[Macworld]

Post your comments for New Customer Relationship Management software made for Mac here

[Jeter2Fan93]

While I'm not too keen on the price (especially since it's per user/month), I do like the interface and how well it looks for a 1.0 product. I guess I'll be giving it a try :)

[Hurley42]

It looks cool, and I need something like this - but I don't know if the monthly, ongoing expense is justified for small companies. They have a trial, so what the heck.

[hayesk]

$69.95 PER MONTH is a ridiculously high price for what is essentially an online relational database. $69.95 is a good yearly fee, but would you pay $840 a year for this? I think they even realize how expensive it is by quoting "as little as $2.35 a day."
Not only that:
- why WebKit? Why wouldn't they just make a native Cocoa application that connects to a server? It's not that difficult.
- you need to be online for it to work. Business travelers may have access to the Internet, but not continuous access. And if they made it a Cocoa app, they could locally cache the data so you don't need to be online to use it.
I usually don't comment on pricing of applications, and I admit it looks like a useful product, but this pricing seems outrageous for the effort required to create this product, and the size of the market they are serving.

[cbh]

There seem to be a sufficient number of free, open source CRM's out there that could run on your hosting service, or for that matter, on Apache on a Mac with mysql activated. I've tried a few, they seem OK, and the price is right.

[macgirl]

Looks like a pretty cool CRM tool to me. Compared to other CRM products we've looked at, like Salesforce and Netsuite, this monthly subscription isn't bad at all!! I know our monthly costs with Salesforce would have been much much higher! My company has been looking for a web-based Mac solution like this for a long time - its a breath of fresh air to finally hear about a product like this!! I know we're gonna give it a try!

EDITORS' NOTE: So far as we can determine, this user is employed by the company in question as a marketer. Please take this into account when you consider her claims.
Message was edited by: Jason Snell

[NeoX]

Your message sounds like you work for the company.

If not, welcome to the forums...

You are right that Salesforce could cost up to $250 per month per user but that is an absolutely outrageous price too. I see what they did here, they made the price competitive with salesforce.com's lower package. The problem with this is that SF is already way overpriced. I can implement Microsoft CRM or some other web based CRM package for a fraction of the cost of these. So you have to have your own server and backups, etc., so what, for the money I am saving I can buy all this. If I have 50 users with this webkit solution, I would be paying $3450 a month. Ridiculous. With SF Unlimited I would be paying $12,500 per month. Ridiculous.

To each his own I suppose, but not a big fan of this app services type solutions, because of the price gouging they do.

[gpstein]

I agree, $70- per month is expensive. I recommend Zoho CRM, its free for 3 users, very affordable thereafter.
Zoho contains other products that are great for a SMB.
Very good
I have done some research on Zoho CRM & the parent company (Adventnet) , and at this time its gotten great reviews. Since your a small business, cost and efficiency are important. I recommend Zoho CRM, there are various price points, depending on your needs. Far cheaper then Salesforce. Its FREE to try, and can integrate with outlook. Zoho Business has other components you might like/need, and for a small business, some are free. Read the review in the link below, and do some research, you'll be very impressed. You can also call Zoho with questions, they do answer the phone !

http://crm.zoho.com/
http://mycrmblog.com...ew-zohocrm.aspx

[cpoff]

Indeed, I've already sent a note to macgirl asking that she disclose her employmet status with Ntractive. Stay tuned.

[macgirl]

Yes, I'm Amy and I do work for Ntractive. I wanted to point out that we're intending our product to compare with Salesforce.com and NetSuite, rather than a typical desktop application, and I used an inappropriate method to respond. My sincerest apologies.

[NeoX]

hayesk said:

$69.95 PER MONTH is a ridiculously high price for what is essentially an online relational database. $69.95 is a good yearly fee, but would you pay $840 a year for this? I think they even realize how expensive it is by quoting "as little as $2.35 a day."

Not only that:
- why WebKit? Why wouldn't they just make a native Cocoa application that connects to a server? It's not that difficult.
- you need to be online for it to work. Business travelers may have access to the Internet, but not continuous access. And if they made it a Cocoa app, they could locally cache the data so you don't need to be online to use it.

I usually don't comment on pricing of applications, and I admit it looks like a useful product, but this pricing seems outrageous for the effort required to create this product, and the size of the market they are serving.

I agree that the pricing is ridiculous, however it is right in line with salesforce.com's pricing for their standard product. Although salesforce does have a $99/year option on their entry level service. Not sure how it compares, feature wise, though.

As for why webkit? According to their website they will be making a windows version available too, ala Windows Safari.

As an experienced SFA/CRM admin, I am really not a huge fan of the whole {internet} applications as a service model.

[jrandersoniii]

Have any of you who are complaining about price - ever priced a CRM implementation?
Trust me, a bargain if you need such an application.
Not familiar with this product. So indeed it may not be worth it. But don't dismiss based on the window price. Trust me, this is a costly investment that fails in enterprises more often than it succeeds.

[NeoX]

I have configured and set up quite a few implementations in my time. While there are quite a few that are expensive and cost 10's of thousands of dollars to roll out, there are plenty that fit the needs of a good majority of businesses at a fraction of the cost. So yes I have priced several and none that I have implemented would come near to the yearly cost of $69 per user per month. All the ones that I implemented were desktop applications with an option to be used as a web client too.

But of course if you are implementing sales logix or Siebel solutions then that is another story as these can be quite expensive.

[adjensen]

Hi, I'm the principal engineer on this product, and nominally in charge of the company, and I really appreciate your pricing feedback -- it's one of the biggest things that we've struggled with as we've finished up the product and prepared for roll out. We have definitely had clients (and potential clients) on both sides of things -- some think that it's out of control and ridiculous, while others say it's reasonably priced for the market that it's going up against.
In talking to all of these users, it generally comes down to use and expectation. If you're a one or two person shop looking to track contacts or projects, yeah, this isn't the product for you, and there are lots of other great options out there. If you've got a widespread team, or need integration between disparate things (like documents to sales accounts or projects to products) Elements makes more sense, and those are the companies that we're more focused on.
If you're comfortable setting up a network, VPN and user access controls for remote employees, once again, Elements probably isn't what you need. But Elements does offer "turnkey availability" of this stuff -- get your account and you're up and running right away, regardless of what your set up is.
All that said, we're open to hearing more about the possibilities in pricing. We've gone through a number of scenarios, from pay per piece to tiered pricing to user minimums and I'm happy to hear what you have to say. But, due to the costs of capitalizing and maintaining the data centre (mostly Xserves!) if you're looking for free or almost free, this probably isn't going to work for you.
As for webkit, the project was originally started as a purely web based product, running in Safari and Firefox, but once we decided on this hybrid approach, we had to choose one engine behind the thing and webkit was easily the best option, for support of the standards that Justin was keyed on, if nothing else. It's also a super thin technology to wrap around, and Cocoa makes it all the easier. Plus, it renders and works exactly the same in the Windows webkit prototype that I threw together a while back, so that definitely speeds us along to that end of things when we choose to go there.
Thanks again for your feedback, and we really appreciate the attention our little company has received over the past couple of years.