TurboCASH CD production costs

[Philip Copeman]

My answer at the bottom of the email.




Dianne van Gysen wrote:

Thanks – what you are saying is that I cannot use the turbo cash software free off the net. I have to buy the disk?

 

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From: Philip Copeman [mailto:phi...@pinksoft.co.za]
Sent: 19 October 2005 15:31
To: dianne...@mweb.co.za
Subject: Re: TurboCASH problem

 

Best will be to order the TurboCASH CD off the shop

http://www.turbocashtraining.co.za/os/

We have not yet released the International version for 3.74. Betas are for developers- no guarantees.

I am saying you CAN use the software free off the net. However you can't expect someone else in the community (including me)  to incur a cost for you to do so. If you are willing to incur costs to help other people with their accounting, I could sure use your help. I am desperately looking for people that will make CDs and ship them to users, and then go around there free of charge and help them implement it.

I am working on it (seriously), but  I simply have not yet figured out a way to make and ship and install free CDs. If you can do this, I have  30 000 people that will take one off you, please make them up and and I will send you a list of 20 000 addresses. What is your courrier account number and is it authorised with R 700 000 credit.? My freight company insists on charging me R 37.80 for a delivery, yours might give us a better price as you could sell them on the idea that you are paying to  help other people not for profit. Get a freight company to do this for us for free and we are halfway there. This is not out of the question, it would have to be something to do with promoting the freight companies services to the TurboCASH users. Do you know anyone in the business that would sponsor shipping 20 000 CD's twice per year?

 I am working with a national retailer to reduce this cost. They simply are not enthusiastic to give up their paid retail space for a zero margin product. They don't even want to reduce the price of the CDs as it makes it unviable for them. Their argument is that  if a business does not want to pay the R 342, they propbably don't need TurboCASH anyway. They will also not want to pay a consultant if they get an error with the program, and we will end up with an unhappy customer and a stain on TurboCASH. I have not yet figured out a way to get consultants to help others with their accounting for free. All the best accountants are making good money doing paid work. If you and some of your freinds are up for putting in a few free mornings at other peoples companies doing free bookeeping and solving network and computer problems, I have 30000 users that would love to have you. I just don't get many offers for this.

Internet downloads are also not free. You will pay Telkom for the Bandwidth (Funnily enough not much differrent in price to the CD). We have a struck a deal with Sourceforge for international downloads. They make their money from the adverts that they show you as you download.  I have not found a local company willing to do this. The bandwidth costs would be about R 100 000 per month. Do you have a server I could use.?

I have a number of reasons why I hold back the International release. It is to do with i) Each market presents is own launch challenges giving magazine partners the first "bite" and getting an exclusive cover disk out there. In terms of us vs the commercial packages we are about 10 times faster than them at this process. ii) While we are very proud that TurboCASH comes originally from South Africa, there are a mountain of things to be done to ensure compliance in the off shore countries. Releasing a program that works only for South Africa would do us more harm than good.  You are welcome to join our research team to help make this cycle faster. It costs around R 50 000 per month, per country involved. It is not necessary for you to be an actual programmer, just sending us the cheque every month would be helpful. Figure out a better way to do this and I am your greatest supporter.

It is in my interest to get as many copies of TurboCASH out there as possible. I am limited by the cost of achieving this. Help me fugure this one out and your contribution would be invaluable. In the meantime until we come up with a new plan, I have to keep referring users to the clause in the licence that Free in Open Source, is as in Freedom not as in Free Lunch.