Cyclic Simplifies Standard Support Pricing

New prices are easier to understand

Cyclic Software's Standard Support, which provides CVS bugfixes and assistance using CVS, now has simpler pricing. Users such as programmers and web content authors who want to keep their documents under version control can get Standard Support for US$6000 per year, covering the CVS software running on both Solaris and Windows.

Our old pricing scheme has grown over the years. We have found that we can make it much simpler without significantly changing the prices that most customers are paying. Under the new pricelist most customers will pay US$6000 per year.

Notable changes from the old pricelist are:

• The distinction between server, client, or non-client/server CVS no longer affects pricing. Server, client, and non-client/server (whichever ones are available for a particular platform) are included in the same price.
• There is additional language allowing a limit on the number of problem resolutions instead of a limit on the number of CVS users. We have been offering this language for some time now when asked, but it now is part of the published pricelist.

The old and new pricelists also have some things in common:

• Support is available for all platforms, with the lowest prices for the most popular platforms ranging up to quotes for custom work if a significant amount of porting would would be involved.
• The services provided are unchanged (bugfixing and assistance using CVS).

Current Cyclic customers should contact Cyclic with any questions concerning transition to the new pricing structure.

The new pricelist is enclosed at the end of this news release.

Cyclic Software sells support for CVS, a cross-platform, easy to administer client/server configuration management system. For more information on Cyclic and CVS, see our web page at http://www.cyclic.com.

Standard Support for CVS includes:

• Full source, binaries, and documentation for CVS via the internet or disk/tape. This includes whatever programs CVS needs to run beyond those supplied with the operating system it runs on (for example, RCS, GNU diffutils, and patch for the CVS 1.9 server).
• answering questions concerning how to use CVS, by phone or email;
• guaranteed responses for bugs within 5 business days;
• guaranteed fixes for reproducible bugs within 10 business days. (By "reproducible bugs", we mean instances where the software clearly does not behave as documentation or reasonable expectations indicate it should, and that we are able to reproduce this misbehavior reliably. Naturally, we will make every possible effort to reproduce the bugs you report; our experience has been that it's usually not difficult.)

Standard Support starts at US$6000 per year and that price includes CVS running on the following platforms:

• Solaris 2.x running on a SPARC processor (server, client, and non-client/server)
• Windows NT/95 running on an x86 processor (client and non-client/server)
• One additional platform, to which CVS has been ported. If the platform is not one we have access to for testing purposes, you can either lend us a machine of the appropriate type for the duration of the contract, or offer access to one of your machines over the internet, or pay an additional sum sufficient to purchase a machine of the appropriate type.
• If you are running CVS on additional platforms, you can either handle problems specific to those platforms yourself, or you can pay an additional US$ 5000/year per platform to add additional platforms.

The above pricing covers up to 20 users, with two of those users designated as "contacts" for CVS, to reduce communication problems. If you have more than twenty users, that is fine but in that case Cyclic reserves the right to limit problem resolutions to two per month. Our intention is that we will not exercise this right in circumstances such as if we ship a buggy release, but it would be our decision. If you want support for more than 20 users without this restriction, please contact us regarding pricing.

Payments are quarterly, due at the start of each quarter of service.

If the above fee structure is not well-suited to your organization, please say so. We're interested in tailoring our services to be as useful to you as possible.

Consulting:

Cyclic can recommend third party consultants for services such as training or setting up CVS at your site. We also may do custom work ourselves, especially implementing general-purpose CVS enhancements for fixed prices.