Make Notes/Domino free for companies with under 10 or 20 or even 50 users

Support shouldn’t be free but small business companies below 10 could be free without support. Or that the license is free if they buy the setup from a business partner that needs to register the company and monitor number of users.

Suggest free for under 10 , HCL also need income to support development team of Notes/Domino.

Just put a ulimit on the server to nerf performance, so you don't have to worry about legit companies abusing this.

We have to get the software and clients in the hands of developers, students, and hobbyists.

Remember, the Japanese in venturing into the luxury automobile market segment, sold Lexus vehicles at a loss for five years, just to create market share for their new vehicles. Why? Toyota knew well that when a competitor loses market share, it is very difficult to reacquire it. From that wisdom, they took a significant slice of the revenue pie to became a major player.

HCL is looking to recapture the SMB market squandered by a previous owner's mismanagement--respectfully. Domino-I-173 helps move HCL in that direction in a major way. Thank you for the idea.

For me this suggestion belongs for very, very small companies and more common to small developer teams that are sometimes very few users only. These developer teams work for bigger companies anyway and thus they can legally use a server.

This was first posted July 2018. It is marked as "Likely to implement". It's been over 3 years. If you're serious about getting companies to buy into your product who currently don't use it, this is the way to do it. Get them hooked while they're small. If they grow and become successful, you will have the inside track on keeping them as a paid customer and they will be your best advocates to sell you to other people. Panagenda already does this with MarvelClient. Do it with Domino. But don't go more than 10 or so licenses. This is called a sales funnel. Want to understand this highly successful strategy? Read the book "DOTCOM Secrets" by Russell Brunson. Or just keep doing what you've always done, but don't expect different results.

-David Hablewitz

This request is open for about 3 years. Status "Likely to implement".

Is anyone really so naive to believe that HCL will offer a small (maybe 5-100) user verion for free?

Great Idea, We in the open source world, atleast provide free licenses for Lotus notes lovers to continue to work on their free time and build products and productive apps

I agree, or at the very least a very cheap option under £30 per year per use for up to 50 or so users. The service must be full enterprise service notes-client and http, with e-mail, traveler, custom apps and clustering.

I think Ad-ons such as Sametime, connections, LDAP/single sign-on etc could be charged a premium

Gotta be honest. I don't think this is a good idea but I would support much lower maintenance costs for Small businesses. Can't give stuff away and still be in business.

This is the best idea i have ever heard. Amazing . Thanks

Yes, a free community edition much like Microsoft does with Visual studio would be very well received.

The applications with the most market share will always be the winners in the end.  Make it cheep and get the market share then figure out how you can make money on add ons.  Total cost of ownership is a huge factor in decision making.  It would be good to consider making the base application free and then you can always make more money on add ons the same way games are making so much money on skins and in game purchases.

That is supper idea.   why no one thought about this before.  

The domino express license is already quiet generous and the ROI for express license users is already high IF they implement the server correctly and make use of the templates. Reducing the license cost might be an option, but the trick is in improving the overall UI and functionality. If HCL/IBM do go this route, then a cloud only based version would be more appropriate.

Free is not an option, it can be free for 1 year. If company see value , they will stay and will pay

I totally agree.  Only way to be back on the market is to create a good base of users / customers, that can check how powerful is and how easily can add value to their business, without having to buy an additional server for database,  add LDAP,  security,  apps engine, etc......    Customer prefers to install MongoDB Community Edition, a free LDAP Server, and a Node.js engine because they have not fees, and is easy to do (just a click away).  If you give them all of that free,  for small business (less than 100 users), they base of people knowning domino will increase,   and we will be able to introduce our products on other areas later on.

Even if you have to pay for it at CA$219 up front per user license and the 20% support/year costs, it is a LOT less than a set of MS Office 365 / MS SharePoint / Exchange enterprise licenses plus all the hardware you need, plus Domino runs on RHEL very happily - don't need Windows servers...and Red Hat keeps server software up to date almost painlessly (not to mention Linux just keeps on running...!)

I agree this is a similar post to the free student / educational license. I've already commented on this under that request. This is similar to the Canonical Ubuntu model. The client is free, support from Canonical or a business partner is a paid subscription. This is a good idea, too. Most people will go for the free and then finally bite for an issue they cannot easily get the solution from a web search.

@20th August.

But if you do put it on the Internet for (say) occasional use by a few of many customers accessing a web page, then a small 20 user company like ours has to pay £15,000 for a Domino Utility Server lic. Which is quite a lot of money for a small company. AFAIK