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Long post about the new 50% Discounts (!)

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mouser:
Long Story about the New 50% Discounts

Ok i think it's time to spill the beans about the new discounts situation.

I told you all before that we were going to be able to offer our members a 25% discount on the Agnitum Outpost Pro firewall.

I'll be sending out an email as well when the discount order bridge is up, but I want to share with you guys the full story behind what has become a 50% discount on both Agnitum Outpost Pro Firewall and on the new reviewed product, Beyond Compare !


After our initial review of Agnitum Outpost we were contacted by Agnitum, who were interested in our opinions of what could be done to adress the one critical aspect of our review.  After some discussions, I brought up the possibility of Agnitum offering a discount to our members here.

It initially appeared as though we were going to be able to arrange a 25% discount for our members, which would be pretty nice by itself.

It's fairly standard for software companies to offer commissions to sites or stores that can bring them sales, and Agnitum offered us a comission on sales generated from our discount offer.  This is common and standard practice.

But we decided that commissioned sales was something that we will not do.

We don't want to have commissions or advertising that would cause our members (you guys) to question whether our reviewers were slanted in order to boost sales revenue.  Such an arrangement seems like it would at the least cause some suspicion and mistrust.

We proposed instead that DonationCoder.com and Agnitum team up and try an interesting experiment.

We proposed, and the good folks at Agnitum were flexible enough to arrange, a 2 week period wherein our members would be offerred a 50% discount on purchases of Outpost Pro.  I think this is a fantastic offer and I'm really happy about the entire arrangement.

DonationCoder.com received absolutely no commission or payment from Agnitum from this deal, which is why we were able to get such a high discount for you guys.


This is not to say that we don't benefit from this arrangement - we think we will benefit from making you guys happy you joined, and by showing that we are serious about being able to negotiate discounts for our members.  We hope that word of mouth will spread and that we will be able to get more visitors to the site to check out what we are doing here, and maybe even join the site with a small donation.

I hadn't really conceived of this site as a mechanism for collective bargaining but it's clear with the interest we've had in the site that we should be able to secure further discounts for our members.


Please bear in mind that we are absolutely committed to giving our reviews of programs without respect to whether a company is willing to offer a discount to you guys.  Whether they offer a discount is ultimately going to depend on whether they think it is in their interest.  But the more people we have at DonationCoder.com the more likely it will be that a company will want to offer a discount.

We made very clear to both Agnitum and ScooterSoftware, the company who makes our latest reviewed program Beyond Compare, that we were going to write our glowing reviews no matter what.  Whether they offered any discount at all.  The reviews get written based on our love of the programs we give awards to.  That's the whole point of our reviews, to find the best programs in each category that we love, and lavish praise on it and give it an award.  We made clear that the content of the review would be unaffected by the discount offered by them.

But we also explained that a significant discount, beyond the ordinary, would be something that our members would recognize as a fantastic opportunity to get the best program in it's class, and that such a discount would likely result in substantial purchases from our members.

It is to the credit of the Agnitum advertising team that they were flexible enough to be able to facilitate this arrangement, and we appreciate Agnitum working with us on this first experiment.

In fact on the basis of this arrangement, we were able to convince the company behind today's reviewed program that they would also benefit from offering a 50% discount on Beyond Compare.  You'll see from the review of Beyond Compare how much i truly love the program.  I've been a registered member for a few years now and it's just one of those programs that brings me joy to use.

Beyond Compare's normal price is only $30.  With 50% off that makes it only $15 which is almost obscene for this program.  And if you read today's review there's a suprise ending that blew me away when i spoke to the developer today and he told me.

The idea of Agnitum at $20 and Beyond Compare at $15 almost sounds illegal :)


We've set up a new section on the main page to spotlight these new discounts, and we will reserve this space for companies that are willing to offer our members significant discounts.  We hope this will bring a little more attention to these time-limited deals and encourage new members to join.

Again, we will accept no commissions or advertising fees from these companies; we benefit by making you guys happy you joined and by bringing new customers to our site who we hope will donate.  And the more people we have with us the more appealing it will be for companies to offer us discounts.  As always, people can join by making a donation of any amount.  We have had people join at $1 and people join at $200.  By donating what you think is fair we hope that you will view this site as a place you can feel proud to be a member of.


Now, please do not get spoiled by the size of these discounts.  We worked hard to get these up to 50% but we're just not going to be able to have this level of success all the time.  Don't expect every program we give a rave review to to be offered for a 50% discount - some companies may not be willing to offer a discount at all.

And also please don't forget that the reviews and discounts are just one part of this site!!!

Our software is the other main aspect of this site, and as you can see from the forum, we're having great fun talking with users about new feautres to add, and new possible programs to write.  In fact I'm hoping to make some updates available next week.  Your donations make this possible.


In time we hope to get a few more quality software authors to join us and offer some more unique homemade software.


LASTLY,
and please forgive me for going on an on,
i want to send a sepcial thanks to bob at shellcity, and all of the wonderful software fanatics that have come over to us based on the announcements on bob's great site and newsletter.  it was a real thrill to us to have so many people join in the last week, and it really reinforced in us the desire to make this site a place where everyone involved feels like they are getting a great deal not at the expensive of someone else, but rather in cooperation with each other.


If you want to help, you can do so by simply spreading the word about this site.  We're going to be trying to get the word out ourselves but we can use all the help we can get.  And we're finding that once people find their way to the site, they seem to like what they see.  So if you can help us get out the word on any forums or newsletters you know about, please do!


I think that with your help we can make this site a real success and a nice place to hang out  :beerchug:
-mouser, and the donationcoder.com team

tenseiken:
Nice work.  I think you made the right choice as far as commissions go--that would make it seem like the reviews were biased.  I'm looking forward to getting the code for Outpost.  The firewall I've been using lately tends to act flaky every once in a while, forcing me to reinstall.  Which is a pain, because then I have to re-create all of my rules.  Outpost looks like it has a much nicer interface, as well.

Ann Elm:
I'll try it and thank you!!!

Jibz:
Impressive :Thmbsup:.

nudone:
 :stars:  :) i am absolutely stunned - a 50% discount would be insane not to take advantage of, especially when it's for top quality software like this.

fantastic work mouser  :up:

donationcoder.com certainly deserves more attention for all this.

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