Plone Costs for Non-Profits (Was Re: [Plone-NGOs] Initial thoughts ona "Plone for Nonprofits" bundle)

Jon Stahl jon at onenw.org
Tue Jan 9 01:03:44 UTC 2007



> -----Original Message-----
> From: ngo-bounces at lists.plone.org 
> [mailto:ngo-bounces at lists.plone.org] On Behalf Of George Lee

> I'd like to ask a question of the Plone community which I've 
> gotten some hints of. For a small non-profit, budget 
> $100,000-$200,000, is Plone really appropriate or 
> sustainable? We're not talking Oxfam (I'm assuming) or the 
> government here.
> 
> One of the Plone gurus, maybe limi, mentioned Plone catering 
> to the "higher end of the mid-level range" of the market. I 
> love Plone and the power it gives; I'm also always worried 
> about donating a lot of time to developing Plone products for 
> non-profits without really knowing if it'll be sustainable 
> after I'm gone. 
> Is the usual practice to hire an outside developer to help 
> with new development, maintain simple behind-the-scenes 
> things (backups, dealing with server crashes, etc.), etc.? 
> How much realistically should a nonprofit commit to say 
> long-term maintenance of a site, if it doesn't care about too 
> much new development? How much if it does?
> 
> It seems people often don't want to or can't give hard 
> numbers because of the varying use cases and requirements, 
> but even a sense of the minimums and typical costs would be 
> really helpful. If you want to e-mail me off-list, that's 
> fine too although I'd expect this information to be helpful broadly.
> 
> Especially after reading in the "Open Source Myths" that 
> "Open Source is cheaper" is a partial myth ... I want to 
> really understand these financial realities!

George-

I've had this conversation with Limi (and others), and my belief (and
experience) lead me to the following conclusions:

-- Plone is definitely a strong contender for "mid-tier" CMS projects --
as the experiences of Enfold, Plone Solutions, and others shows.  (Paul
Everitt has defined these as $50,000 - $500,000 projects.)

-- Those kinds of projects are what provide strong income streams to
many core Plone developers -- giving them time to invest in making Plone
rock.  Thus, they have a lot of interest in "positioning" Plone in that
space.  That's good for Plone.

-- However, that marketing tends to obscure another truth.  Plone is
also really good for smaller projects.   Here at ONE/Northwest, we've
delivered over 80 projects in the $2000-$40,000 range.  It is definitely
possible for a developer who knows what they are doing to implement a
Plone site quite cheaply.   Plone 2.1 was a huge boost here, and Plone
3.0 is going to be another huge boost to the out of the box experience.

That said, deploying Plone projects quickly and cheaply requires some
experience.  Like all powerful CMS frameworks, Plone has a learning
curve.  I personally don't think it's really any steeper than anything
else, but opinions are a dime a dozen. ;-)

As we all know, Plone doesn't run in $5/month LAMP webhosting space.  So
it's not suitable for the most epehemeral and low-budget of efforts.
That said, capable virtual hosting (and turnkey folks like WebFaction)
are getting cheaper all the time, so I'm not convinced this is all that
much of a barrier.

$0.02.

best,
jon  




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