It doesn’t surprise me at all that Six Apart wants money for moveable type now, it’s a fullfledged and incredibly useful piece of software. I was planning on purchasing Proteus, ecto and donating to MT (when 3.0 came out) after I received my first summer paycheck, which happened yesterday. I just have to make some room the credit card first.
The pricing scheme for the personal license isn’t right though. Kottke sums up my feelings about right. He’s a little bit more hardcore than I am, but I can safely say that it boils down to tech-junkies liking to fuck around with things. I’d have to go for their high end pricing model to accommodate what I have on my site right now. I’ve created blogs to keep track of things for a short period of time. And what about one post that you want to have a weird/fake username?
The user and log limits are poor models for representing the usages of lone-webmaster. The chief concern should be whether or not money is being made through the use of the product. Offer a free version and a paid personal version; the freebie is user/log limited while the paid version is not. The structure for corporate pricing can remain the same, as their webmasters are not apt to let the users have rogue blogs for tracking grocery lists or books read.
I’ll stick with the version of MT that I have for now and see if they change their pricing structure at all. It’s time to start paying for some of these small apps I’ve been using for the last year or two.