Opinion about LimeLM

I have been testing the system for a few days and I am concluding that there are better solutions for the quality, features and prices. We can even develop our own system and will save many thousand of dollars in the long run.From the top of my head, some negative points:1) Technically, the system is too basic for what it costs.2) Deadlines are never met, I am reading promises that next release will be here next week since last year.3) When we have a large number of registrations, and many developers have, it does not make sense to pay hundreds of dollars every month to you for past registrations which do not generate developers any more income. Other providers charge only once when the activation is done, you want a life rent!

That is it, i will not expand because I know you are going to delete the message.

Good luck,

Alonso

PS: I completely disagree with your opinion that Software Protection is useless against crackers. It is very useful, of course, some software protection systems are very difficult to break and only the best crackers can do it if they invest good time for that (time is a scarce resource). I have software were the old releases were cracked but newer release are still not cracked many months after I started using a good protection system. So it makes a difference.

1) Technically, the system is too basic for what it costs.

I disagree. We hide the complexity of LimeLM and TurboActivate. Designing a hardware-locked licensing solution is a hard thing to do correctly. We go into the details of what LimeLM does here: What is hardware-locked licensing and why choose LimeLM?

LimeLM doesn't just do licensing. It does it right. For example, we work to reduce false positives (seeing 2 different computers as the same computer) and reduce false negatives (seeing the same computer as a different computer). That in itself is a huge deal. All of our "bargain bin" competitors screw this up.

And this is to say nothing of the massive amount of work we do to make the end-user's experience with TurboActivate a painless one-click thing. This is no small feat.

We continually monitor our competitors. The only competitors of comparable quality cost an order of magnitude more than LimeLM.

Respectfully, I think you're confusing the simplicity of our interfaces with a "basic" design. (E.g. the iPad is simple, but it's not "basic").

2) Deadlines are never met, I am reading promises that next release will be here next week since last year.

A couple of things about this comment. Firstly, I wish we could implement features faster while maintaining the same, or greater, level of quality. I concede we frequently miss self-imposed deadlines for feature requests.

There are a couple of approaches to this problem. One approach is to stop making hard date of release promises and take a Valve approach and just not comment on dates (e.g. "if we even release Half Life 3, then it will be released when it's released").

Or perhaps we should temper expectations. That is, features get bumped for other features -- the requester of the feature is notified privately via email or a phone call. Feature request conversations frequently start on the forum and finish via email or phone call. So you might see "features to come" that have already been resolved via other channels. But random walk-on users who see the forum post may think a requested feature is still coming soon despite being bumped for a future release.

Critical bug fixes come out often the same day they're reported (often the same hour). Less critical bug fixes come out quickly (usually within a couple weeks of the report).

Lastly, we're not very good at updating duplicate feature-request posts. I bet more than half of the feature requests that you see as unresolved have already been added. We just haven't updated the dozens of posts to say as much.

3) When we have a large number of registrations, and many developers have, it does not make sense to pay hundreds of dollars every month to you for past registrations which do not generate developers any more income.

Our pricing is setup in such a way to segment startups from mature companies, and it's largely successful at doing that. But unfortunately we're not always successful. Ideally a Fortune 500 company shouldn't be on anything lower than the Max plan (or the self-hosted version of LimeLM) and a slowly growing (or unprofitable) one-man startup shouldn't be on anything higher than the Plus plan.

In other words by the time you need the Max "unlimited activations" plan the cost of the plan should be a negligible expense.

Also, the increases sales that come from LimeLM should far outweigh the cost of LimeLM. Are you a customer of LimeLM, or have you just been playing with the free plan? If you're a customer of LimeLM and you're not seeing increased sales, then you'd be right to be upset and we should talk (email me, or we can schedule a time to have a phone conversation).

Part of our problem is the value of LimeLM is implied, but rarely explicitly stated. That is, we assume you know everything we know. Which is a huge marketing problem that we need to fix.

Short answer: LimeLM has tremendous value for its cost.

Other providers charge only once when the activation is done, you want a life rent!

Unfortunately for customers choosing most (but not all) of the other licensing companies is that if the licensing company charges too little they end up going out of business. (The 3rd-party licensing landscape is riddled with corpses of unprofitable licensing companies). Plus, if the licensing company charges too little then the they're limited in the employees they can hire, and thus the quality suffers.

Unless you're an expert in licensing design, it's hard to tell low quality software licensing from high quality software licensing. We try to cover this here, but I think we can do a better job explaining this.

Yes, we're not the cheapest. No doubt about that. But you'll be hard pressed to find anywhere near LimeLM's quality for a comparable (or cheaper) price.

We can even develop our own system and will save many thousand of dollars in the long run.

