'm sure there is plenty of response for direct support.

We do not see it all.

 

 

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>> Posts over morning coffee.

I would surmise there is more communications for direct support over morning coffee and throughout the day.

 

Not sure what that means so just to be clear. 5 minutes a day of regular posts is better than one set of posts per month and nothing in between.

 

The first thing i do in the morning is answer all my previous evening client emails/support tickets and it works well. If i ignored then for 24 hours I would lose clients. If i didnt answer them for a month id be out of business. So since Limetech isnt out of business it cant be the same model but I still say its a better route than current.

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I emailed a week or so ago requesting info on when or if a prebuilt system would be available.  Never received a reply.  A friend of mine experienced the same.  No big deal on the system... as I'm glad I went the route of building..  however, If I order a couple preloaded OS/USBkeys should I expect to get them in a timely manner?  no responses to my emails makes me hesitant to send money for anything.

 

 

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>> Posts over morning coffee.

I would surmise there is more communications for direct support over morning coffee and throughout the day.

 

Not sure what that means so just to be clear. 5 minutes a day of regular posts is better than one set of posts per month and nothing in between.

 

The first thing i do in the morning is answer all my previous evening client emails/support tickets and it works well. If i ignored then for 24 hours I would lose clients. If i didnt answer them for a month id be out of business. So since Limetech isnt out of business it cant be the same model but I still say its a better route than current.

 

You're making an assumption that important paying client support communication/email/tickets remains unanswered.

 

I've seen pre-sales communication seemingly unanswered, but we don't know when it may have been answered.

I've also seen paying customers with issues answered by forum members or directly by limetech.

 

 

I emailed a week or so ago requesting info on when or if a prebuilt system would be available.  Never received a reply.  A friend of mine experienced the same.  No big deal on the system... as I'm glad I went the route of building..  however, If I order a couple preloaded OS/USBkeys should I expect to get them in a timely manner?  no responses to my emails makes me hesitant to send money for anything.

 

This is what should be discussed with limetech.

If you pay for something, then you have 100% right to expect it in a timely manner.

 

There's probably a reason on why the shopping cart says none of the systems are in stock/available.

Who knows, there may be a pleasant surprise of a new system type available soon.

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>> Posts over morning coffee.

I would surmise there is more communications for direct support over morning coffee and throughout the day.

 

Not sure what that means so just to be clear. 5 minutes a day of regular posts is better than one set of posts per month and nothing in between.

 

The first thing i do in the morning is answer all my previous evening client emails/support tickets and it works well. If i ignored then for 24 hours I would lose clients. If i didnt answer them for a month id be out of business. So since Limetech isnt out of business it cant be the same model but I still say its a better route than current.

 

You're making an assumption that important paying client support communication/email/tickets remains unanswered.

 

I've seen pre-sales communication seemingly unanswered, but we don't know when it may have been answered.

I've also seen paying customers with issues answered by forum members or directly by limetech.

 

You seem to be suggesting forum support isnt real official support. However Limetech LLC makes no clear distinction.

 

"Forum

 

Online support is available via the unRAID Community Forum. Our comprehensive forum is very friendly with many regular posters eager to help out, including several long-time users of unRAID OS.

Wiki

...

Technical Support

 

You may also contact Lime Technology directly with any technical support issue or question."

 

The wording is open to some interpretation but I would suggest that the wording and order makes it very easy to not see the distinction.

 

This is one of those topics that isnt hard and fast either way. But the fact that I wouldn't recommend unRAID to my clients for this reason should be enough in itself to give it some validity.

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