Product: PowerShell Universal
Version: 1.5.x
I need authentication on a single dashboard. Previously there was a per-dashboard license. Has this been removed now - is the only perpetual license the $499 one?
That does appear to be the case. I believe this pricing structure made a lot more sense for most situations. Paying per dashboard is something that could cause some heavy expenses to build pretty quickly. Also the $499 license is for PowerShell Universal, not just UD. Universal Automation and the API functionality are extremely powerful and worth every penny.
The Lite version offers authentication and is $149.99 yearly
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On the topic of licensing, we are considering some changes to PSU and PoshTools licensing.
We are looking at how JetBrains does their licensing. They have subscription licenses that also include perpetual fallback licenses. So if you buy a year subscription, it also includes a perpetual license that covers versions released during your subscription period. Month to month subscriptions would not include a perpetual license.
They also distinguish between business and individual licenses where the a person buying a license can get it way cheaper than a business buying a license. The business licenses would include email support while the individual licenses would just have community support. We are looking at price points similar to the original UD prices ($100 per server, per year) for individual licenses of PSU. There would be no limitation on features in this model unlike the Lite vs Full model we have today.
The Lite vs Full model hasn’t really been popular. Most people are just buying the perpetual licenses for their companies and very few have bought the lite models. That’s why we are considering this change. The lite model was intended for personal use but I think it’s too limiting and I would rather just provide people with the whole platform than try to figure out which features are “enterprise”.
It also simplifies our codebase since we don’t need to do weird stuff around limiting things in the product.
In terms of ad hoc feature licenses, I’m on the fence as to whether to offer those again. It’s a similar problem as it complicates the code base but it also complicates the sales and support process since it’s always a struggle to communicate what’s included, what isn’t, what happens if I want these two features but then add the third one later etc. Still thinking through it.
EDIT:
I also want to note that with any license changes like this we will continue to honor existing license holders terms and EULAs so nothing will change if you already hold a license or subscription.
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@adam Just my 2 cents.
I would say you’re on the right track with anything that simplifies the payment structure, as well as the code base. That said, thinking of the personal license as more of a “developer” tier might be a way to go. With the personal licenses you are going to get hobbyist coders for sure, but I think the majority would be independent contractors like me that are pushing customers on the benefits of PSU and want a playground to be able to demo features. As you said, having access to the whole platform, as well as support options, would be beneficial.
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That’s for the input.
I do like the idea of a contractor license. I almost wonder if it were licensed per user it would make more sense in that scenario. I do wonder what support options you’d expect from something like that. The biggest cost in time for PSU is certainly support so providing a reduced cost license for the same level support is a bit tricky. I’m looking at ways to provide additional support resources but with such a specialized product it’s hard to find the right fit.
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If your thought is simplifying the personal license so you get access to the whole platform, the contractor license could simply be something along the lines of $50/$100 extra gets you everything in personal plus x number of support tickets per quarter or year. The tickets would be something worked to resolution, whether through email, phone or screen sharing.
I realize this will be tricky; allotting time for support on a product as the user base grows, while still actively developing, adding features, maybe sleeping some times, is always the hardest part 
That’s a good idea. I’ll ruminate on this a bit.
And sleep? Who does that? 
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I was just thinking about this per a mention of that structure in an episode of Coding Blocks I was listening to. It seems like an awesome idea and a serious value add to me.
Per community support
Honestly I don’t think having full support for a DEV/MSP type of license is really all that necessary. I’m sure you already are overwhelmed by the adoption/community support, however I’d say at least thus far, the support you and the community provide here are at a level that is more than reasonable at the price points mentioned earlier in the conversation.
All that said, I’m not making my living off this stuff, so I don’t really know the ups and downs of licensing in that way.
I’ll be the first to tell you though, as a person who hates people who try to use bespoke solutions (IE: Sharepoint) as catchall solutions, I’m definitely becoming that guy with Universal within my organization 
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I can just speed for us and the 499 usd incl tax is a good price. It’s like 374 without tax or similar.
Got one POC now and let’s just say that the board are loving it so far.
Don’t know really how many users / session one server can handle?
But we are 10k users when we are out of the POC.
So I guess it will be a hole bunch of more servers.
At least we need 6 more for redundancy as we want 2 per site.
Thanks for the feedback and super happy to hear that your board is loving it. We won’t be changing the 499 price point with the new model. We’d just be merging the subscription and perpetual licenses in that regard to make it more straightforward.
We have tested the PSU server and it can handle about 1k requests per second on higher end server specs with empty scriptblocks. I would think that 10k users all using a single server at once would likely be too much so you’ll like want to spread that out over a few servers. I’d highly suggest taking advantage of application insights monitoring to provide HTTP and server performance information. You can configure that in appsettings.json.
It is also super variable on what you are doing with your dashboard so you’ll have onboard users in batches to ensure that what you’ve provisioned is capable enough.
What was the spec for the 1k server?
We are having 6vcpu now and 16GB of ram.
The testers are around 10-20 people and it’s not even notable on the server so far.
We are using it to mainly administrate the AD as it’s perfect for it with the GUI then our support don’t even need to bee operators with there account in the AD we are just locking them to the function we want.
Also it’s some automation and administration against exchange, vSphere, appvolume and horizon.
The tests I referenced were done on a 8 Core, 16B machine. I’ll look at publishing some sort of performance data in a more formal way. I’ve had this question come up a few times so it would be good to have some exact performance data to reference.
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