Plumbr announces monthly subscriptions

Today we are announcing two notable changes in the way Plumbr subscription is billed. Both of them are created to simplify and ease the use of Plumbr, so do not be afraid of a well-masked price hike by a secretive vendor.

One price for monitoring all environments

We have removed separate prices for monitoring production and non-production JVMs. From now on, there will be just one per-JVM price that allows monitoring whichever environment you please (and allows for moving Plumbr from one environment to the other if needed).

Why did we make this change? The two most important reasons were:

• Being restricted to a specific environment sometimes created problems to our customers. They had to carefully audit which environments they monitored and when their needs changed, it was a hassle to adapt the subscription to the new requirements.
• Having different prices for monitoring different environments is not a common strategy in the monitoring tools world – and this was confusing for our customers. The reason Plumbr offered such an exotic framework was historical and originated from the times where Plumbr was mostly a troubleshooting tool that application developers used to inspect different performance issues.

The new price for paid Plumbr subscriptions will be $999 per year per JVM.

Plumbr now available as a monthly subscription

We have heard from many potential customers that while Plumbr impressed them with functionality during the trial period, they could not commit for a whole year of use because of budgetary or various other reasons.

As a general, the success of SaaS models also preaches more and more atomic pricing. Some vendors of monitoring products go even as far as to per-minute pricing. When we discussed this with Plumbr users, it turned out that we should not make Plumbr price too granular, as one of the biggest advantages of Plumbr is that it detects performance problems that you are not even aware of. You get the most value out of Plumbr if you monitor your applications 24/7 – which per-minute pricing would not encourage.

With the above in mind, we decided to start offering monthly subscriptions (with a single per-month price) and make it a default option. From now on, you can start using Plumbr at a price of $139 per month per JVM. You can change to the annual model and save 40% of annual cost whenever you feel ready.

No changes for existing customers

Don’t worry – the above change will not affect existing subscriptions. You will be able to use Plumbr on the agreed terms until at least the end of the subscription period. We might approach you at the end of the subscription period to see if we can offer more favorable conditions under the new framework, but will always ask for your explicit consent and not change anything automatically.

I hope that the new subscription framework makes using Plumbr easier and more natural to our future customers. How do you like the change? Is there anything else about Plumbr that you’d like to see differently? Let me know in the below comments or write to our CEO.