Maybe, but you need to be realistic about how long it takes to develop properly designed licensing, how much it costs in development hours, how much it costs to test this.

I'd be shocked if you could spend less than $100,000 to develop a properly designed bare-bones hardware-locked licensing system. That's a lowball number (based on cheap outsource labor costs) and it doesn't cover continuing development costs, let alone testing costs.

That is it, i will not expand because I know you are going to delete the message.

We only delete messages from spammers and from former customers who harass and verbally abuse us (which has happened once before, unfortunately). We don't delete critical messages (you can find a few others on our forum).

If you have other criticisms then I'd like to hear them.

Thank you for the fast answer.

>>Short answer: LimeLM has tremendous value for its cost

I have one of my products being activated in a company that charges 2% + 0,75 per activation. It is very expensive, but the system is very good and reliable. The product does not sell a lot but is expected to reach a total of over 3000 (let's make it 3100) till the end of this year @$100 each.

If I keep in the existing provider, total cost will be:3100 * 100 * 0.02 + 0.75 * 3100 = $8525

If I use LimeLM I will pay $149 per month, so after 58 months it is costing me more.

A few more points I dislike:Your system lacks important features, for example when the key is valid for multiple machines there is no possibility to deactivate a particular machine from the web control panel.The way the isGenuine works and your advice to use it only every 90 days does not convince. We should have the possibility to use it as many times as we want without issues, if there is no internet connection just return that as an error.In my opinion, you should not hide the password in Programdata\ms-drivers and the registration data in Window\Registration. It is neither professional nor safe.

Regards,

Alonso

I have one of my products being activated in a company that charges 2% + 0,75 per activation. It is very expensive, but the system is very good and reliable. The product does not sell a lot but is expected to reach a total of over 3000 (let's make it 3100) till the end of this year @$100 each.

If I keep in the existing provider, total cost will be:3100 * 100 * 0.02 + 0.75 * 3100 = $8525

If I use LimeLM I will pay $149 per month, so after 58 months it is costing me more.

You can start on the Solo plan ($11/month) and move up as needed. There's no need to start on the premium plan if you don't want to. So LimeLM will be cheaper than your current system for much longer than the 58 months (4.83 years!) that you calculated.

And, again, you're not accounting for the increased revenue due to using a properly designed hardware-locked licensing solution. Does your current system correctly handle false positives and false negatives? If not, then you're throwing money out the window. Most licensing systems screw this up (yes, we look at our competitors -- very few are well designed).

It's always an apples to oranges comparison (it's rare 2 systems are comparable *only* by price). Comparing licensing systems fairly unfortunately requires a deep knowledge of licensing system design (which is not a walk in the park). We cover this fact in "Why LimeLM and why hardware-locked licensing?"

Also, your conclusion is wrong. LimeLM will never be more expensive then this "2% + .75 plan" licensing. (Remember, you're not just selling 3,100 licenses on the first day and never selling another license. Even if you are, you can cancel LimeLM and will have only paid $149). You need to think about how you're calculating this.

Your system lacks important features, for example when the key is valid for multiple machines there is no possibility to deactivate a particular machine from the web control panel.

Sure it does. Each activation is listed on its own line. Click the "Deactivate" link next to the computer you want to remotely deactivate.

If you're talking about identifying a particular computer's activation when there are multiple activations behind a single IP address, then you use "extra data" field when activating. This way you can identify computers based on arbitrary data you pass to LimeLM upon activation.

[attachment=0]extra-data-acts.png[/attachment]

This "extra data" feature is currently enabled for a slice of our paying LimeLM customers and we'll be enabled for all our customers early next week. In this example you see the customer's actual name. All the customers are behind the same IP, so if Patrick lost his computer and needed to be remotely deactivated you can easily identify which activation is his.

You can use any data you want for that field -- you don't have to use customer names (or anything, for that matter).

The way the isGenuine works and your advice to use it only every 90 days does not convince. We should have the possibility to use it as many times as we want without issues, if there is no internet connection just return that as an error.

You can use IsGenuine() how many times you want. But you have to consider your customers. You also have to consider all the problems that come with calling an internet-required function synchronously on every run of your app.

Short answer: use IsGenuine() however many times you want, but always think of your customers. 90 days is just a recommendation that works for most of our customers needs.

In my opinion, you should not hide the password in Programdata\ms-drivers and the registration data in Window\Registration. It is neither professional nor safe.

You mean the product key? I don't know what you mean by "safe" (we could put the product key anywhere on the computer and it's completely readable by its very nature). Also, it's professional.

Activations can't be transferred to other computers. That is, even if a user copy&pasted the activation files from an activated computer to another computer, the other computer wouldn't magically be activated. Again, this goes back to the proper design of hardware-locked licensing. See: How hardware-locked licensing works