After deliberating a long time – perhaps too long – I have made the difficult decision to announce the end of life for Daylite Server and Billings Pro Server.
This has been a very difficult decision with many facets and I’ll do my best to explain the reasoning below, but the short answer is this: Daylite and Billings Pro with our Cloud service are better products and we don’t have the resources to continue to develop both Cloud and Self-Serve platforms.
An important lesson I’ve learned as CEO of Marketcircle is that as a business, it’s critical to evolve or you get left behind. In order for us to stay competitive in our market, to continue innovating, and to provide you with excellent products and services, we have to focus on Cloud. With 87% of our revenue coming from Cloud, it doesn’t make sense to continue working on a platform that splits our resources and is decreasing in demand. If we continue to support both platforms, both will suffer.
Why is Cloud better?
We strongly believe Daylite and Billings Pro with our Cloud service offer a better customer experience, and our CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) proves this. Customers who are on Cloud rate both Daylite and Billings Pro higher than customers on Self-Serve, and I am truly humbled that our very first Daylite customer, whose license I created manually 16 years ago, is a Daylite Cloud customer. There are so many benefits to Cloud.
Cloud offers:
- Fewer headaches and downtime
- More features like Push Notifications & Mail for iPhone & iPad
- More integrations through Zapier & the Daylite API
- More security than standard Self-Serve setups
- Faster syncing
- Better support
Why not keep both?
There are many facets to my decision but it boils down to three main things: Self-Serve splits our resources, restricts features we can add – features customers have been asking about for years – and is a declining market.
- Limited Resources: As any business, we have limited resources. If we continue to support both our Cloud and Self-Serve platforms, both will suffer. We have to focus on what has the most significant impact on the majority of customers. As Steve Jobs once said, “Focus is about saying no. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.”
- Feature Limitations: With Cloud, there is much more potential for new features that would not be feasible with Self-Serve. Examples of this are Push Notifications and Zapier integration. We can offer customers better features and a better product with our Cloud service.
- Declining Market: Ultimately, Self-Serve solutions are a declining market. This is not a big surprise as Cloud has become the norm. Self-Serve makes up only 13% of our revenue and with 90% of new customers choosing Cloud, we can’t justify the resources to keep supporting a platform with a declining demand.
Change can be difficult, but change is inevitable
The old, licensed-based business model forced us to hold back features until we could release a major new version in order to generate upgrade revenue. But with Cloud and our new recurring revenue model, we can work in smaller chunks and release new features as soon as they’re ready. For example, how we’ve released Push Notifications and improvements to Zapier integration and the Daylite API gradually. Cloud allows you to get more features, sooner. No more waiting around a year, two years, or even longer to get new features.
As our company and products evolve, we’re making steps to further support our core purpose – to empower small businesses to do what they love because we believe they change lives and make our world a better place. On top of getting features sooner, Cloud removes the IT burden for our customers. By shifting the IT burden of managing backups, networking and security to us, you as a customer are able to focus more on your business and doing the work you love.
What this means for customers:
If you’re currently using Daylite or Billings Pro with our Cloud service, you can ignore this announcement. If you are using Daylite Self-Serve or Billings Pro and hosting your own server or using a hosting service, we encourage you to move to Cloud so you can take advantage of all the benefits, and continue to get great customer support from our team. To start your move to Daylite Cloud, visit here. To learn more about Daylite Cloud, register for our Experience Daylite Cloud Webinar. For moving to Billings Pro Cloud, please contact us.
You can continue using Daylite and Billings Pro on the current OS’s they’re supported on. We will continue to offer technical support for Daylite Server and Billings Pro Server for a year, the official date technical support ends will be February 28, 2019.
To clarify, Daylite Cloud and Billings Pro with our Cloud service are not web apps. Daylite Cloud and Billings Pro are still offline Mac & iOS apps, but without the hassle of managing the server.
Questions & Concerns
We know this may be a difficult change for you and we want to help you with any questions or concerns you may have. We have a Daylite Server End of Life FAQ and Billings Pro Server End of Life FAQ to answer questions about security, privacy, pricing and other questions about this announcement. We’re happy to answer any other questions or concerns you have, please get in touch with our team by opening a ticket here.
Thank you so much to all of our loyal Daylite customers. We truly appreciate your business and would not be here today without your support.
I hope you understand this very difficult decision we’ve had to make as a company.
Alykhan Jetha (AJ)
CEO of Marketcircle
Updated March 1, 2018 to include section: Change can be difficult, but change is inevitable