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

[Martin Aspeli]

George Lee wrote:
> Kai Harris <kai.harris at ...> writes:
> 
>> I imagine that my experience is similar to many nonprofits.  We are
>> developing in-house and are learning Plone as we go.  Composite
>> page-building products should be designed for people like us.  Plone
>> developers can build their own custom pages templates without using
>> composite products, but I can't and most nonprofits can't unless they
>> hire a Plone developer!
> 
> 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!

I think this is often a bit of a false question.

Plone is often used for uppper-mid-tier type *problems*. It happens to 
be good at that, but it's not a magic bullet. If you have complex 
problems, you also pay more to solve them. The costs of hosting etc will 
be very small part of that.

By contrast, if all you want is a very simple web site building tool, 
then Plone is probably overkill. Cost of hosting may be a factor, since 
it becomes a much bigger proportion.

When it comes to cost of acquiring skills or paying for consultants, 
good consultants tend to be expensive no matter which platform they use, 
and bad ones are often false economy since it costs more to clean up 
their mess then to use someone with sufficient experience in the first 
place. If you are doing it all yourself, Plone does have a learning 
curve, and you need to invest in it, but on the other hand there are 
multiple books and other resources available, and a very open support 
community.

Martin