I recently upgraded my VP 11.2 to 14.0 and I seriously love the experience so far. But it also got me thinking.
This is probably not easily done and when trying to think about the whole thing from your perspective maybe not feasible (when thinking about development time and all). but… Right now the features increase depending on your license. Modeler solely focuses on modeling, standard on all that + code generation, and so on. We get what we pay for, I honestly think VP is very much worth the money.
However… It doesn’t always seem to add up. For example UeXceler is available on the modeler version, it provides access to project management features which are not accessible through the program itself. It works, but seems a bit off. (I still like it though). It got me thinking: why not try to make the feature set more modular and allow us customers to opt-in on those features we want to use?
I’ll be honest with you: I love Visual Paradigm, if I didn’t I wouldn’t have been using it for 8 years now. But the license for the standard and/or professional version is a bit too steep for me (at least for now). Also because ‘Standard’ is more focused on code/documentation & database generation (in comparison to modeler). But I don’t care much for that, instead I’m more interested in RACI, Mind Mapping and maybe user story, wireframing and project management. However, then you’re also entering “professional” territory with a steeper price tag. Don’t get me wrong: I honestly think it’s money well spend, I think you guys are doing an amazing job and really care for us customers (just in case someone doesn’t believe me I’d like to point you to this online training; as a customer I got access to that and I seriously enjoy it!).
So it got me thinking: why not try to “modularize” the feature set and allow us to buy into that based on the features we want? So, for example, I’m using modeler; would like to add CRUD/RACI, Mind mapping, User Story, Project Management and maybe SoaML and Impact analysis into the flock and that’s it. For an x amount I would be able to unlock those features and use them in my program. Obviously this would also have an effect on my support subscription, that’s only fair.
This way we could buy into the features we’re interested in, could skip the rest and generally for a lower price than now. My reasoning is simple: this way people might be more inclined to pay for those specific features. Because you don’t risk paying a lot of money for things you may already know you’re not going to use (like code generation in my example).
Maybe food for thought?
