Today I received an email from the Total Phase sales team that my hardware/application support agreement for our Promira Serial Platform device will expire soon and they tried to convince to purchase a new agreement at 10% of list price of the device.
The executive summary is :
Without such a hardware/application service contract the customer will
- no longer have access to technical support (hmm maybe ok, but understandable as it can be expensive for small companies to offer such a support free of charge...still)
- no longer receive bug fixes of their software and firmware (not acceptable)
- no longer be able to purchase new software options for the hardware you already purchased !!! (absolutely not acceptable)
To be very clear here: If you don't have an annual subscription at 10% of MSRP for the support agreement you will lose the right to purchase a brand new software option in the future.
To put this in perspective, below are the pricing options for the Promira Serial Platform according to their website (US prices):
- Base unit 450$ (note that I2C and SPI decoding is disabled for the base version).
- I2C up to 1MHz : 150$
- SPI up to 12.5MHz : 150$
- I2C up to 3.4MHz add another 800$
- SPI up to 40 MHz add another 300$
- SPI up to 80 MHz add another 1000$ (nope I am not joking)
for a total of $2850.
- they offer more options for a total of up to 8218$...
You can do the math yourself, they expect you to pay 10% of the list price for the privilege of buying a new software option in the future.
They really think they can force a customer that is off the annual subscription and wants to upgrade (for example) the SPI decoding speed from 12.5MHz to 40MHz with a software key to purchase a brand new hardware unit and re-purchase the software options, that were already purchased, again.
I found this policy so outrageous that I politely responded asked if they could explicitly confirm that my understanding is correct. Total Phase responded, confirmed my assumptions and re-iterated the terms of their policy and said that easiest way for us would be to purchase the annual subscription.
So I am curious to see what kind of responses will be posted in regards to these policy terms.