New TidyText Pricing

I’m pleased to announce a great new pricing structure for TidyText! While it was free and I am able to support myself through related business activities, I feel that everyone would benefit from me adding surprisingly expensive, restrictive and arbitrary restrictions – especially my prime demographic of poor students (see, I need to make more money to learn more words like demographics, or as we in the “biz” say, “demos”).

Also, if you were planning on using TidyText for a commercial product, good news! I’ve jacked up the price so high that it’s got the same price point as some professional tools! Unfortunately, this isn’t well suited for commercial sites and the only reason it was considered in the first place was because of the low cost, but I’m sure I’ll make a ton of money without the evangelization of the cheap webloggers who spread the word.

table {
width : 470px;
}
td {
text-align : center;
padding : 4px;
}
th {
text-align : center;
font-weight : bold;
text-size : larger;
color : white;
background-color : #8FAEBE;
padding : 4px;
}
.promo {
font-weight : bold;
color : red;
}
.promo strong {
color : black;
}
.oldprice {
font-size : smaller;
}
.explainlicense {
width : 480px;
margin-right : 10px;
width : 480px;
float : left;
}
.explainlicense li {
list-style-type: disc;
margin-left : 20px;
padding-left : 20px;
}
.licensetype {
width : 230px;
margin-right : 10px;
float : left;
}
.licensetype h3 {
margin-top : 0px;
padding-top : 0px;
margin-bottom : 0px;
padding-bottom : 0px;
}
.license-option {
margin-bottom: 10px;
}
table tr.odd {
background-color: #EAF2FF;
}

Personally, I don’t have a problem with SixApart trying to make money, but the terms seem a bit out of whack with what I would think the market will bear. I’m just going to keep using Movable Type 2 unless I decide to ditch a bunch of weblogs and authors or if one of the challengers to the MT throne can wow me away. I might have paid $40-$50 to keep my current 4-5 weblogs with 5-10 authors if MT 3 had some impressive new features, but I don’t have $100 – $150 to spend on software that has reasonable open source competition. Also, isn’t it weird that they allow more weblogs than authors? I know a lot of collaborative weblogs, but not too many people who keep more than 1-2 personal weblogs.

Update: I had fun going through Movable Type’s features and picking out what’s new to 3.0. This is what your $70 – $600 gets you, new features are underlined:

• Multiple Weblogs: One Movable Type installation can support multiple weblogs, as permitted by your license.
• Comments: Create and manage a community on your weblog by letting readers respond to posts with their thoughts. Comments can be enabled or disabled on a per-post or per-weblog basis, and an extensive suite of tools for managing, authenticating, and approving or disapproving reader comments is available.
• Multiple Authors: Movable Type supports the creation of new authors in the system, as defined by your software license. Each of these authors can be assigned specific permissions on a per-weblog basis, giving you fine-grained control over the activities of your users.
• Thumbnail creation: Movable Type automatically creates thumbnails from uploaded images, eliminating the need for processing pictures with image editing software.
• Publishing API: Movable Type 3.0 supports the MetaWeblog and Atom APIs, allowing you to use a broad range of existing client tools to manage your blog, with AtomEnabled support that allows developers to use a single XML format for syndication and publishing.