Cms: The removal of the 'Client' license

[lukeyouell]

Along with the release of Craft 3 the 'Client' license has been removed, leaving 'Solo' and 'Pro' as the only available licensing options.

This has lead to a significant discussion on Slack based on whether or not the client license should have been removed, some people (including myself) have use-cases where the only project requirement that isn't satisfied by the solo license is the ability to create an account for the client. In my experience this is normally the case when we work with smaller clients and purchasing a pro license would be overkill.

I feel like there should still be some sort of middle ground where we can purchase something that gives us the ability to create an account for the client without having to pay for the additional pro features that won't be used. This could come in the form of a licensing option or as an official P&T plugin.

It would be great to hear the opinions of others on the matter.

[lindseydiloreto]

Paraphrasing from Slack (and echoing @lukeyouell)...

If it's possible for P&T to build a “Client User” plugin for $199, I think that would solve everyone's problems.

[lukeyouell]

@lindseydiloreto that's definitely the solution that makes the most sense to me, although I think it should cost a less than $199 as it won't come with features such as system branding and custom email templates.

I think $100 would be a reasonable amount and hopefully entice those that use the Solo license to pay something in situations where they would normally stick with the free version.

[mildlygeeky]

I wonder if another possible compromise / middle ground may be making the Settings and Utilities pages less accessible on Solo edition — for example, some sort of overlay that makes a user tick a tickbox and then click a button to move into that section of the site. Could use a session cookie so that someone who intends to work in the admin section only has to hit it once per session.

I am personally glad to see the Client Edition gone — the price difference never seemed all that different from Pro, and whenever we've taken on a client who is on Client it seems like they have a negative opinion of Craft (sometimes because of Client, sometimes because the past agency cut other corners as well).

We've found that often other agencies were essentially looking to save $100 and just force their client to share passwords without knowing that Craft was capable of much more.

[lukeyouell]

@mildlygeeky I think the checkbox idea doesn't completely negate the reasons why we don't want to give admin access to clients.

Maybe the removal of the Client licensing option is the right way forward, but I believe that it's removal creates a need for an official P&T plugin that enables the creation of a client user account as mentioned above.

We've found that often other agencies were essentially looking to save $100 and just force their client to share passwords without knowing that Craft was capable of much more.

Those are the clients that should be purchasing a pro license, and therefore the reason for removing the client license.

In my experience this is normally the case when we work with smaller clients and purchasing a pro license would be overkill.

This is where the plugin would be a solution.

[lindseydiloreto]

I am personally glad to see the Client Edition gone...

^ I personally agree with @mildlygeeky on this point (and everything he said in that paragraph). Good riddance to Client, at least for any projects that I've worked on.

But the point @lukeyouell raises is still valid... there are enough situations where having a system-safe client login would be critical, even if the client needs zero other bells & whistles from Pro.

[bgarrant]

I have used Client for probably 30 mom and pop small sites. It was a good price point and will be missed. For people with no website or coming from WP it was great. Many of these sites only needed one login as there was only one person making edits.

I understand the move to Pro. It would have been nice to have these discussions before removing it. While I appreciate the existing upgrades to Pro, that really is almost no benefit to the client projects already completed.

I think a "lite" version with just one non-admin user is a valuable version. Sure you can scale it back, remove features, etc. Most of these sites would not use multi-site or cloud storage so those don't really matter to me.

Just my $0.02

[marflow]

So I am not too happy to see that the Client editions has gone. It was a viable choice for smaller projects that needed one locale and one (branded ;) client login / account.

Sure, $100 does not seem that much and in the end and worst case, we can decide for ourselves if we are willing to pay the difference because it will not only make the clients experience and safety that much better, but also make developing and maintenance much more productive, fun, and secure. But then again, the Craft license is one item, then there are plugins costs now, and then there are the update fees. (From my experience, a client with a project budget around 3.000 is willing to spend 350/year for quarterly updates in total. Higher costs / retainers are met with questions regarding the software quality, because those clients have no comparison.)

One thing to keep in mind as well: The smaller the client budget, the harder to compete with a WP / theme-based alternative. So it is also a question if P&T want to be a fit for those smaller sites as well. If you ask me, they should try.

[brandonkelly]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. To offer a little additional insight beyond what we said in the announcement, there were two main factors that led to us cutting Client edition:

1. One of the big lessons we learned from Craft 1 was that complex pricing sucks, and considering how the Plugin Store is inherently making Craft’s pricing more complex (however warranted), if there was an opportunity to simplify pricing in any way, we felt it was worth exploring.

2. Client edition wasn’t very successful. Most small projects just ended up running Personal, with the client using the Admin account.

I wonder if another possible compromise / middle ground may be making the Settings and Utilities pages less accessible on Solo edition

Yep, we were actually just talking about something along those lines earlier today: we’re thinking we will introduce a new config setting that disables administrative features in 3.1, sortof along the lines of allowUpdates, which can be set on production environments. So developers can continue doing all their admin-y stuff on their local environments, push their changes to production (another thing that will be far easier in 3.1), and the content manager can continue using the Admin account on production without fear of royally screwing everything up.

[narration-sd]

I'm pretty much on the outside for this one, Brandon, but doing this on the allowUpdates model sure feels a center-of-concerns solution...

[lukeyouell]

@brandonkelly something like allowAdmin would be spot on!

[brandonkelly]

Just added a new disableAdminFunctions config setting to the 3.1 branch (8058b6c0b4c76b9c10476bf1cb169d6be497fd03).