“Charge for Change” and the power of evolution
In dealings with software suppliers, you’ll quite often come across the “Charge for Change” mentality. It makes a certain sort of sense. If the software they have isn’t quite what you need – then no problem, they can change it, and they’ll charge you for the changes. They might do this on a daily rate, or on a quoted cost for each change.
Even though it makes some sense, you find that there are a lot of problems with this kind of arrangement. One of the main ones is on the supplier’s side. Software costs are notoriously difficult to estimate, so they may well be undercharging (or more likely overcharging) you. But the most important problem affects you, the user. If a software supplier charges for each change, then financial pressures will tend to make the software change less and less over time. We’ve found that in working arrangements where “Charge for Change” has become the well established way of doing business, actually, there’s hardly any change, and there’s hardly any charge. It stabilises everything, so you get a software product which is fixed and unchangeable (because users can’t afford to change it).
However, software products which are fixed and unchangeable are not very good software products. The beauty of software is how easy it is to adapt it to new requirements – how much you can do with the right suggestions – and how quickly you can do it. At Truckcom, from the very outset, we decided that change was good, and, within reason, the more the better. If we got suggestions from the front line saying “could it do this?” or “could it do that?” then these suggestions were very valuable things. And (again within reason) if we made it “do this” or “do that”, it would have a greater appeal to other potential users.
So we decided on a fundamentally different commercial model: “Charge for Use”. In fairness the Charge for Change people do this as well, they tend to charge for change and charge for use, but for us, the only charges we make are for use – we never charge for change. Actually, the way we charge for use is a bit different to other suppliers, and we cover this in another blog post. But back to changes – when people first hear that we don’t charge for change, they are slightly taken aback, but it’s a very important part of our business model. If we charge for use, and the product is getting used, then we’re making money. If we change it so it gets better, and then more people want to use it, we can grow our business. This is exactly what’s been happening, so it seems like quite a good way of working, especially because the customers are very happy that the product adapts to their requirements at no extra charge. Customers in “Charge for Change” arrangements tend to be far less happy.
But the most important part of the never charge for change philosophy is the power of evolution it gives us. Based on feedback from customers (and new prospects), Truckcom is constantly changing. There’s no commercial barrier to this pace of change, so the product really does change all the time – often a couple of new versions in a single week. Truckcom has been around for about 6 years in its current form, which is actually quite a long time for a software product – and within that period, the speed of evolution has been very high. So we have a highly evolved, highly specialised, and very, very capable product.
How do you get a good piece of software? By talking to your users, and doing what they suggest. How do you get a bad, old piece of software? By telling people they need to pay to make it change – and hey presto – they don’t, so you’ve got an old dog with no new tricks.
