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Security Software Costs More to Renew Than Buy New
Matt Whipp writes "In a story I wrote for PCPro, I explore a tip submitted by one of our readers. They pointed out how much more it costs to renew security software, rather than buying it new. In fact it cost less than half the price to buy it new than it does to renew the license because of heavy discounting. He feels a bit cross that, as a loyal customer, he is the one penalized. From the article: 'ZoneAlarm may have tripped up on this discount issue, but it's not alone. It highlights just how cynical companies can be in relying on customers' assumptions that a renewal should be cheaper than buying new. McAfee's Internet Security Suite costs just £24.99 with the current 50 per cent discount. However, should you be fool enough to already be a customer of McAfee, you'll have to pay £39.99 to renew your licence.'"
these software packages sounds like viruses to me.
a normal virus:
(1) pay me money or i'll screw up your computer.
an anti-virus:
(1) pay me money and i'll screw up your computer
(2) repeat steps 1 and 2.
Can't find any of their products on my workstation. Haven't seen this "norton" people keep talking about.
Decided iptables was more effective than zonealarm [more configurable] too.
Wow, I must be one of those Linux hippies...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Avast is not free.
They give home users a free copy as advertising. SOHO technically should pay (though I don't think the police it) and business must pay according to the license agreement.
That said I use Avast and plan on using it at my pipe-dream cyber cafe. It's a good product and fortunately they are a company that "gets it" that the home user market is rife with piracy and really is low (profit(/(work to extract $$) ratio. They aviod the issue by giving it away to home users and charging businesses, which is the way it should be with everything IMHO.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I worked in the circulation department of a very large magazine for about 4 years, and learned a lot about the industry by being working closely with our data carrier that managed the majority of America's publishing data.
"Renewals are your profit engine" was industry-wide strategy. In fact, the vast majority of magazines expect to be money losing propositions for publishers for the first 3 years someone is subscribed. The job of the Circulation department was to figure out the best way to gradually raise the price, and lower the value, of the renewals until they became profitable. This isn't easy, as each magazine comes with far better subscription offers already inside of it. So the whole key to making money with a subscription model, is to distract the customer from the fact that you are blatetently offer then less for more. You can do that a lot by making the value of the offer more difficult to quantify (you get a calendar, and a free issue, and then 2 more issues for half price!); but the most effective tool is to play up their desire for continuity ("don't miss a single issue!").
It always struck me as ridiculous that my whole company's business model hinged on our best customers not noticing something fairly obvious. But as the job of my department was to make things less obvious - it's not really a matter of being an intelligent customer; it's a matter of being too busy to spend the time figuring out when you're getting a worse deal.
Yea, I know this is a thread about software subscriptions; but the principles are the same.
If you're buying something via subscription (security updates, software "assurance", or magazines) - know that there is a whole *industry* who's sole purpose is to make it a pain in the butt to figure out that each renewal deal is worse than the last. It's not a nacient industry, it's ridiculously sophisticated. So before you subscribe to anything, either figure out exactly how to drop your subscription and restart it instead of renewing it (let's just go ahead and assume the renewal deals are always worse, because they are), and decide if it still makes the initial bargain worth it. Or, if the convenience of not paying attention to the whole issue is worth eventually paying usually 3 times what you start out with.
Another interesting note on the topic - companies which do this are frequently kind of secretely embarrassed about it. As with ours, you may find that if you point out "Hey... I've been a customer for years and you're trying to renew me at Y, but someone who signs up now only has to pay X"; they'll frequently give you the introductory offer.
Shut up! If they discover that we're wise to them being wise to us, they'll start putting 1/3 to 1/4 ink in the refills, too.
Every year for the last 5 or 6 I have gotten McAfee for a cost of 0. Sometimes I even get money back. Every year they have Internet Security Suite for anywhere between 70-90 locally. At some point they will price the software 35-45 dollars. Going from Staples to best buy or vice versa nets you another 10% off that price. The rebate offer for having a previous version normall is 40. So most of the time I pay under 40 and mail in the rebate offer and get a check for 40. Not only is it free but often I make money by purchasing their software.